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server updated

thewebexpert

Administrator
Staff member
Nov 14, 2012
351
89
28
Almonte, Ontario
server updated, hopefully performance will be more consistant, otherwise I will have to move the server to a new ISP. hopefully with little to no downtime.

Sorry about the outage today.
Derek :evil:
 

thewebexpert

Administrator
Staff member
Nov 14, 2012
351
89
28
Almonte, Ontario
I hate server issues. my isp has been really really good. and I have a bad feeling they are getting too big. server is fine now, but I have to look at alternatives. which tends to be costly and very time consuming! argh
 

thewebexpert

Administrator
Staff member
Nov 14, 2012
351
89
28
Almonte, Ontario
Spent the evening re-configuring the new server, security etc. We will be doing a transition to the new server this weekend.

I will try to do some database shananigans, so that way if someone is on this site, they actually will be talking to the database on the new server. that basically means 0 down time until the dns updates.

Plus I have cloudflare on, and no clue how that will help the transition!!!

the new server runs very fast, uses solid state drives and most importantly is using an architecture that prevents bad neighbours from effecting performance.

wait for it guys...
 

thewebexpert

Administrator
Staff member
Nov 14, 2012
351
89
28
Almonte, Ontario
Moving the server this friday night if I can get ahold of brock .,. Server will be down for about an hour, sorry for this, but we need to have a smooth transition and database shenanigans can corrupt data.

It is all up to your DNS, i recommend you use google (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) as your name servers, and run ipconfig /flushdns after about 30 mins when you see the site go down .

Cheers
 

mwong168

Administrator
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Nov 14, 2012
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Toronto
Thanks for all your hard work and moving us over to hopefully a faster server.
 

thewebexpert

Administrator
Staff member
Nov 14, 2012
351
89
28
Almonte, Ontario
the be honest, I am not looking for speed, I am looking for consistency and reliability. I need to be able to go on vacation and know the server will not stop working for no particular reason, or that someone else would effect my performance.

The previous provider used a technology called solusVM, it allows them to over sell resources, and there is no way to 100% dedicate resources to a client.

I am now on a new provider using open vz (zen) . This allows you to dedicate resources, so regardless of how busy your neighbours are, the speed remains the same. I have dedicated memory and CPU. what even better, I paid extra and am on a SSD San, meaning all solid state drives.

The biggest issue tends to be what we call IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second, pronounced eye-ops). On a traditional SCSI/SATA raid, writing or reading a file from disk can take seconds on a busy server. My current isp it instant

The best benchmark I could use was one of my online store clients, each click used to take about 2 seconds, now it is instantaneous.

Also added to the new sever is offsite frequent backups, so if the blog ever gets hacked, we can roll back to a previous version in seconds. Using a nifty technology called R1Soft.

Only been a weekend, but loving the new server. I hope you guys are no noticing any performance issues, from what I can see in the logs, everything is chugging along perfectly.!

Derek