Welcome to NullMind's Lair, the blog of a cranky Web Hosting Geek

VPS.NET … finally !

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

It’s been many months of hard work, countless revisions of code and design and an incredible amount of people and feedback, but finally last night we released VPS.NET.

Ok, we calling it a “Public Beta”, but it only means we are still missing a few bits, what’s there is solid and working fine !

I am incredibly proud with what we achieved there, going “Cloud” for a VPS setting was a risky new idea, but once that once it sunk in, we knew we had a winner, and above all, we knew we had cracked the trend of things to come.

Now I wish I could say it’s “DONE” .. but it’s not yet, still have loads of ideas and cool features to add, man this has been fun :)

Picture 258.jpg

A grand design .. better see some awards for it !!

26.03.2009 Computers / Internet, Work No Comments

What’s Next ? .. easy .. more Sleep !

Saturday, January 24th, 2009

I’m pondering tonight .. what does the future of Web Hosting Industry hold for those geeks like me who are fortunate (so I think) to make a living working on it.

Back in the day, say first half of this decade, one of the problems that afflicted sysadmins, such as myself at the time, was downtime.

We hated the fact that when a machine went down, somebody had to run all the way to the DC and check what the problem was, this was especially a problem when you where the one that had to do it, I remember having to drive to the DC at 2:00 AM to fix an hardware failure, just to drive back at 5:00 AM for a fault in the same machine.

Yes, with the years advances where made, for once DC’s started to hire more than just mere NocMonkey’s, and a hole culture of DC’s targeting the Web Hosts emerged, but still, to pay $125 for a reboot and a FSCK was something many of us where not comfortable with, or even could afford, luckily the advent of KVM over IP and IPMI made our lives easier, but still, on a more serious problem, it was still you out of bed at 4:00 AM on a cold winter night rushing to the DC while customers complained on every forum they could find.

Yes, some people will say that a Web Host should have 24×7 staff and own their own DC, or pay the DC to fix the problem, but thats just not the real world, many Hosts out there cannot afford the 24×7, and if they have to pay allot of Tech fee’s to the DC, they simply cant afford to offer those dime-a-dozen ubercheap hosting plans that everybody loves, but complains when things go wrong, heck I remember when I owned my own Small DC back in 2002-2005, in the beginning when lights went out at 7:00 PM the place was empty, we could not afford “on site 24×7″ when we opened it. :)

So as I glaze at the upcoming VPS.NET platform, and test the fail-over ability that allows a server to take over and boot the client’s virtual machines from a failed server, in a matter of seconds .. all I can think of is all those late nights almost 10 years ago, when I wished I had such a system, how good it would have felt to wake up to a system notice page about a failure that was self-fixed, turn around and go back to sleep …

24.01.2009 Computers / Internet No Comments

Gearing up for SAN Testing

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

The greatest task on any job, has to be product tolerance testing.

We are gearing up for a series of tests that will define what sort of SAN we will be using on the VPS Cloud, the actual tests will be performed early next week, for now we are setting up the hardware for it, once we have done it, we will post the results here in the bog.

Here is the info on what we are planning …

(more…)

11.12.2008 Computers / Internet, Work No Comments

The VPS.NET Mascot

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

I have always been a huge fan of website mascots, they are not just great marketing tool, but also a fantastic way for people to relate to their provider, plus for us, it’s a fun way to express ideas by utilizing the mascot, you can create cartoons, explanatory graphics, etc .. much nicer than plain text and a chart.

With that in mind, we decided to create one for VPS.NET .. here is it’s story.

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07.12.2008 Computers / Internet, Toonz, Work 2 Comments

Do you want fries with that VPS ?

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

I was reading recently a post on WHT about a customer complaint that he paid $8 /month for a VPS with a certain host, and he was upset he only got 200Mhz per core on a quad core setup (800Mhz total), and not the “entire” cpu … !

That was the kind of post that makes me real happy that I dont work on Sales .. otherwise I’d tell that individual to shove it, take their money and go look for hosting elsewhere.

Lets do the math shall we ?

We know the host is using Quad Core 2.4Ghz CPU’s, and they offer “equal share CPU” .. this means they are putting (2.4ghz / 200Mhz = 12) 12 VPS’s per server, that on itself makes me doubt the sanity of the host, if they sell 12 of their $8 /month plan, it means the server brings in only $98 /month .. for Quad Core .. thats insane.

Why is it insane ?, because these are the kind of people that later on are wondering around trying to sell their businesses at any price, due to the fact their profit margins are so slim, they realize they can make more money per month by selling fries at the Mc Donald’s Drive-Thru than Web Hosting, and second, I am a firm believer you must be a very profitable company at all times, you OWE it to your customers, otherwise they are not safe with you as you are just a bankruptcy in the making ready to go off at any time (ok, I know I am generalizing here, but look at the amount of bargain basement hosts going bely up the past 5-6 years and tell me I am wrong..).

And the delirious customer ?, well, he is a by-product of the bargain basement offering, simply put, $8 for a VPS ?, such product should no exist, it creates a false statement that this technology can be sold at a certain price bracket, and that is just not true, problem is, customers expect it, and then when they get it, they want more, and again expect to be given more .. period ..

Rant Over …..

07.12.2008 Computers / Internet, Short Rants 2 Comments

The importance of failure

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once said “Sometimes we may learn more from a man’s errors, than from his virtues.” .. I guess we can adapt that quote to the fact these days we learn more from when the systems fail, than when they are working fine .. such was the case today.

We had done some tests on the VPS Cloud self healing measure by shutting down a Hypervisor’s services, and always, the VPS nodes residing there, would automatically boot up on a different one in the Cloud … always below 40 seconds (yes, 40 seconds)… but we decided that was no fun, it was time to go to the datacenter and pull some cables … yes .. I love my job :)

(more…)

04.12.2008 Computers / Internet, Work No Comments

Fluffy VPS Cloud ?

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Since starting working on the VPS.net Cloud project, several people have asked me … what exactly is a VPS Cloud ?, I quickly explain it’s a conglomerate of high power servers and network based storage working in unison to allow almost instant deployment, scalability and self healing, a true utopian hosting environment…

That is usually followed by “yes .. but where is the actual cloud ?” .. and then my job just got harder.

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03.12.2008 Computers / Internet No Comments

VPS.net

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

After months of planning, we are finally in the homestretch towards releasing our (until now, Uber-secret) VPS.net Cloud.

So as such, time has come to start a blog (located at http://vps.net/blog), to keep everybody informed on the latest and greatest features we are working on for the VPS Cloud, as such, during the upcoming days and weeks, we will post details on the new website, the Cloud features, the user interface, and much more.

VPS.net is a new brand by that great hosting outfit that I work for (yeah, we are great, get used to it), the UK2 Group, owners of 10TB, UK2.NET, Midphase, etc ..

So keep checking that blog page every day (or even several times a day, things are moving fast), we expect to release VPS.net LIVE on January 31st, but will be looking for beta testers in the upcoming few weeks ;)

02.12.2008 Computers / Internet, Work No Comments

WebHosting … Everybody Sucks

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

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.

24.05.2008 Computers / Internet, Short Rants, Work 5 Comments