Media Temple has a new offering that looks like a Slicehost slice. It’s just a Linux server, you do the rest.

At first glance, it’s cheaper. A slice starts at $20 for 256MB RAM, then goes up to $38 for a 512MB slice. The MT (ve) starts at $30 for 512MB.

Anyone try this yet? I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know my Slicehost sliced, but was a long time Media Temple customer prior. Actually, I still have 2 (dv)s there.

My (dv) 3.5 at Media Temple is hosting a few Magento sites. With the configuration customized to support them, I’m wary of messing with an upgrade, and an upgrade to Plesk is needed to fully support scheduled backups posted to another server.

A few quick Google searches last night and a few hours spent got me up and running with a great backup solution that stores everything on Amazon’s S3 hosting service.

1. Used this guy’s script examples to create archives of vhost directories and mysqldumps of databases on the server. I put everything in /skbackup with a ./backups directory and a ./scripts directory within. 1 script each for vhosts and databases, per client, so they can be staggered when scheduled in crontab.
2. Used this guy’s script to archive the entire ./backups directory and move it to Amazon S3, which I signed up for last night. His script accommodates a POSTCALLBACK script call, which I use to call a purge_backups script that deletes everything within ./backups once they’ve all been moved to Amazon. Nothing stays on the server.
3. #2’s script references S3 cmd, which worked great. I just uploaded the app to a directory within my ./scripts directory and used the documented Python installer.

Everything was easy to manually test and came together quite nicely. The S3 backup script sends emails upon error and completion and I built logging into each step. I’m glad to finally have that out of the way (and to continue to switch from Plesk tools to the command line).