I have been working or Parallels since they bought PSoft from Comodo (about 9-10 months ago).

I cant fault the company, they have came a long way and still they have much more to go, but unfortunately it was just not working for both the company and myself, so as of last Thursday (3rd) I no longer work there (well, I am on 30 days notice).

There are several factors of why, one of them being that I was one of the few (if not the only) remote employee, in many ways I felt detached, mostly because the company is not structured to deal with remote single employees … everybody works on a Parallels office, not at home, second, coming from 8+ years of owner, co-owner & shareholder of the companies I worked for, to be relegated to a lower echelon was just not for me, I am only happy at the top, or close to the top .. if I am not part of the decision making process, I am not really happy.

Also my way of working did not help, being used to not report to anybody, I keep all my activities within the confinement of my laptop, I was not used to have to use a CRM such as Salesforce, that was a pain, and i did not adapt well to that structure, but then again, if I where working at the sales office in US or UK, then the need for such a tool is not as relevant.

So, now I am out, if this experience taught me something is that I do prefer to work on a smaller company, where the decision making is more personal and the trill of growth is very much alive ..

In the next few days and weeks I will be sending my resumé to a few prospects, time to move on.

Popularity: 36% [?]

So last night I am made aware that the RC NUT website was down, ok, I checked the webserver .. no response, so I sent out a e-mail to support and didn’t tough much of it .. surely it would be up in 5-10 minutes

30 minutes later and no show, I started to get annoyed, told support to get a grip on things and since it was very late, I went to bed.

This morning I woke up early, about 6:00 AM to check it out, site was up, but no DB connectivity .. I have my DB on a separate server (thats the proper way a H-Sphere install is done) .. so I ping the DB server .. no luck, I then checked the IP of the webserver and .. i’ll be dammed, I was on a US server, not a UK server, I ping the MySQL server by name, and sure enough, it was there, but also in the US.

I changed my config files and removed the old US ip, the site was fully up .. except the site was 13 days old !!

Now, for 99% of people out there, this is not a biggie, but for a online shop with sometimes dozens of orders in one day .. this is a catastrophe .. over 100 order records are lost and all since we do inventory by the website stock level, a messed up inventory as well.

Upon further investigation, I found out that Relio’s (webhost) server provider in the UK seems to have decided not to pay their bandwidth bill, and the bandwidth provided cut them off, in essence rendering companies like Relio’s UK servers .. dead (notice, it was not Relio that did not pay their bill, but their server provider, UK Easily)

So I called the bandwidth provider (Uk Grid … all those UK names, they confused the hell out of me today), explain to them our situation and after some negotiations, they agreed to open up traffic to the server for 3 hours to allow me (and others) to access and backup their data out, that was commendable .. those guys where true stars in doing that, after I got the database back, I restored it and the website was up to date … gosh was I relieved.

Why was my site 13 days old to start with ? .. well .. simple, Relio backups my data every day to another server, and every week or two they backup that server to another server in the US .. ok, at first glance, not a bad setup .. but this experience taught me .. not good enough, I need more.

So, since Relio’s UK servers where dead in the water .. and no access to the backup server was possible, they had to do an emergency recovery from the US backups.

I will give Relio credit, to restore every UK account in the US servers, move DNS, remap ip’s, etc .. etc in less than 6 hours .. thats not bad, they did a good job, but it goes to show, no matter how good your first Tier is .. somebody up the ladder is bound to mess it up !!.

Thats the problem with the Web Hosting market these days, too many idiots working on it, we put out livelihoods in the hands of people who later turn around and mess it up for you .. and does not matter how big or small the company is, your are always at risk.

What is the solution ? well, nothing below 50K of hardware and a few K’s a month in fees, so sometimes .. you just have to pay up and shut up.

Thats what I am doing next, first I am going to hire a local hosting company (when I mean local, I mean 3 streets over), I feel the threat of a 300lbs+ guys walking into the office and breaking your nose is a good incentive to make sure they dont screw with you .. that can only happen if they are local, second, I am going VPS (Virtuozzo) .. my idea is to find a setup I can create a Virtuozzo Failover Cluster with a backup residing off-site.. third, I am setting up a mirror of all this on a VPS server in the US, with my DNS residing also offsite (easily re-routable) so if something happens to RIPE itself (The IP consortium of Europe) .. I can still be up, fourth … dont know fourth yet .. but it’s sure to pop up while we doing this.

Overboard, overblown, over-budget ? .. of course .. but piece of mind, i’ve been in this business for 10 years .. I have seen some huge companies working with a setup that would make anybody cringe, promises of redundancy are usually all hogwash, backups many times are simply not practical, yes, they will back your data, they just cant extract it back, customers are at huge risks all the time of loosing all their data, and for some, thats instant bankruptcy, I have try to give away control on how my data is stored and managed, but it’s proven once again, if I want it right, I have to do it myself.

Popularity: 100% [?]

I just returned from a trip to the SWsoft office in Germany.

PSoft was sold to SWsoft not long ago, so I went over for some training on the SWsoft products, it was very pleasant, on my last day there we also had the office XMAS party, so that was a bonus

Popularity: 28% [?]

Now, here is a post i’d never tough I be making .. the sale of Relio.

A few years back, I decided to sell DataColo and just keep Relio, at the time Relio was very small, just a few servers, it was a perfect “testbed” for H-Sphere.

But soon things changed, clients just continued to come in, and while it was good news, it did meant it was growing quicker than I could manage by myself, after all, I still had to manage Positive Software and H-Sphere.

So, a little over a year ago, I contacted a god friend (Robert Rolfe) who runs a H-Sphere company called Weberz .. we discussed a plan where he and his support team would manage the Relio cluster and provide support to the customer, therefore freeing me from 90% of the day to day workload that Relio was demanding.

But that was not the end of it, Relio kept on growing, and became very visible, that started to upset some of our clients at PSoft, who did not saw fit for their Control Panel provider (H-Sphere) manager to have a Web Host of their own .. and while I did allot of smooching to appease those people, deep inside I knew it was a problem, i’d be upset if I where them as well.

And so, Relio continued to grow, and with that I started to make plans for an ambitious plan, take it to the next level with GRID-like distributed hosting .. the idea was (and is) great .. but when announced, it would forever make me a person-non-grata with the PSoft clients .. adding to that, another good friend of mine, started to tempt me with an offer of work, an offer that would see me on a great company that was also deploying such a system as I was planning, and above all, managing great staff and collaborating with great people.

But above all, it also started to take more time away from myself PSoft .. and that was not fair for PSoft.

So decisions had to be made, drop PSoft, drop the new offer and take Relio to the next level .. or Give Relio to the people that can take it to the next level and concentrate on different challenges

Well, I choose the second.

I also decided to open a RC Shop .. it was just too much to handle .. Relio was then sold to Rob and the Weberz team, meaning no changes for the end customers, it’s the same company, I’m just not there.

So i am now free to go forward with new and current projects, there is a upcoming change coming to PSoft, and it will require me to work hard on it, I will open the RC shop on September 1st, and hopefully in a few months, I will be collaborating with some new people one some exciting new projects.

Unfortunately NDA’s and the works prevent me from being more specific .. but to the Relio clients, you are on great hands.

Technorati Tags: Relio

Popularity: 26% [?]

Relio got listed on Web Creme’s main page .. and within a few hours there has been already almost 1000 unique visitors from that site and their XML feed, and still counting .. at this rate, it might send 3-4K visitors to the site on a day, a great exposure.

not bad

I had never heard of that site, but it seems to be very popular with web designers, it also feeds many other sites such as Pro WebArt .. so by being listed there, you are listed in many other website design related sites that lists some of the best looking sites on the web, and now Relio is considered one of them .. cheers !!

Technorati Tags: Relio, Web Creme

Popularity: 19% [?]

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% [?]

We added some nice touches to the Relio site, one of them is a Christmas theme logo

And the other is a Christmas theme splash for the main-page

Do you see Santa ?

We will do more of both for each major holiday
I also added a new CSS feature (lightbox) to open the images with a faded BG, looks great.

Technorati Tags: Christmas, Relio, Toonz, WebHosting, XMAS

Popularity: 36% [?]

This one was a no brainer … it’s December.

The idea behind it was to make a cartoon where Leo is complaining he wont wear a clown’s red nose .. the idea behind the nose is so he looks like Rudolph.

I am amazed at how much people liked this one, maybe it’s the XMAS spirit.

The hasty sketch


The final Art

Technorati Tags: Cartoons, Christmas, Relio, Toonz, XMAS

Popularity: 36% [?]

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: 26% [?]

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: 45% [?]