Service transition (customer experience, geekery)
So for obvious reasons I'm moving my crap away from Google. I'll keep my main gmail.com account for use with my Android phone (because there's no reasonable substitute on the Android side) but for everything I care about, I'm going back to self-hosted über alles.
Dreamhost's shared server offerings are no longer adequate for my email needs, though. As such, I will probably switch that to a VPS. I've gotten a few good recommendations for Linode. Any others I should look into? Normally I'd just sign up for Dreamhost VPS but I've heard bad things about them lately, and also bad things about Slicehost.
It'll be nice to have sane bogofilter-based filtering again, in any case.
The other main thing I use Google for is RSS aggregation. Are there any good server-side aggregators with decent user interfaces? My usual fallback is FeedOnFeeds, but there's something that always causes me to get fed up with it and switch back to Google Reader. I have no idea what the hell that reason is, but it always becomes a giant "oh yeah" thing when I start using it. The only thing I seem to have written up was the last time I switched back to FonF after Google pissed me off the previous time. (Someday I'lll learn that he doesn't hit me out of love.)
It'd also be nice to have a decent CalDAV server, since I occasionally use my Google Apps ones for various things. So that's another thing to put on the VPS (Dreamhost's WebDAV doesn't have CalDAV extensions). I assume that I can find such a thing via, er, a search engine.
And ON THAT TINY NOTE, what should I use for searches instead of Google?
Comments
/me ducks
I'm not sure I could wean myself off google. So few other choices integrate well with the iPhone. Unless I setup an exchange server, the other easy choices are just other google competitors that are even less competent. And mostly google services work pretty damn well. I guess if I were serious about privacy and security I would make the effort. Perhaps Sonic has an exchange/calendar option. I've been giving them $20 / month for a while just for shell access and non-giant-corporation email - at least if I'm giving them money I have a hope of getting some support if I have trouble.
Incidentally, I don't feel that I'm relying on Google for Android, what with running Cyanogen, an opensource fork. Okay, I still use the Google apps (although if I switch to pure IMAP email that'll only be for the one gmail.com account - and honestly I feel that Android's IMAP client is better than the native GMail client anyway) and it's not like Google's the only game in town when it comes to app markets, either.
Hosting-wise, I keep hearing good things about Linode, but I'm really tempted by both the prices and reviews I've found of 5ITE. One thing I really like about linode is they specifically list backup/restore services, though, while most VPSes are just kind of handwavey about it (but I mean, virtual servers need to be backed up too - they are still running on real servers after all).
For IMAP, I like the looks of Dovecot, and for the MTA I'm expecting I'll just do postfix as usual since I've never had any reason to dislike it and always found its debconf setup really easy (although if someone has better suggestions I'm open to it).
Also! My intention here is to eventually let friends chip in, say, $1/month for this setup, and to that end I've registered the domain e-snail.us to host it separately from any of my other domains. If you'd be interested, let me know. I figure that I've had this sort of service as a wishlist so many times that I'd might as well make it come true. I don't intend to make it scale up to hundreds of users or anything though, and certainly don't want to get into a situation where I have to spend multiple hours a week administering things. But I figure that a lot of people would want a setup like mine but wouldn't want to spend a lot of time or money to get it set up.
I haven't set up CalDAV or CardDAV yet but email's working great. I need to set up an alternate offsite backup mechanism, though - I don't completely trust 5ite's just yet.
I just want to keep it to friends for now, but I suspect most people who would want something like this already have a setup they're happy with.