Mark Carroll's Journal

Part of my issue is that I don't want a hosting provider's default image, I want to run the vanilla distro installer myself because I know it well and am sure of what I end up with after it is done; it also remains constant across providers. Many providers do offer short-term console access by request but I am generally not paying for fast out-of-hours support so, for example, when at around 6pm on Friday I found one of my test servers to be offline there was nobody who could help me.

Generally providers offer through their web admin panel the opportunity to boot from a rescue image which can suffice if one can then mount the regular filesystems and detect from logs and config files and whatnot what the problem actually is, but for my issue on Friday the logs hadn't been touched and the config looked fine to me. It could have helped enormously to be able to see what was going on on the console during the failed reboot. So, without console access my downtime can end up being days instead of minutes.