For a few months now I’ve been offering OpenELEC release bundles and SD card images at openelec.thestateofme.com, and more recently I set up resources.pichimney.com to host a broader range of Raspberry Pi related downloads. The servers that I’ve been using were part of the BigV.io beta, so I’ve not been picking up the tab for VMs and bandwidth.

BigV has been great. Fast servers, expandable disks and plenty of bandwidth. Unfortunately it would cost me too much to stay there now that they’re starting billing (bandwidth alone would be around £40/month), so I’ll shortly be moving the URLs over to a new virtual private server in the US that I found via LowEndBox offering 3TB/month inclusive bandwidth.

The new server comes with 60GB of disk space, so I’m not going to fill things up by moving over the entire back catalogue of builds and images. I’m also going to have to prune things as the storage fills up.

No loop devices on OpenVZ

The one gotcha that’s already caught me out is that loop devices don’t work (due to security issues) on the OpenVZ platform that my VPS is hosted on (I knew there would be something to justify the premium for KVM or Xen). This means that I can’t make release images on the server itself. For that reason I’m going to keep a VM on BigV for the time being and make the images there (shipping them over to the main web server with rsync).