Shared hosting is now on sale! New clients or existing clients who register for a new account, can now receive our lowest price ever, $3.95 per month. This price will go back up to our normal $6.55 on May 15th.
After blowing through deadline after deadline, our new bandwidth carrier delivered our newest ultra fast backbone connection. What they lack in intra-department coordination they more than make up for with the quality of their bandwidth. The new connection has great ping times from around the world.
Our customers should see a decent response time improvement as well as raw download speed improvement.
Happy browsing everyone!
For a very good reason this article is being written and published entirely on my blackberry.
If nothing else it proves the point that you never know how your website is going to be accessed.
Like it or not, there is now a whole new dimension of compatibility to test for when designing your new website.
Having just come back from the HostingCon 2008 industry trade show, my head is still buzzing from all the presentations. Everyone from hardware vendors (ICC-USA) to the great satan himself (Microsoft) was presenting their wares and as much as I hate to admit it, even the microsoft presentation was very impressive.
There was a lot to see this year from the vendors, but far more interesting were the presentations and group learning sessions. Far less time was spent on the technical aspect this year than in previous years. There were no “how to install XEN paravirtualization” classes; instead, many sessions focused on the business itself, such as graphically mapping the company’s track record, how to evaluate your hosting company’s net worth, and some very interesting QA sessions with industry leaders who spoke about managing growth and valuation of assets. Very grown-up conversations indeed!
The thing I noticed more this time than in past years is how the keywords “cloud computing” and “grid hosting” were thrown around the room. It’s the new Web 3.0 terms that have had little meaning in the past but are now, all of the sudden, more tangible.
So what’s the deal? Grid/Cloud computing means: a “process/computation” moved off a single server into a “cloud” of computers. A group of servers (can be tens of thousands) is presented as a single unit to handle a task with the combined power of all the processors/ram/storage. In this model, all systems are the same when it comes to both hardware and software, and are completely interchangeable. Meaning that you can take any two systems and swap their physical locations in the cloud, they will not need to be reconfigured. All systems perform the same task.
While this model works very well for parallelizable tasks such as graphics processing and mathmatical computation, it simply does not work for hosting a website. A “grid” or “cloud” as they are being presented are far less useful than a “cluster” of servers. While I may be too picky, I feel terminology is very important. In our case, a Cluster is a group of systems, each performing a specialized task (web, mysql, dns, email), and presenting a unified interface to the Internet. Here, you cannot take a server from the MySQL group and swap it with the server from the eMail group and expect them to work. They are very distinct systems with differing hardware and software configurations.
This “cluster” model is a very old concept and is the only way to host the largest websites, such as facebook, myspace, youtube, google, yahoo. When the existing systems are approaching saturation point and load spirals higher and higher, you simply add another front-end machine to the effected segment of the cluster to offload some of the processing. When web traffic goes up, add another front end apache server. Too many SQL queries, add another mysql machine. In essense a Cluster is a collection of Clouds/Grids. Each Cloud handles its specialized task and contributes to the performance of the main Cluster.
What I find infuriating is that some providers are talking about Cloud or Grid computing as though it’s the next step in VPS hosting. This is so misleading that it makes my teeth grind. There is no way to run a single VPS instance over a cluster/cloud/grid of computers.
When they market their VPS service this way, it makes a client believe that if the server that hosts their VPS, has a meltdown, their own system will continue to run on the rest of the cloud without interruption. In fact, what happens is that a crashed system is a crashed system, and your VPS instance will also go down in smoke with the rest of the server. And while it may be restarted almost immediately, it will still have downtime.
Also, they claim that you can scale out your VPS to unlimited levels, implying that it’s a trivial task to add more processing power. The way they handle this is by adding other VPS instances of the same system and splitting the traffic with a load balancer. This has it’s own tremendous issues because you cannot take a normal website, split it into two or more instances and expect it to function properly. Websites have to be designed especially to handle this scenario. For instance, MySQL files cannot be written to at the same time by two instances of MySQL without experiencing some very serious corruption.
More than that, this new “Cloud” model is billable based on usage of cpu cycles, bandwidth, disk access. This means that you never really know how much it’s going to cost at the end of the month. This is especially wonderful in the case of a Denial of Service attack which can burn through server resources like there is no tomorrow.
Today’s providers who claim to live in the Cloud, are using traditional hosting technology masked with a very fancy control panel. In my opinion, cloud computing still has a long way to go before it’s going to be useful for our industry. Today this technology is useful to a handful of customers. For the rest of us, we have Shared hosting, VPS hosting, and Dedicated hosting. With the incredible pace of technological advancement of individual servers, I don’t see a reason to move to the cloud. Today’s web servers are more powerful than yesterdays supercomputers and this trend will continue for a long time yet.
Last thought, when the Cloud is going to become useful, we will add it to our product line. For now, our products are every bit as useful as anything available today on the market, and without any fancy buzz words.
About servers. Everyone reading this post is making a connection to a server. In fact, you are making a connection to at least a couple. There is a server in your office or home that is allowing you to proxy onto the internet, most likely a wireless router, which connects through another server, the DSL or cable modem. There is a caching DNS resolver server on your ISP. An entire army of router servers between your home and our data center. And the last server in the chain is our web server, which actually hosts this content.
Lets narrow down the definition of a Server. We are not going to talk about IBM mainframes or Sun UltraSPARC based blade systems. Today, we care only about the servers which comprise the majority of the infrastructure of the websites you visit. These are normal computers just like you have in your house or office, with the exception of being confined into more efficient packaging. They use familiar Intel or AMD processors, normal DDR2 or faster RAM, and SATA hard drives. What really separates them from home PC’s is the software. But software is not what this blog is about.
Here is what one of our older servers looks like (below):
To compare, here is one of eBoundHost’s newest servers. This form factor is unofficially called the ‘pizza box’ due to its small dimensions.
The first thing you will notice is that the new server is not as tall. Our older hardware uses 2u (units of space) while the new servers use 1u. This allows for greater density. Some servers use as much as 7u but these are specialty machines that are filled to the brim with hard drives in gigantic RAID arrays.
Side to side comparison:
These servers fit into specialty (read expensive) racks that have 42u of storage in each rack. This means that when filled with 2u servers, we can only install 21 machines instead of 42 1u servers. It’s a dramatic difference when you talk about a server room full of racks such as in our facility:
Of course the entire 42 units are not available for servers, there are switches, power distribution units, firewalls, intrusion detection equipment. All considered, we are happy to have 30 servers in one rack.
There is also the consideration of electricity and heat. A rack full of servers eats electricity like a hungry SUV, and produces just as much heat pollution. 30 servers stacked on top of each other, blowing air into the same direction, require an amazing amount of cooling, which needs big air conditioners that move a lot of tonnes of air. That’s all I’m going to say about that. Data center challenges is going to be saved for another blog entry.
To jump back into server hardware. Here is the same 1u server without its cover.
Motherboard, CPU, heatsink, RAM, hard drive and a very powerful cooling fan. Seems simple enough. Another picture:
Every server is custom built. When an older machine comes off line, we generally sell it through eBay and build a new server to take its place. The nature of hardware is such that components wear out and fail eventually. Our clients and our reputation are far too important, so we give old hardware the boot and use all new equipment.
Here are some servers in action. The following pictures may not be completely safe for geeks, they may cause weakening of the knees and a desire to run out and fix something. Please refrain, it will pass:
These (above) are dedicated servers. Inventory tags have been obfuscated in order to protect the innocent.
(below) Are some specialty machines which have 15k SAS (fast/expensive) hot swappable hard drives in RAID array. Used for our shared servers, VPS machines, and some powerful dedicated servers.
Each server is built by our staff. We love them so much that we have hundreds of them 
More to follow, there is so much to cover: data center, operating systems, server software.
The Thanksgiving holiday is almost upon us. From the eBoundHost crew, I would like to wish all our friends who are observing this wonderful day, to have a good celebration and try not to have too much turkey (or whatever else).
This is the one holiday per year that seems completely innocent and not commercialized. Its spirit has somehow been preserved over the years and has not become a day to give cards or mandatory gifts, just to get together with your family around a dinner table and enjoy each other’s company.
On a related note, some of our staff are traveling around the country in the next few days, so we are running on a skeleton crew. If support runs a bit slower than usual, we hope you understand! (non critical/outage tickets only, of course)
So without any further delay, happy Thanksgiving.
Thursday august 23rd, 2007, at approximately 11 pm, our backup power generator was unable to cope with a lightning strike to our data center and shut itself down. A technician was dispatched from the generator manufacturer, CAT, and was on site in 15 minutes after the outage. Battery power allowed our servers to keep working, however, the air conditioning units were disabled until generator power could be restored. After approximately 20 minutes of battery power a decision was made to bring down the equipment in order to avoid heat damage. Approximately at the same time as the network was being brought down, two mobile power generators capable of producing 1 Megawatt each, arrived on site on flatbed trucks.
After the two mobile generators started to feed the air conditioners and our main building generator kicked in, all servers were turned up to full service and were scanned for array problems. All together, most customers experienced about 30 minutes of outage.
In the last 24 hours, the Chicago area experienced floods, severe thunderstorms, and a tornado. Trees are broken everywhere and one of our staff lost his car to a flood. All things considered, we are very lucky that the damage was not any worse.
To head off any questions, yes we do have backup batteries, yes we do test the generator every month, and yes, we are prepared and have survived times this type of situation many times. We apologize for the outage and will be happy to speak with you on an individual basis about how this effected your service and what we can do to help.
Not a week goes by without some kind of emergency: hackers, backup server woes, operating system issues, hardware trouble, software trouble, spammers, integration of new technologies. Round and round it goes.
So, to start with Hackers. A long long time ago, EBOUNDHOST acquired a smaller hosting outfit to broaden its offerings with cPanel. Up to 2005, EBOUNDHOST was a Plesk only outfit. cPanel and Plesk are two competing hosting control panel systems that run on Unix-like servers. Both systems have their raison d’être, one is better suited for power users, another for SOHO and non professional website owners.
Unfortunately, one of the acquired cPanel servers had a serious vulnerability which was inherited with the machine. The root-kit survived our admins’ sweeps and lock downs and lay dormant for at least a year. When the time was right, our friendly hacker, or should I say `cracker` (hackers generally don’t damage systems), sprung into action. When the situation was finally under control, several clients no longer had their databases and files were missing. Unfortunately, the attack was scheduled in a time when the server backup was in progress and corrupted the backup. This was a glaring oversight, and our team took ownership of the problem and helped our customers rebuild their websites from old backups with the help of pieces recovered by the Data Recovery procedure.
After this event, a new backup strategy was deployed to production almost immediately. Client data is now archived in snapshot style for several weeks on our new Backup Server cluster. All of our Shared servers and many Dedicated/VPS hosting customers make daily backups to this system. Additionally, databases are being archived in a separate structure. Whereas previously, to recover a single client, an entire server backup had to be unwrapped onto a dedicated machine and then moved back into place; one of our techs can now mount the image and copy the files back into place within minutes. This is possible due to some very cool technologies that became available recently, but this is geek talk.
In real world terms, this requires a tremendous amount of storage, lots of spinning hard drives RAIDed together into mammoth terrabytes of backup space. But it’s never a dull moment, just two months later, we’re almost out of room.
Not all emergencies are of the bad kind some are just exciting opportunities, but one common thread emerges, in hindsight they are all valuable learning experiences. Once you pass one hurdle, the next one seems more approachable.
Last night, January 25th, 2007, there was a brief outage that effected our entire network at 2 am – 2:30 am.
Our network people had to take down both of the redundant gateway switches for maintenance (big iron 1 and big iron 2) resulting in all external traffic completely stopping. The switches were dropping packets and had to have some hardware replaced.
Some of our customers did not know what this was a scheduled outage and we were flooded with email as soon as the services were back up. So I want to take this time to point out the Network Status page which has a running schedule of all upcoming maintenance (network and server).
The vast majority of such repairs do not result in outages, since just one switch at a time is usually being worked on, but this was a very special event. They explained why both of the switches had to be worked on at the same time, but not being a network person, it was a bit over my head.
Along with the very exciting news about the launch of the VPS product, something equally important received no attention. You may have noticed that the Home and Professional shared hosting packages were upgraded to:
HOME:
200 GB Storage
2,000 GB Transfer
PROFESSIONAL
300 GB Storage
3,000 GB Transfer
The prices did not change, the plans are $6.55 and $9.99, and of course all of our existing clients are automatically upgraded to the new feature set.