A few weeks back I mentioned I was moving to BT .. and was anxious to see the speed difference .. well, there is it

According to my router, I am connected at 6Mps+ .. but BT says they cap 2 of those for the VISION (on demand TV) that we have .. and sure enough .. I am getting now around 4Mps

And here is the OLD one

Not bad

Popularity: 28% [?]

I got an email tonight .. ebay suspended my account for lack of payment !!!

We regret to inform you that your eBay account has been put on-hold due to the violation of our site policy below:
Non-payment of US $1.88 balance on your eBay account.
To be considered for reinstatement of this account, you must pay the US $1.88 balance due immediately.

LOL .. well, a debt is a debt ..

All paid now, but this is what happens when you dont pay attention to those threatening letters from collections department

Popularity: 20% [?]

I have just cancelled my Bulldog DSL account and opened a new one with BT

Bulldog only gives me 2Mps .. BT says they can go up to almost 8Mps on my exchange.

So, as a test, this is the speed test today .. next Monday, when the BT one is suppose to be up, I will test it then again and see if there is a difference

Popularity: 26% [?]

Was trying to reach youtube at 6 AM this morning, and got presented with a ISE 500

I guess the big boys also have those problems

Technorati Tags: youtube

Popularity: 17% [?]

So, there I was yesterday, up to my neck in work … trying to please the nice clients, avoiding the not so nice ones, when my ICQ blinks up … it was Keith from Pingzine asking if I had a minute.

I have knows Keith for about 7 years now .. back in the WizardsHosting days, he had a reseller package with us, and always one of the “nice” clients you where never bothered to give a minute to.

Anyway, he to asked me if I still wanted to write on the PingZine blog .. he reminded me it was something we spoke about several times for the past few months, and I had agreed before (did I ?) .. so, since Keith is a good friend, I proceed to ask “How much will you pay me ?” … after a long sad story about how he has kids, a wife, a mistress and a pet elephant (?) to support .. I agreed to do it for just twice the amount the other blogger get .. yes, I know they get $0 .. but I can still brag I get paid twice as much as them.

But there was still the matter of the fact I am not one of the so called “web guru’s” .. who go on blogging and telling people they are the real deal, if you read their columns, you will find the path to real success on this otherwise uber-competitive market, besides, if I knew the path to success, why would I be giving it away fro free on a Blog ?

Neither the less, keith said: “just bog away, say anything you wish, just don’t upset out other advertisers”, to which I reply “so I cannot say things like, forget all the other hosts, they are all C$ap.. Go with Relio instead ?”, and he said “no, you cannot say the other hosts are c$rap, and people should go with Relio”… so there you have it .. I cant say that .. bummer.

Who are you ?, you probably thinking by now, I have been a part of the WebHosting industry for 8 years now, before with WizardsHosting, then Datacolo, and since 2004, with Relio (wich is basically a re-branded wizardshosting post cpanel hell era, and into H-Sphere heaven), also before the grammar police starts bickering, english is not my first or second language .. it’s my third.

I like to think I know allot about this industry .. after all I manage to survive in it for so long, but every month, heck, sometimes every day, I see something new that makes me realize how little one really knows about anything nowadays, and how if you blink for a second, you are history, and your competitors have left you in the dust.

I will be posting there until Keith decides to pay me to stop, sometimes about webhosting, but mostly about nothing at all ..

Here is the link this post on the new PingZine blog

cheers.

NullMind

Technorati Tags: PingZine, Relio, WebHosting

Popularity: 10% [?]

Ok, I say going HA/LB/GRID .. because depending on who you ask, you get the setup we deploying named after one of them.

I gave the guys the green light yesterday to go ahead and setup the load balancers, NFS and redundant servers for the Linux setup, we expect to have it al done, and tested in as little as 4 weeks, but it can be as much as 8.

This is a sketch on how the network will look (not all servers are listed, but gives a good idea)

High Availability doesn’t come cheap, but looks pretty
I am now in talks with the 3TERA folks about using Applogic with H-Sphere (as a PSoft executive, for PSoft clients and their H-Sphere setups), and I am VERY excited about it, and I believe it’s a terrific solution that our clients will love, but I wont be using it for Relio, for several reasons, none of them is me not trusting the technology, au contraire, I think it’s great, but mainly, I need to deploy this NOW .. and we still have a long road ahead before H-Sphere and Applogic and speaking to each other, second, for OUR kind of setup, I see a little bit of resource wasting with Applogic…

3TERA’s solution uses VPS’s for servers (nodes), it’s nice, and they can be deployed rather quickly .. but for Relio I see it as a waste of resources, if I put 10 VPS’s on 1 server, each VPS will consume allot of OS related resources, so I get less output from that server.

Instead what we doing is doing proper load balancing for HA .. by making each node a actual physical server .. now the downgrade is that it takes more time to deploy a hardware server, so if you are in the business of providing instant growth potential to clients, it’s slower than VPS (I can deploy a vps in minutes, a server .. 1 hour, if it’s in stock).

But thats not the market we are after, we instead wish to provide High Availability / Reliability .. so, as such, each server will have at least 2 nodes running at all times, if one goes down, the other is still alive and taking requests, this also allows for a sideways growth, were instead of deploying . say WEB10 .. you deploy another node on WEB9 .. so now WEB9 has 3 servers running, it can take allot more traffic.

Also, all the web data does not reside on the webservers, but on the NFS system instead, so when any of them goes down, the data itself is unaffected.

Our intention is to have each server (WEB) run on 3-4 nodes .. so if any of them breaks .. there are 2 or 3 left to take the load .. then you dont mind if it takes 1 hour to bring the problem node back up.

Also, another nice thing with the 3TERA solution, is the fact that it’s also easier to move your whole infrastructure to another provider if you need to do so in a harry, we are literally our own providers, so that also does not apply.
Back on our setup…, this also opens up another possibility, later when we have load balancing for Windows, if we make the data all reside on the NFS systems, we can focus in having single accounts for Linux and Windows .. each deployed domain would simply be assigned to one platform or the other.

I’m not sure yet how windows plays (if any) with NFS .. so more discussions on that will be needed with the dev team, but if I could have a single FTP to load up both my windows and linux domains .. that would be heaven

Technorati Tags: GRID, H-Sphere, HA, HSPhere, Linux, Load Balancing, Relio, WebHosting

Popularity: 26% [?]

Just for those who might complain they get allot of SPAM
We did a test on one of the mail-servers at Relio (MAIL1) .. and found out that:

The server averages 2000 successful e-mails per hour (not much at all)
The server bounces back in average close to 4000 SPAM messages per hour (using the Blacklists)

So, 2/3 of all mail that arrives at that server is denied .. and still lots of spam go thru.

Goes to show, indeed when statistics say noways that about 80% of all email is spam, it is true .. so by those numbers, we still need to catch an additional 15% of spam.

Average In: 2182 per/hour

RBL Rejected Mail: (Average close to 4000/h)

Technorati Tags: Relio, SPAM

Popularity: 24% [?]

There have been allot of discussions lately on WebHosting related forums about “Grid Hosting”

So that got me thinking, how different is a “Grid” from a “Cluster” ?

My first reaction to the whole thing was to get more info on what exactly are hosts calling a “Grid” .. on my Gfx background, we recognize a Grid as an array of computers, linked together to form a “super-computer” for processing power, somehow why would I need to link 1000 servers to offer processing power to a website was not really evident to me, what could you possibly be processing that required that much number crunching ?

The way big players like ebay and others do it (putting it in lame terms) is to have many computers serving the flow of traffic, this is called “load balancing” where traffic is routed to the least overloaded server, so this way you have 100 servers distributing ONE site, but they are not combining the power of 100 servers to process that site, instead each server processes a chunk of the traffic on it’s own.

As as it turns out, thats very much like “Grid” is working as well, you basically get more servers (In this case, VPS’s) to help process your traffic, this is not a super-computer (for Processing) as a “Grid” is usually called.

So that got me thinking, how hard would it be to do it with Relio ?

Apparently, not hard at all .. we already have most of the tools fabricated at the H-Sphere end, just need to invest into the rest of the hardware.

The solution is to use a NAS/NFS load balanced solution, all the data resides on the NAS, and the servers are then load balanced in the front, you can have as many web and mail servers as one needs for processing power (of traffic), should one server go down, the others keep the sites up, since the data also does not reside on the servers, it doesn’t really matter.

Here is a schematic of how it works for H-Sphere currently.

Neato
This system allows the Host to add more slave servers as it’s clients needs arise .. so should a site grow exponentially .. one just adds more slave servers, isn’t that the promise of GRID ? unlimited growth with no disturbance to the site ?

BUT, I see how this system could be ever better ..

1 - Add NAS Redundancy, everything is fine and redundant, but should the NAS fail, your whole network is down, one should have a second NAS on a real (or near) time sync, so should one go down, the other keeps the whole setup up.

2 - Make it VPS centric .. if one could define VPS’s as the mailservers and webservers for one user, then as the user grows, one could simply replicate THAT vps into any additional slave server (with a bit of development I am sure) .. the flaw I see is, if in order for ONE user to grow, I need to replicate a whole server, then all the other users on that server are getting a free ride ..

There is another solution, which is to move the growing user to it’s own webserver/mailserver and replicate those as needed, thats a bit more expensive, but it’s a solution neither the less.

My perfect scenario.

I’d love to see us be able to deploy a VPS as a shared account, basically, the user resides on it’s own VPS, but manages his account from within H-Sphere, just like a shared account would, no need for a second CP or additional software, and if we could make all the services for that account to be distributed (1 VPS for mail, 1 for web, 1 for databases) .. then one would replicate those vps’s for load balancing, and then increase copies of those vps’s as growth demanded.

I am sure with time and development, H-Sphere will do just that, or close, for now, I am pricing to try and deploy the existing load balanced system, can I cal it a “GRID” ? .. not sure, but it’s all about marketing.

On a side note: This whole boils down to money .. One needs to be able to charge clients for additional resources, how are people offering 1TB of traffic and hundreds of GB’s of storage for $20 is mind boggling .. it’s not even the matter of “can you do it” .. I’m sure with lots of volume, you can, but why ?, why would I want to make 100K profit on a 10Million Turnover ? call me greedy then, but I want to make 100K profit, on a 500K turnover .. otherwise, I am in jeopardy of running a business with very limited capital, and one slip, and it’s Chapter 11 time.

Update: Ok, I just learned that NAS can do fail-over .. do thats one strike off the wish-list

Technorati Tags: GRID, H-Sphere, Relio, WebHosting, website

Popularity: 38% [?]

I recently got me a new Blackberry 8100 (Pearl), and immediately began the task to make it into a Bluetooth Modem for my MacBook Pro running OSX.

I had done it back in January with my XDA, so now was time to do it with this sleek beauty.

The normal Pairing process was easy, on the Blackberry, had to go to “Bluetooth Options”, open the menu and make sure it had “Discoverable: YES”

After that was just a matte running the “Set Up Bluetooth device” in OSX.

After the MacBook Pro and the Phone saw each other, I followed these steps

Download this script here.
Copy the script into /Library/Modem Scripts.
Open Bluetooth Preferences, Select The Blackberry 8100 from the list of devices and press ‘Configure…’.
Make sure ‘Access the Internet with your phone’s data connection’ is checked. Also, make sure ‘Use a direct, higher speed connection’ is selected. Click Continue.
In the Modem Script pulldown on the following screen, Select ‘BlackBerry 8100’. Use the following settings for the other fields, then click Continue:
* Username, Password: leave blank
* GPRS CID: *99***1#
Open the Internet Connect application. Select the Bluetooth icon at the top. Under Phone Number, put your APN
For T-Mobile UK
* Telephone Number: general.t-mobile.uk
* Username: guest
* Password: guest

For T-Mobile USA
* Telephone Number: wap.voicestream.com
* Username: guest
* Password: guest

Then click “Connect” and you it’s all set

To be able to Google in the middle of nowhere … Priceless

Technorati Tags: Blackberry 8100, Blackberry Pearl, Bluetooth, MAC, OSX

Popularity: 16% [?]

When I was a kid living in Portugal, I used to love reading “Disney” comic books, used … nah, I still like them even these days :).

Anyway, one of my favorite comics of all times, was a series of stories published in the late 70’s, early 80’s entitled “Goofy Does History”, on those stories, Goofy played very famous characters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Midas, Marco Polo, etc .. and one of them was “Galileo Galilei” ..

Yep, this exact comic is on my bookcase

I remember that one of the great things about those stories was how for example, at such young age, I learned how Gutenberg published the first book ever, and that that book was the Bible, or that Galilei experimented that two bodies of different mass and weight would fall at the same rate on a vacuum (the “Falling Bodies” theory), these are things I would only hear about many years later in High School, but there I was at the age of 5, and thru comics, I was learning.

A fact that didn’t went unnoticed, so these days, I spend some time looking for those same comics in english, so my children can read them and while having a laught with them, they are also learning.

Anyway, enough nostalgia, our next cartoon episode, was based on my re-colection of the Goofy Galilei episode, where he tests his Falling Bodies theory by asking a heavyset woman and her puny husband to leap from the tower of Pisa into an old mattress to test his theory that they would both fall at the same time (hey, it was a cartoon book after all).

On this episode, we illustrate that sometimes you just feel like trowing the deadbeat customer’s server’s from the 10th floor, but hey, if you have to do it, might as well make a science project out of it and test the great master’s (Galilei) theory.

The sketch was done a big on a hurry, I had the idea on my mind and needed to give it to Paulo @ Yellowicon/Iconbase within 5 minutes so he could do the final Art; To illustrate how on a hurry we were, I had to capture the sketch on my MacBook Pro Webcam since I had no scanner around and there was no time to wait until I got back home.

The Draft

The final Art

In the end, I love the result, it’s a funny Gag, and I am sure Relio visitors and other friends will have a laugh at it , and who knows, a few might do a google on Galilei and learn something from it (especially those who wont have a clue what his theory was).

Technorati Tags: Cartoons, Disney, Funny, Galileo Galilei, Goofy, Pateta, Rea & Leo, Relio, Toonz, WebHosting

Popularity: 33% [?]