Things have calmed down since. My VPS started out as an Owncloud server which it did quite well for about 2.5 years. I even managed one Owncloud upgrade but due to the constant updates to it and the inability to skip even minor versions, making it necessary to go from point release to point release which in my case meant to go through something like five upgrades, it soon became obvious that this particular solution wasn't suitable. After all, with every LTS release a major new version number of Owncloud would arrive which would be completely impractical to upgrade to. The point of a server is I want to use it, not spend days fighting it.
So Owncloud was ditched in favour of FTP, or VSFTP on the server side to be specific, which was still set up on 14.04 before the upgrade and data copied over from the Owncloud folders - no need to re-upload it all. There are some great write-ups all over the internet, for example on HowtoForge or here, and it seems very capable and secure. Btw, this is not supposed to be an ad for DO and I'm not getting paid for this, but this is what I'm using. You should use what ever hosting or VPS provider you think suits your needs best. It all worked out great and at first attempt, no sweat. That's what choosing a well-documented solution can do for you. Plus, not going for something too complex. Once again: Keep it simple, stupid.
In fact, it worked so well that I decided to add a personal VPN as a backup to my paid provider. If anything it might be even more private. Who knows who all these VPN providers belong to that sprung up after the whistle blowing, right? It also turned out that having your own VPS somewhere is a really great idea, not just for storage and file serving or getting around geo-fencing but also to give yourself a quick and dirty alternative with an ssh tunnel, just in case you want to add an extra layer of encryption to your application or should your VPN protocol ever be blocked.
The upgrade from 16.04 to 18.04 went well, just as the previous one did. I realised 'Xenial' had about 14 months to EOL next April which seems plenty, but then again I don't want to be bothered by having to keep this in the back of my mind so I'ld rather upgrade when there's time and then not having to think about it for the next three years, bearing in mind that 'Bionic' will have support until at least April 2023. I might even be in a spot without internet for a while with no need to care. The provider has a script called do-release-upgrade which overwrites your sources with the repositories for the new release. After that, it's the standard Debian and Ubuntu way of apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade. Yes I know. Supposedly apt-get is deprecated in Ubuntu server but it still works.
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| Ubuntu server after the upgrade |
Everything kept humming along nicely after the machine came back up, and ever since last Sunday. No unpleasant surprises. Services kept doing what they're supposed to. FTP allows me to log in and manipulate files, VPN and ssh do their jobs. Really pleasant when something just works as it's supposed to, in a marked change to experiences with upgrading Ubuntu and Debian GUI installations.
So the kernel went up from Linux 4.4 to 4.15. Not really required in a virtual machine but what the hell. System load usually idles around 0.0% although quite high up there after the restart. After removing the remnants of Owncloud repositories processes went down from 109 to 92, and now always sitting at 89 in fact. The only thing that irks me a bit is that 16.04 always used just 25% of RAM on idle or with a bit of file transfer in the background. This has now gone up to 28% or even 30% in some instances (It's a 1GB only droplet). It all points to what I had noted in another review of Ubuntu 18.04 on the desktop once, that it is more resource hungry, and of course a lot more with a GUI depending on what graphical environment is running on it. Adding the new monitoring agent for some slick graphs of the droplet's performance added another percentage point.
If you are concerned about efficient memory usage I would hold out on 16.04 until next April and possibly a bit longer.
