Few more questions:
* How do you backup Fastmail?
* How'd you find your colo provider?
* If it's in a different country, how does the latency affect you?
* How do you backup Fastmail?
* How'd you find your colo provider?
* If it's in a different country, how does the latency affect you?
* I simply use OfflineImap[1] to backup my mailboxes to a share on my NAS.
* I was lucky and did not have to search for too long since my webhoster of choice (Hetzner) also offers colo in the country I'm living.
* I use my setup located in Germany from the US a few times a year and when a friend of mine was in China he used my VPN and a dedicated storage pod as well.
It did not feel like one of us was bothered by the slightly increased latency. But I also do not care about the speed of my terminal rendering characters that much, so maybe I am not sensitive enough to latency to give a useful data point.
2 - Searched, emailed, asked questions. I ended up with three or four quotes and picked one
3 - It's only a few hundred miles away geographically. Latency is under 30ms. This is 10x my home lan (2-3 ms), but in practice I have no issues with SSH or Remote Desktop. Both feel as fast as having the machine on my LAN.
Which virtualization do you use on server and how do you handle remote admin and security updates for guest VMs and host?
Guests - it depends on the OS the guest is running. I follow standard best practice for each OS. The server has encrypted drives, and each VM disk is also encrypted.
Remote Admin - SSH, Remote Desktop, Powershell etc. Standard management protocols. Since I have the IPSEC VPN always running, I can use anything.
I'm aware that I could be hacked if someone sufficiently skilled wanted to take me down, but that's true of anything stored online. I've achieved a reasonable level of security and I have control over my data.