Date: 24-10-09
Time: 12:30
HOSTING ENVIRONMENTS: Changes to help your business move forward
Dear all cluster 1 shared hosting clients;
Over the last few weeks we have been experiencing some shared hosting problems which obviously we are not happy with!
There has been a combination of causes including:
- An iframe attack which is widespread across the internet, not only infecting clients’ websites but possibly the PC’s of their site visitors. This is usually due to passwords, specifically FTP passwords, not being SECURE (e.g. using ‘mypassword’) or clients’ own PC’s which are infected but have not been checked (we use Avast which is quite good!)
- Increases to some of cluster 1 clients number of visitors which is great news, but also has an impact on overall server loads (Hogging!)
- ……AND yes we are a little disappointed with our shared hosted cloud environment.
Let me explain:
The cloud is a new technology and in principle (on paper) looks quite amazing. It has already being adopted by large data centres such as Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook etc and for our clients who have opted for DEDICATED VM’s the performance has been great!
However, the cloud is having problems with our shared environment – one technology talking with another doesn’t always work! We only have to remember Microsoft’s release of VISTA which looked and worked quite well by itself but became annoying when you found your printer or certain applications wouldn’t work with it! — well that is what we are experiencing within our shared cloud.
At JSWeb, we pride ourselves in being eCommerce specialists, and we have had to make a decision. Ideally, any eCommerce site – or any that is serious about making money or where it is the owner’s sole or main source of income, should be in it’s own dedicated environment where there is no risk of interruption to business by the activities of another client. However, the cost of a Managed Dedicated VM (just £6 per day) is deemed too expensive by many of our current cluster 1 clients, so to move us FORWARD (and become more reliable) we have decided to move our shared hosting performance environment back to PHYSICAL hardware.
We are in full discussions with our suppliers (H365 and IBM) to get our new equipment built and plan a migration from cluster 1 to the new physical boxes with minimal interruption. We will keep you updated.
Again all we can do is apologise – unfortunately problems will never fully disappear within shared hosting as you will always be at the mercy of the actions of others.
Regards
Jamie
Owner of JSWeb Ltd
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UPDATE: 29 October 09
Summary: I know it is Halloween weekend and I don’t want to give people a SCARE but we have made a decision to move our databases out of the CLOUD environment to their new PHYSICAL SAN environment. This is one of the biggest moves and although normally we would want to give lots of notice, an opening at our NOC became available which we have grabbed allowing us to move quickly.
SCHEDULED CHANGE: Fri 30th October at 01:00 AM (Downtime 1-2hrs)
UPDATE: 31 October 09
All work was completed within the schedduled time scale and now our DB is on physical — Interested to know if anyone notices any difference of any kind
UPDATE: 16 NOV 09
The brand new HP DL380’s (9x 4 cores with 8Gb’s) have now been ordered.
Once these have been built then we will be ready to move VM’s from Cluster 1 and 2 to their new physical homes.
We have planned out a method to move each VM one by one (this is a cool feature of the cloud).
This work being scheduled aims to be completed by 27th November 2009.
PLANNED OUTAGE: 23rd Nov from 11:30 PM
Task ahead: Moving the Storage Area Network (SAN) – migrating all site data from virtual to physical machines – will require complete outage of service for several hours
First cluster1, then cluster 2 then email storage
Outcome: The SAN migration started at 23:00 last night and has successfully been completed by 07:39 this morning.