Ask HN: What are your priorities in a VPS service?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=646713As some of you noticed a while back[1] I provide virtual private servers using Xen[2].
Right now, the largest problem I see is the interface. Now, I'm running pvgrub, which lets you boot into a read-only image that can mount your virtual disk, so you can upload and download new images, but it is something of a pain in the ass[3].
a bigger interface problem is that it usually takes about half a day for you to get provisioned, but this just requires me to sit down and work on it for a few hours.
Now, I do think I have a reasonably good interface to start, stop and to give the user a console. But I think it is essential to allow users to easily upload and download the contents of their hard drive. I was thinking a mechanism that would allow a user to download a .tar.gz of their file system through a webform or something. (of course, this would require shutting down the guest for a consistent image)
what does hn think? restoring such an image elsewhere would usually require little more than an untar (and fixing /etc/fstab)
the other option is to take a straight dd of the drive; this is far more flexible, as it will preserve your filesystem labels, partitions, and will work with any filesystem you can dream up. The problem is that a dd of a 90GiB disk partition will take a really long time. (partimage-ng and related tools help some, at the cost of complexity.)
Another assumption I make is that most people leave most servers on for a while. more than a week. is that correct?
A further possibility is that my interface is fine, and I should throw all available resources into improving my support response times.
[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=590993
[3]http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Untarring_a_fresh_OS_image