I’m hosting RankBuzzard on a virtual server hosted at Linode. I initially signed up with their least expensive offering of $20/month.
This weekend I started observing some mysterious crashes on the server. First I saw some failed queries into the Postgres database which stores RankBuzzard’s Django models. Then, as I was investigating the cause of these errors, my Emacs quit with a simple “Killed” message. Odd for sure.
I wondered if RankBuzzard’s database had outgrown the minimal 360MB allocated to my Linode 360 VPS. After some basic resource checks that confirmed my suspicion, I decided to upgrade to a Linode 720. The entire upgrade process, from filing a support ticket to clicking reload on RankBuzzard’s main page, took under 30 minutes.
All I had to do was:
- Submit a ticket requesting the upgrade,
- Shutdown my virtual server,
- Click a button that kicked off the migration process,
- Boot up the new virtual server.
The entire process was flawless.
