Upcoming Free Hosting Change

[Corey]

Hi All,

It's been a while since we posted an update for free hosting. The majority of our time over the past few months has been working on automation and our paid services, we have not forgotten our free hosting users though.

Last week we ordered some new hardware for free hosting to start moving toward a cloud setup. Unfortunately cPanel does not support being fully distributed - yet. We have a SAN going online tomorrow at some point, our goal is to move free hosting storage over to the SAN to allow for I\O pooling. At the moment our greatest bottleneck with free hosting is the software (cPanel) and I\O. While we can't do much about the software we can tackle the I\O problem which will greatly increase speeds and allow us to handle abuse much better. If you're wondering what a SAN is Google "Storage Area Network".

In order to move to the SAN we will have to copy all data on a server over to it, this will take some time and most likely cause some problems as the copy will be very I\O intensive. We will be posting a news thread for each server as we do the move to keep everyone updated. Starka will be the first to move over, after the move has been completed we will wait a few days before moving another. After we have moved all servers to the SAN we will have to go back and take the server offline for a couple hours to replace some hardware in it. This will be scheduled at a later time.

On top of this we are putting a roadmap together for free hosting upgrades and changes. As we wrap up some projects with our paid services we will be returning our focus to free hosting. Please take a moment and post in the feedback section for any changes you'd like to see come to free hosting. We will be reviewing all threads in there prior to finalizing our roadmap.

Any questions?

[baranmatej63]

Thanks

I love the hosting. I was wondering why is the server called 'grandma' {starka} is it that old that it need replacing .

Wt ever free feature you roll out for us is awesome I use a static built side runing a dinamic Flash portfolio on it, so as long as that is supported I am loving it.

[leafypiggy]

Starka is a type of Vodka, as all our servers are named after.

[phoenix2010]

Hi there corey

Firstly i want to thank you for providing a great free service
But would also like to add a few questions about upgrades and
features that you may be implimenting on the free servers!

Last year was a hard year for my scouting web site especialy
the migrations that didnt seem to work after so much hard work from
yourself and your team at x10 which in the end led to weeks and weeks
of problems and headaches for both yourselves and your free users!

Is there a potential for these kind of problems to plague us again?
i.e the massive amounts of downtime ? lost files? and sites?

[Corey]

With all new technology there is the chance for things to go wrong, lost files\data is not a possibility with this though due to how the data migration will happen. The data will also be much safer on the SAN due to the extra redundancy. Regarding the issues, I believe you're talking about our mass migration to a server called 'Fris' that became quite the nightmare when we hit an undocumented limit in cPanel. At this time we are only making a hardware change and worst case we can revert the change very easily with minor interruption. If everything does work we will need to tear down the main server to replace some hardware next month - this will be scheduled though and should span just a few hours, not days.

[phoenix2010]

With all new technology there is the chance for things to go wrong, lost files\data is not a possibility with this though due to how the data migration will happen. The data will also be much safer on the SAN due to the extra redundancy. Regarding the issues, I believe you're talking about our mass migration to a server called 'Fris' that became quite the nightmare when we hit an undocumented limit in cPanel. At this time we are only making a hardware change and worst case we can revert the change very easily with minor interruption. If everything does work we will need to tear down the main server to replace some hardware next month - this will be scheduled though and should span just a few hours, not days.

Firstly corey thank you for the fast response.
and yes i was reffering to the problems regarding the fris migration and the limit on cpanel
that was giving everyone headaches!
i hoped that kind of thing wasnt going to happen again and your explanation seems to have allayed my fears.

[lamomiabmxlive99]

Umm dse seems perfect in the server are working the
administrators is that this takes time and good to be prepared and
Greetings and thank me that idea. (Y)

[donaldli]

yap that's hot. i love whatever you guys are doing and i know is for the good of every members. Am loving it already

[vekou]

wow, this is nice. i'd better start to backup my files and database tables.

[Brandon]

wow, this is nice. i'd better start to backup my files and database tables.

You should always keep a backup .