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:

1. Purchase new VPS.
2. Block traffic to old VPS.
3. Run backup on old VPS.
4. Restore backup to new VPS (don't miss the items to check in the guide).
5. Update DNS record for NS server at my domain registrar.
6. Set up backup to S3-compatible provider (the setting was broken).
7. Wait for DNS updates to propagate and continue to use the service as is.