Roger

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Posts posted by Roger

  2. New Services / Features / Suggestions

    in Suggestions

    Posted

    Have you heard of name.com? it's a relatively young Registrar company that has grown a lot in the last few years and now it goes toe to toe with the big ones. Plus it's based on google technology so it has a lot of addons like easy integration with GoogleApps.

    They recently released their API but it will be a while till we see a module for WHMCS or Client Excec if at all.

    Now that you offer WHMCS for resellers I will realy love to see an exclusive module from Hawkhost for name.com as an alternative to Enom and RC.

  3. New Services / Features / Suggestions

    in Suggestions

    Posted

    I'm suprised I haven't seen an offer of dedicated server from HawkHost, with your purchase volume at soft layer I would imagin that you can get a decent profit margin, and then offer diferent levels of management.

    Also streaming media servers are very profitable market, now that products like wowza media server have provided alternatives to Adobe's expensive licensing.

    Another good thing will be to add .Net support via MONO, there is an increasing number of applications using .Net framework and then you can add ms-sql instances as a separate service for business applications.

    This is it for now, I'll let you know, if I think of something else.

  4. VPS Containers

    in Suggestions

    Posted

    I think pricing should be based on resource allocation, pretty much like you do with actual VPS.

    As for a starting price, 10 a month sounds about right considering this boxes will not be using any public bandwith.

    If my website were on the edge of having to migrate to a 60 dollar VPS I would probably pay the extra 10 a month instead.

    And may be the next step will be to buy a Proxy container or may be I need to run a very long process or a daemon to implement something on my website.

    What I'm saying is that integrating VPS and shared hosting in a more symbiotic manner may lead to a whole new level of service between shared hosting and fully managed expensive VPS.

    I think you should consider the posibility of integrating this functionality over your existing VPS infraestructure, it might not be too dificult to achieve.

  5. VPS Containers

    in Suggestions

    Posted

    How about setting up VPS specifically for MySQL containers.

    This will help database intensive aplications or very busy database driven websites, with the advantages of the powerfull and higly tunned shared web servers but whithout the risk of running out of resources due to heavy database activity also increasing scalability an reliability for big websites.

    This containers should be:

    - specialy tunned for MySQL performance.

    - easily deployable.

    - accessible via private network.

    - surpass shared hosting account capacity for querys.

    This concept will also work for load balancing proxy containers and php accelerator containers.

    Regards.

  10. Pluto bad drives issue

    in Suggestions

    Posted · Edited by asambler

    Well this is pretty amusing we deployed the replacement Pluto only to discover a failed drive! It died literally after deployment. So much for SAS being more reliable the name Pluto is what's cursed! In all seriousness we're just going to deploy a new set of i/o stuff (raid, cables drives) for this new machine. It just shows you sata, sas or whatever failures do happen and are totally unpredictable. In this case though the machine just became very slow before the drive was removed.

    I never said than SAS drives never fail, then again with an unrelated comparison since a drive failure on deployment usualy means manufacturer defect and it's much better this way instead of having drives dieing from exhaustion every few months.

    SAS drives are simply better, tougher, more reliable and the most importan thing they are made exactly for this kind of job.

    Raptor drives are great, but I think they have proven than they won't do for this job anymore.

    that is if Pluto's curse don't decide to prove other than that. :o

    Joking aside, I have worked with raptor drives an they don't have much of a thermal efficiency, not to mention that 10k rpm for a 2.5" drive isn't the best design for reliability.

    I still think SAS it's the way to go on this issue, and if I where you I will watch Titan very closely.

  12. Pluto bad drives issue

    in Suggestions

    Posted

    Right now this machine is a very troubling one we have close to 100 IP's so that means 100 users with their own IP's. We've always ever when doing migrations to new hardware re-routed the user IP's so no down time at all. The users do not even experience DNS propagation since their IP's do not change.

    Unfortunately it's looking like we won't be able to do this. We could move some users onto other machines on the same VLAN thus they keep their IP's. Unfortunately for users using shared IP's that will definitely not happen as we simply do not have the capacity on any of the machines to take on an entire other server basically.

    So it's going to be a fun few days we'll probably know what we're going to do in a few hours then post notices and the fun will start.

    I will gladly pay extra $2/mo to be move to another machine while you work on pluto, I think many will.

    haaaa... good old geek fun there aint anything like it.

  13. Pluto bad drives issue

    in Suggestions

    Posted

    The majority of web hosts are using SATA disks not SAS as they're quite expensive. We were using SATA's almost exclusively until recently and we had some machines never have drive failures. Others had drive failures some a lot others not any.

    Well, there's a reason why SAS drives are more expensive, you cant just stick to a cheaper piece of hardware and expect it to withstand the same load.

    Web hosting servers can be specialy demanding to the hardware, with your ongoing growth you sould realy consider lighten the load on Pluto and Titan somehow and do your best to try and move to SAS.

    Those raptor drives are actually considered enterprise drives believe it or not: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=495

    I think is clear you cant always trust what the advertising says, a very important business rule.

    They make enterprise SATA drives in 7.2K RPM form as well as in 10K RPM form. They advertise them with high reliability numbers and all of that.

    Of course they do, that doesn't mean they are right for any aplication.

    As far as the backup machines well they have several TB's of data and are pretty heavily written to and very randomized (we defrag them to help deal with this). It's surprising we haven't had a drive failure they take a beating when we're doing backups.

    that's my point, backup servers only work when they do backup and then they rest for a while.

    It would not surprise me when we finish replacing the drive(s) on pluto that are showing errors that we may not see anything for a year. There was one drive that failed and at the same time another started reporting bad blocks. So probably why things did not get dropped it was not until the second drive on the other side of the raid had issues that problems came up.

    lets hope first the server can get out of this in one piece. we're counting on you guys.

  14. Pluto bad drives issue

    in Suggestions

    Posted · Edited by asambler

    You cannot migrate to a different drive type live. You would need to wipe out all data to do it.

    yeah I know, but you have bakcup system don't you?

    We are also in a situation where this machine cannot be replaced without user IP's changing. So no option like other machines go as far as replacing it.

    I can see how that complicate things, hope your datacenter will come up with a solution in the future.

    We guarantee 99.9% uptime we're well within that even if once in a while there is an outage.

    I wasn't complaining about the service, the way you adress the problem right away and keep us informed is pretty much why I like Hawk Host so much.

    This is is really the nature of hard drive. We have had quite a few drive failures on one machine none on others. Pluto was deployed on 02-20-09 we did not see a single drive failure affecting issue until 10-10-09. It's had a string of them as of late but it's just a luck of the draw type of thing. We could deploy a new machine next week with SAS drives and have 2 drives fail the next week. Even SATA systems our backup machine which is a 12 drive setup has had zero failures. Heck even your home computers I've installed hard drives then 2 weeks later it fails. It's really a luck of a draw with these things. We've just had some bad luck with some machines where drives fail but before then cause problems requiring a reboot. Others fail and we post notice and silently replace them.

    Well, you cant realy blame a hard drive failure to luck, and you cant compar a desktop drive to a SAS drive which are made for enterprise level.

    Also, you cant compar a busy web server who also is serving databases to a storage server who has much less if not almost none random seek operations.

    Velociraptor drives are hi-performance desktop drives wich are also compatible with RAID configuration, but they are certainly not made for the enterprise level and/or to withstand such long periods of intense activity. And that I think is the reason for the constant drive failures on pluto and not realy luck or the nature of hard drives.

    Finaly as I said before I wasn't complaining and as long as you keep replacing the faulty drives fast we all be fine, just lets hope it never comes that the whole array fails at the same time (higly unlikely I know but still).