So I got a bit tired of trying to run a server from home on an old Pentium II 233 MHz computer with a whopping 128 MiB of RAM.

It ran Gentoo Linux serving PostgreSQL, Apache, Postfix, Dovecot, Samba, and MediaTomb until about 6 months ago when power grid took some hard hits with downed trees and massive thunderstorms finally disabled the PSU.

Rather than try to rebuild it. Like most people, I agonized over which service to use. It needed to be cheap, fast, and run something I'm familiar with.

I found Linode several years ago, but it wasn't until about 8 months ago that I decided to take the plunge. After all, US$10 per month isn't terribly much, and they had a risk-free trial period.

It's pretty cool being able to do just about everything I normally would and still being able to use my preferred Linux distro.

With the $10 plan I only get 24 GB of disk space and 1 GiB of memory, but this is still a fairly significant step up from the Pentium II. And, after getting everything emerged, I'm only using 4.7 GiB. Plenty of room to grow with.

I did run into some weird out of memory (OOM) issues during some compiles, but lowering the number of parallel jobs did the trick.