hosting

Setup of hosting servers I manage. This document is still under development, use at your own risk!

General

Use VPS's from Vultr.com, with SATA disks (SSD disks are often too small), 2Gb RAM, and latest Ubuntu installed.

Install Docker and io.js (Node.js, but with bigger and faster version numbers):

# Install Docker:
curl -sSL https://get.docker.com/ | sh
systemctl enable docker # See https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/12002#issuecomment-106759295

# Install io.js:
wget https://iojs.org/dist/v2.1.0/iojs-v2.1.0-linux-x64.tar.xz
tar -xf ./iojs-v2.1.0-linux-x64.tar.xz
rsync -a iojs-v2.1.0-linux-x64/ /usr/local/

Now, install snickers-proxy, configure the sites you want to host.

Running snickers-proxy

To make sure a node process keeps running on the server after you log out and restart the server, I recommend using a tool like pm2:

npm install -g pm2
sudo su
pm2 start snickers.js
pm2 startup systemd # See https://github.com/Unitech/PM2/issues/1319
pm2 list

Configuring failover

For static sites, use DNS round-robin to host them on at least two servers.

For dynamic sites, point DNS to a master, and git push snapshots to a hot spare. The hot spare also functions as a backup server, and using git gives very good rollback options (daily backups are often not enough for effective firefighting).