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Hi,
For some reason some of our posts going to the status site (status.x10hosting.com) are not showing up so I'm making an additional post here as to what is going on, status, etc...
Because of our rapid growth over the past year and some problems we were facing with our provider we decided it was in our best interest to move data centers. This decision was not made lightly as we have quite a bit of servers and terabytes upon terabytes of data including hundreds of IPs that we would have to leave behind. x10Hosting is a lot larger than just free hosting now, in fact our free hosting servers make up the minority of the servers we have online.
The move to Chicago from Dallas is only one of the many things that are going on right now. As most of you may have noticed, a new account panel has been put online. With this account panel a whole new backend system to manage free hosting was also turned on, this system has been in development for over a year and is one of the things that really sets x10 apart from the rest putting most of the account control in the hands of the user and the parts that are not are mostly automated. There are also 3 new websites in the works and changes going on to our paid services along with our free hosting. Some additional changes will be announced by the end of April.
These past few months we've been testing different setups for free hosting to find the ultimate combination of server, software, and compatibility with our own systems. Because the software we use such as cPanel is not setup to handle the amount of accounts we put on a server there is never any way for us to test these things in an 'offline' environment. Unfortunately this means we had to test on live systems and we really had to do a lot of testing to make sure we got it right as making a mistake would cost us thousands of dollars, and free hosting is not all that profitable
. Because of all the testing, stability of the free servers has not been the best these past few months. However we did feel it was necessary to get it out of the way so we could succeed going into the future.
So what are we currently doing? With roughly 90% of our paid services moved over to Chicago including our own website we have started the free hosting migrations. Unfortunately there is no easy way to move 50,000+ accounts. The second we start moving accounts the host server usually chokes and starts spitting out errors. Again, this is mostly due to the fact the software we use such as cPanel is not meant to handle this many accounts. It's either that or no free hosting with cPanel though. Luckily we rarely have to move data centers, and if for some reason we ever had to again I think we'll pay to ship the hard drives instead of migrating accounts. For this migration it is not currently an option available to us though. Everyone keeps asking for an estimate on when we will be done transferring accounts and when things will go back to normal. Well, this is very hard to do. When transferring an account there are so many variables involved that an account that takes 1 minute to move right now may take 5 tomorrow.
I'm going to break out in some basic math now so here is a new paragraph to keep you focused. I can tell you we are currently averaging between 6-10 accounts per minute. Let's use 50K accounts in our math to keep it simple.
High end estimate: 50,000 Accounts divided by 6 per minute will give us how many minutes it will take, this comes to 8,333 minutes or 138 hours or 5.7 days.
Low end estimate: 50,000 Accounts divided by 10 per minute will give us 5,000 minutes, or 83 hours, or 3.5 days.
Now the above is if no problems occur and everything runs smoothly through out the whole transfer process -- this never happens. We constantly have to deal with issues from the transfers including rebuilding configuration files, restarting transfers, and restarting services. I know everyone would love to have an ETA as to when we'll be done but I really can not give a firm number. I can tell you I HOPE to have transfers 100% completed by this time next week. I can tell you they will not be done before 3.5 days from now. I can tell you we are very confident we will be able to consistently obtain 98% uptime or better for free hosting once this move is completed.
All we ask is that you be patient a little bit longer, we have some amazing updates coming soon and I believe everyone will think it was worth the wait.
I'm going to tentatively leave this thread open for questions as a lot was explained above but I'm sure I didn't cover everything. I will not provide support in this thread and even though I'm sure a lot of people will either want to thank us or flame us please do not post it here. Anything that is not a question about this update will be deleted.
For some reason some of our posts going to the status site (status.x10hosting.com) are not showing up so I'm making an additional post here as to what is going on, status, etc...
Because of our rapid growth over the past year and some problems we were facing with our provider we decided it was in our best interest to move data centers. This decision was not made lightly as we have quite a bit of servers and terabytes upon terabytes of data including hundreds of IPs that we would have to leave behind. x10Hosting is a lot larger than just free hosting now, in fact our free hosting servers make up the minority of the servers we have online.
The move to Chicago from Dallas is only one of the many things that are going on right now. As most of you may have noticed, a new account panel has been put online. With this account panel a whole new backend system to manage free hosting was also turned on, this system has been in development for over a year and is one of the things that really sets x10 apart from the rest putting most of the account control in the hands of the user and the parts that are not are mostly automated. There are also 3 new websites in the works and changes going on to our paid services along with our free hosting. Some additional changes will be announced by the end of April.
These past few months we've been testing different setups for free hosting to find the ultimate combination of server, software, and compatibility with our own systems. Because the software we use such as cPanel is not setup to handle the amount of accounts we put on a server there is never any way for us to test these things in an 'offline' environment. Unfortunately this means we had to test on live systems and we really had to do a lot of testing to make sure we got it right as making a mistake would cost us thousands of dollars, and free hosting is not all that profitable
. Because of all the testing, stability of the free servers has not been the best these past few months. However we did feel it was necessary to get it out of the way so we could succeed going into the future.So what are we currently doing? With roughly 90% of our paid services moved over to Chicago including our own website we have started the free hosting migrations. Unfortunately there is no easy way to move 50,000+ accounts. The second we start moving accounts the host server usually chokes and starts spitting out errors. Again, this is mostly due to the fact the software we use such as cPanel is not meant to handle this many accounts. It's either that or no free hosting with cPanel though
. Luckily we rarely have to move data centers, and if for some reason we ever had to again I think we'll pay to ship the hard drives instead of migrating accounts. For this migration it is not currently an option available to us though. Everyone keeps asking for an estimate on when we will be done transferring accounts and when things will go back to normal. Well, this is very hard to do. When transferring an account there are so many variables involved that an account that takes 1 minute to move right now may take 5 tomorrow. I'm going to break out in some basic math now so here is a new paragraph to keep you focused. I can tell you we are currently averaging between 6-10 accounts per minute. Let's use 50K accounts in our math to keep it simple.
High end estimate: 50,000 Accounts divided by 6 per minute will give us how many minutes it will take, this comes to 8,333 minutes or 138 hours or 5.7 days.
Low end estimate: 50,000 Accounts divided by 10 per minute will give us 5,000 minutes, or 83 hours, or 3.5 days.
Now the above is if no problems occur and everything runs smoothly through out the whole transfer process -- this never happens. We constantly have to deal with issues from the transfers including rebuilding configuration files, restarting transfers, and restarting services. I know everyone would love to have an ETA as to when we'll be done but I really can not give a firm number. I can tell you I HOPE to have transfers 100% completed by this time next week. I can tell you they will not be done before 3.5 days from now. I can tell you we are very confident we will be able to consistently obtain 98% uptime or better for free hosting once this move is completed.
All we ask is that you be patient a little bit longer, we have some amazing updates coming soon and I believe everyone will think it was worth the wait.
I'm going to tentatively leave this thread open for questions as a lot was explained above but I'm sure I didn't cover everything. I will not provide support in this thread and even though I'm sure a lot of people will either want to thank us or flame us please do not post it here. Anything that is not a question about this update will be deleted.