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
Outcome: The SAN migration started at 23:00 last night and has successfully been completed by 07:39 this morning.
Hi Jamie,
Let me be the first to congratulate JSWeb for taking what must be a very difficult decision to go back to Physical Hardware. Although Cloud sounded great in principle and i for one was looking forward to the change when it was first introduced, it has not been as successful as you had hoped. We have been unhappy with our service recently and had been considering a change of host. However, with this announcement, we will be staying put and looking forward to the future with JSWeb. Hopefully in the next few months we will be in a position to go for the Dedicated VM.
Hi Jamie,
Echoing Gary’s comments – congratulations on taking this decision, it can’t have been easy. Will cluster 2 be moving as well? I really hope so!
Agree here two. I have already seen some improvement with the recent changes, but would welcome a shift back to the physical hardware and will be sticking around to check out the changes.
Funny thing is during the initial switch to Cloud Hosting it seemed to work much better.
JSWeb have you considered offering hosting that is a step between shared and dedicated? For instance servers that are shared but only are shared by a small number of customers for each one? (I have no idea if this is viable or better, but if it were I would be willing to upgrade to it.)
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Hi Andrew,
Thank you for your message….Yes it’s a big decision but it had to be made (it offers more hosting stability with less problems allowing us to improve our level of service and means we can *all* move forward with our online businesses).
The good new is we already offer hosting that is a step between shared and dedicated! This is known as CLUSTER 2;
Within this environment there are only a select number of accounts and due to this you get a faster response rate and a lot less chance of problems occurring. I will send you an email outlining this in much more detail – It is certainly the next step if you are not yet ready for yoru own dedicated server.
Regards — Jamie
When leading edge becomes bleeding edge tough decisions are called for. I think this is the correct one. I appreciate that the move back to physical boxes will probably result in more downtime and problems during the transition, but I think it will be worth it. Well done.
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Thanks Edwin, we are certainly purchasing ALOT higher spec physcial machines so fingers cross. As for downtime during the migration peroid then if we plan it out corrected we will keep this to a bare minimumm. One of the LARGEST migrates is of our database(s) – this is actually now happening this Friday at 1am (sorry for the short notice but we need to act quicker before the Christmas period fully kicks in). I’ve outlines more about this migration move in the main post section above.
Regards — Jamie
Thank you! Per our last few email exchanges with you. it was determined that we would need to move hosts due to the continuing issues at JSWeb. However, though we did put a lot of time into investigating other options this week, because of this decision, you have kept my business for the time-being.
I am glad to hear you have back-tracked to a more stable environment.
Though, I would ask that, when new technologies are introduced in the future (e.g. cloud computing), that they are fully vetted (testing and QA) before being imposed upon your clientele. A rigorous vetting process might have saved all of us a lot of headache and downtime.
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Thanks Ken,
If only we could dig out that good old crystal ball to see into the future; at least then we would of saved on our 70k investment
That said I still think the cloud environment does offer some great features. For example, using a cluster within the cloud has allowed us to perform server maintenance jobs – unplug a VM within a cluster; perform maintenance work and plugging it back in with no awareness needed to be given – you loose this when going shared onto physical machines.
Also for those clients who are on our private VM’s then they havent had any problems and have been rolling along very nicely indeed.
It is for that reason we will continue to actively try to push all customers onto dedicated private VM’s.
Which ever hosting plan you decide to go with is your choice to make. However, the general recommendation that I make is this: if you plan on making money with your website, the only logical choice is a dedicated server. Given the reliability and speed differences, you simply cannot risk the profitability of a website with shared hosting. Simply put, the extra money saved per month will be lost if you lose a client or customer!
Regards – Jamie
Jamie,
It looks like the switch was made for my site although I’m having trouble FTP’ing in. Is this currently restricted?
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Hi, the move was only Database from a VM to a Physical machine. This is not FTP related. I suggest you raise a ticket or give us a call on Monday so we can clarify your details.
Jamie you are right. I was complicating the switch and trying to FTP using a new server name. Of course once I switched to cluster1 it worked fine. Sigh.
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– Glad you got that working.
Every days a school day (although I remember school being a lot more fun and A LOT LESS stressful
Is cluster1 down again? I thought it was just me, but now I can’t access the help page either.
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The JSWeb Helpdeks is not on cluster 1 and the helpdesk application is being upgraded to the latest version; If you are having problems with your site (on cluster1) then use these link as referneces:
These give a STATUS result of OK or PROBLEM.
P.S. Can we keep this thread on the topic of Cloud moving to Physical please. Anything else you can raise tickets or call us
I don’t know if im imagining things (maybe someone else will chime in as well?) but our site has been working so much better since the database was moved out of the cloud. The page load times have come down and we havent seen any error messages for a few days!
Maybe Jamie can confirm if anything else has been changed?
I only tend to visit these pages when experiencing problems with my site/admin so have not been aware of the changes. The reason I came here today was because my site has been running reliably and page load times on the whole have been noticably better over the past week or two so I wondered what had changed. The prior couple of weeks had been pretty frought for all of us (JSWeb included I am sure) but the decision to go back to a single physical host has so far proven to be the right one. I was vocal on here for the first time last month in my sheer frustration but credit were it is due – thanks to Jamie and the team for taking this tough and costly decision and for the seemless change-over they have performed.
I look forward to the day my business will generate the revenue to afford a dedicated VM but until then here I will stay!
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Thanks for your post Simon; I’m glad the changes we have made, thus far, have been of benefit!
We are still planning to move more elements out of the cloud and are trying to schedule these in to reduce any downtime over the festive period. The next move will be from the SAN (where website files are held. We will annouce more about this soon)
HOWEVER, Loads are still growing on cluster1 (during the build up to Christmas) and we are still strongly suggesting clients take the plunge to move to dedicated (you will not be dissappointed!!).
Seven clients have just moved to their new dedicated homes; Two of these were from CLUSTER2 so if Dedicated is out of your grasp then take these opening on cluster2 while you can.
Regards
Jamie