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As a WordPress developer, I’m more than paranoid about losing data, and run multiple backup and disaster recovery solutions on all my sites, just in case something happens.

VestaCP, in all it’s elegant simplicity, offers user-level daily backups to supplement my Backup Buddy site-specific backups and the weekly droplet backups offered by Digital Ocean.

BackupBuddy and Digital Ocean backups both back my sites up offsite, so I can quickly restore should the datacenter or server become compromised in some way. VestaCP, however, backs up directly to my server.

And when you’re running as many sites as me, this can take up a lot of disk space.

Thus it transpired with my Digital Ocean droplet a few weeks back. VestaCP was emailing me daily to inform me how I’d run out of disk space on my droplet (20GB), and how my precious backups had failed. I had run a quick resize function on my droplet to increase RAM and CPU capacity, but resizing available disk space isn’t quite as simple.

I first tried creating a droplet (with more disk space) based on a snapshot of my original droplet. This, unfortunately, caused some kind of weird DNS issue that I didn’t have the time or inclination fro troubleshoot, so I just destroyed the newly created droplet and started Googling.

The solution, it turns out, is much more simple than I had suspected.

Just power down the droplet you wish to resize, create a snapshot, destroy the droplet (make sure to have a snapshot or backup!) and create a new droplet with the exact same username.

With a bit of luck Digital Ocean will assign the same IP address (the system tries to do this first) to your droplet, and you’ll have a newly resized droplet with all the information you need!

Enter VestaCP, a free, open-source, Russian-built control panel of excellence.

Setting up accounts, databases, and staging sites is super simple, and I’ve even set up Varnish for superfast pageload times.

The only downside to this control panel is that there’s very little information on this control panel (just one support forum), and a large percentage of that support is in Russian.

Imagine my dismay when I went to log in to Vesta to received an error message out of the blue. 505 Internal Server Error, read the screen. All my sites still loaded, but I couldn’t access the control panel or log in at all.

The fix? Clear all cookies and you’re back up and running!

Now, thanks to this fine gentleman, I’ve found a way to remove the spotlight icon, at least until I repair my machine’s file permissions. According to Collin, you just have to open up the Terminal (I use iTerm) and enter the following commands.

sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search

You’ll be prompted for an admin password, go ahead and type that puppy in.

killall SystemUIServer

This technique worked like a charm for me in Mavericks 10.9.1, and should also work for previous versions through OS X 10.6.

If you’re an Alfred user, you still want to allow Spotlight indexing, as Alfred leverages it to find apps, files, and the like. If not, you can remove it like so:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

I haven’t tested this, but I’m guessing that the spotlight icon will likely reappear when you go through and repair file permissions, so you may need to repeat this process after system maintenance and such.

Happy customizing!

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