Tony

Nope The license fee's aren't that steep at all and it'll save us money in admin time alone due to it solving some issues we have come up. Along with that with it's reduced memory and cpu usage we have the opportunity to have more customers per machine. If a server has it's load go from say 3.0 on average to 0.5 we'd obviously want more customers on that machine. It would not reduce quality but we'd just better utilize the server. We've actually introduced new features in the past without price increases. Just look at how we added rvsitebuilder and then after that we also added R1Soft for our backup system. We make these investments in software anticipating we can make it up by either less admin time, lower server loads or just the extra feature being a selling point.

R1Soft is automatic. It's our back up system which we also give you access to for your account. Now as far as fantastico upgrades it's really on you. But if your phpbb install doesn't have a bunch of hacks the upgrade should be fine.

Sounds like you've done your home work with regards to backing up everything. We also have R1Soft which is available in your control panel which automatically backs up your content. We keep 7 days worth of backups at all times. Now as far as phpbb upgrades, well fantastico has the ability to do 1 click upgrades. Once a new version of software is released it takes fantastico about a week to support the new version.

On Wednesday December 17th at 11:00AM EST we will be upgrading the Apache and PHP on the Mars server to the latest versions. We do not expect any interruption in services however the CPU usage may be higher than normal on the server while we compile the new versions. We expect this upgrade to take no longer than 30 minutes. Date: 12/17/2008 Start time (EST): 11:00am End time (EST): 11:30am Estimated Down Time: None Duration: 30 minutes

On Wednesday December 17th at 10:30AM EST we will be upgrading the Apache and PHP on the Mercury server to the latest versions. We do not expect any interruption in services however the CPU usage may be higher than normal on the server while we compile the new versions. We expect this upgrade to take no longer than 30 minutes. Date: 12/17/2008 Start time (EST): 10:30am End time (EST): 11:00am Estimated Down Time: None Duration: 30 minutes

On Tuesday December 16th at 11:30AM EST we will be upgrading the Apache and PHP on the Skyline server to the latest versions. We do not expect any interruption in services however the CPU usage may be higher than normal on the server while we compile the new versions. We expect this upgrade to take no longer than 30 minutes. Date: 12/16/2008 Start time (EST): 11:30am End time (EST): 12:00pm Estimated Down Time: None Duration: 30 minutes

On Tuesday December 16th at 11:00AM EST we will be upgrading the Apache and PHP on the Neptune server to the latest versions. We do not expect any interruption in services however the CPU usage may be higher than normal on the server while we compile the new versions. We expect this upgrade to take no longer than 30 minutes. Date: 12/16/2008 Start time (EST): 11:00am End time (EST): 11:30am Estimated Down Time: None Duration: 30 minutes

On Tuesday December 16th at 10:30AM EST we will be upgrading the Apache and PHP on the Saturn server to the latest versions. We do not expect any interruption in services however the CPU usage may be higher than normal on the server while we compile the new versions. We expect this upgrade to take no longer than 30 minutes. Date: 12/16/2008 Start time (EST): 10:30am End time (EST): 11:00am Estimated Down Time: None Duration: 30 minutes

On Tuesday December 16th at 10:00AM EST we will be upgrading the Apache and PHP on the Jupiter server to the latest versions. We do not expect any interruption in services however the CPU usage may be higher than normal on the server while we compile the new versions. We expect this upgrade to take no longer than 30 minutes. Date: 12/16/2008 Start time (EST): 10:00am End time (EST): 10:30am Estimated Down Time: None Duration: 30 minutes

Well we'd be giving a weeks notice about doing it. But seeing as how this week we'll be upgrading Apache and PHP to their latest versions that puts off any notice until around the 18th. We won't be doing the switch over on the week of the 21st to 27th. So the earliest it would be done would be December 29th. All up in the air at this point considering we haven't said we'd be switching.

Of course. Just like how we do things now with software we always have the latest and greatest.

Well we don't run mod_svn right now. But basically how it works is we can proxy back things to Apache if LiteSpeed does not support it in most cases. Of course our SVN implementation does not require Apache at all so none issue really.

Unlikely Their core licenses is to the web server portion only so not the PHP processes it spawns. From our speaking to them you most likely need 1 or 2 in most configurations where you're running mostly PHP. The reason being the majority of the CPU time is taken by PHP and MySQL which are their own separate threads as well. In PHP's case it's numerous threads as PHP daemons need to be spawned to handle requests. If we were serving a ton of static traffic it would make sense but in our configuration it does not.

You cannot manage your own CNAME and A Records from within cPanel. You can however manage your own MX entry within it. Reseller accounts have the ability but for whatever reason cPanel has never given it to the user. So we'll gladly add entries for you.

We already spoke to LiteSpeed about this and how we do not restrict content and they had no issue with it. This was confirmed by others hosts with the same policies not having any issue running LiteSpeed. Well I am not sure if anyone will see any difference in fact most will not realize they're on the other web server software. We literally flip a switch and it switches over reading the httpd.conf file for it's configuration. PHP would still be the same, rewrite rules ect. ect. This is the great thing about LiteSpeed vs others is it is almost 100% compatible with current apache configurations. But if we switch it's a 100% switch over on all our servers over the course of a few months at most. If we have various configurations still we have a support nightmare.

LiteSpeed does not use FastCGI. It uses LSAPI PHP (their own php system) which is suppose to be 30% faster than FastCGI.

We'll obviously be using the enterprise version since we have more than 5 vhosts per machine. We'll be making use of the 2 core version as you only need the correct number if your web server is the one taxed. In our case PHP processes take up the majority of our CPU time.

http://litespeedtech.com/ I've never heard of a lightspeed web server.

As the topic states looking for your thoughts. Quick blog post I made about it: http://www.hawkhost.com/blog/2008/12/13/should-we-switch-to-litespeed/

It is not a standard feature of cPanel they just have a cPanel plugin. We purchase licenses for every machine we have as it reduces server load as well as making backups accessible to our users. You can read more information about R1Soft by going to http://www.r1soft.com/

Another update this is affecting all our dallas servers. This only affects the private network and services that run through it. So it should not cause sites to go down or anything of that nature.

Small update here I did not realize but this also affects the DNS resolvers so that means our servers are unable to resolve domains currently. This should affect very few sites but it's worth noting.

Date: Tuesday December 9th 2008 (12/09/2008) Start time: 9:40 AM CST End time: N/A Devices: bcr01.dal01 Location: DAL01 Duration: 10 minutes Services Effected: Private Network / bcr01.dal01 ================================================== Datacenter Engineers were alerted to an issue occurring with BCR01.DAL01. Upon investigation, it was determined the router had crashed and was in the process of rebooting. Currently services are being restored, and Engineers are working diligently to determine the root cause of the issue. ================================================== Please note this only affects private back end network and for us specifically only the skyline server. All this means is currently Skyline is unable to communicate with the R1Soft backup systems so user file restores cannot be performed at this moment.

Well any decent size site will quickly become a noticable drain with a shoutbox. So I really advise against it unless you like being harassed by us.