Moving out of Google Suite (Workplace). Part 3: VPS vs dedicated server vs VPS with a bigger disk.
While doing the test migration of users mentioned in Moving out of Google Suite (Workplace). Step 2: mailboxes and users migration. I also set up backup of my mobile photos to Nextcloud which comes as a part of Mail-In-A-Box.
This combined with my main mailbox over 10GB gave me a concern on scaling the system.
I ordered one of the cheapest VPS with small disk to test the setup and upgraded it to next disk tier after migrating my main mailbox.
I will encourage my users to move their Google Drive and Dropbox contents to MIAB/Nextcloud, and soon will reach unreasonable VPS tiers where I will have too much RAM and CPU and too few disk space for a price, comparable to dedicated server hosting.
My market research led me to an offer for dedicated server with 4x1TB disks priced at 2600 ₽ (US$ 43). However, they were not offering ZFS, only LVM+RAID(0,1,10) and my target capacity of 3TB with redundancy could not be met. Other offers were significantly more expensive, 4800 ₽ (US$ 80) for a setup with 2x4TB disks.
I did more research and found out a VPS vendor which could provide me with a 3TB disk at 3700 ₽ (US$ 61).
Moving between VPS vendors also provides a good opportunity to test Mail-In-A-Box backup/restore in practice.
I used this guide from Mike Neumann. Clean and clear. The only change for me was the sequence of steps:
- Purchase new VPS.
- Block traffic to old VPS.
- Run backup on old VPS.
- Restore backup to new VPS (don't miss the items to check in the guide).
- Update DNS record for NS server at my domain registrar.
- Set up backup to S3-compatible provider (the setting was broken).
- Wait for DNS updates to propagate and continue to use the service as is.