Jun 7, 2010

I've successfully managed to stop running all my own services like email and DNS and my servers are sitting idle. My (non-public) revision controlled stuff is copied to dropbox, email, calendar etc. is all provided by Google Apps, and the handful of websites I used to run (like www.asplode.net) are now on Google Appengine.

On one hand, this makes me really really happy. It turns out that despite my day job, I'm a really lousy sysadmin for my own stuff. I don't monitor half the stuff I'm supposed to, I ignore security updates and generally don't spend any time on the maintenance of my machines and the software that runs on them. Now my stuff is monitored 24/7 by teams of people who are paid to take care of the services they run and this is all blissfully out of my hands. And I'm not spending anywhere near as much on this stuff as, say, a hetzner dedicated server or a bytemark VPS.
It still makes me a bit twitchy knowing that I can't tweak this stuff myself. And I'm not sure I'll be amazingly happy to make DNS changes using a point-n-click web browser interface.

That said, who edits DNS more than once a year? And really, why spend time on maintaining this stuff when someone else out there is happy to do it for me? It's fucking difficult to run an effective anti-spam filter, and gmail seems to be doing a far better of of blocking spam than I ever could. I think I'll be sticking with the cloud.

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