evilrouters.net

I recently started using the free monitoring service available from Pingdom to monitor (via simple ICMP echo requests) the VPS that this website runs on. Here’s the “monthly report” that I received from them via e-mail for the month of February:

For the month of February, there were a total of two outages detected for a total “downtime” of exactly three minutes.

The first outage was for two minutes from 01:20:38 to 01:22:38 on February 13th. This was observed from Pingdom monitoring servers in London, UK, and Tampa, Florida.

The second was a few moments later, for one minute, from 01:25:38 to 01:26:38. It was observed from Pingdom monitoring servers in London, UK, and New York, New York.

The response times seem to be averaged across all checks from all monitoring servers. Monitoring servers that are close, network-wise, obviously see much lower response times, e.g. 1 millisecond from a monitoring server in Los Angeles, California. The VPS physically is in the Wilshire Annex facility at 900 N Alameda in Los Angeles, so that makes sense.

I can’t really comment on the “unavailability” of the web site as compared to its previous home (a 1&1 shared server) as no monitoring was done then, but I’m quite happy with only three minutes of downtime in a month.

Side note: a few months signing up with ARP Networks, I’m still quite pleased. I know of a number of others who have since signed up that are as well. If you’re interested in a VPS (768MB RAM, 20GB HDD, 200GB bandwidth for $20 USD/mo.), definitely check out their deals. If you sign up, mention my name (I’ll score a free month if enough people do). For us network geeks, they also have native IPv6 to every VPS.

Recently, I moved the web site over from shared hosting at 1and1 to a VPS running FreeBSD 8.0 from ARP Networks (@arpnetworks and @bsdvps). They have a special going on right now, for a VPS with 768 MB of memory, 20 GB of disk space, and 200 GB of bandwidth for $20/mo. (that’s cheaper than Slicehost and Linode, who I also looked into), and they support FreeBSD!

I signed up online and within about half an hour, my VPS had been provisioned and I had the details needed to log in. Fortunately for me, it was late at night when I signed up, which is when they generally take care of this stuff (or so I’ve gathered, from hanging around their IRC channel). In a few hours time, I had set up my user accounts, updated the sources, rebuilt the world and a new kernel, configured the firewall and pretty had the “base” of the server the way I wanted it. I slept.

The next day, in short order, I had Apache, PHP5, and MySQL installed and up and running. To move this blog over, I dumped the MySQL database that Wordpress uses, made a backup of the Wordpress files, scp’d them over to the VPS, recreated the database and extracted the backup. After a quick edit of wp-config.php and editing the hosts file on my Windows 7 desktop, I was able to load up the website running off of the VPS. I tested as much as I could and, when I was satisfied everything was working correctly, I changed the A records in DNS, and waited for the change to take effect.

I began tailing Apache’s access.log files and watched, in pretty much real-time, as visitors were slowly directed over the “new” website running on the VPS.

Since that time, eight days or so ago, I haven’t heard of or noticed any issues with the site, so I assume everything is going well. I’ve also done a number of other things with the server, such as configuring log rotation (and per-vhost transfer and error logs, in Apache), replaced sendmail with Postfix and enabled relaying from my home mail server (my e-mail is still hosted on Google Apps and will be, for the foreseeable future), purchased an SSL certificate and enabled SSL on the website (mostly for the administration interface, but feel free to use SSL if you’d like), and enabled a nightly rsync to an off-site host where backups are then made.

The reason for the latter is to reduce the amount of traffic on the VPS. The Wordpress files don’t change very often at all (usually only if I update Wordpress, add or modify plugins or themes, etc.) and the database doesn’t either, so I chose to simply rsync them to an off-site machine. The traffic used for this is around 650 kB currently. I then run a backup on the off-site machine, and the backups are around 55 MB. Doing it this way accomplishes the goal of having a nightly backup (I’m keeping 30 days worth) in a different physical location (indeed, halfway across the United States) as well as minimizing the amount of traffic on the VPS.

So far, I haven’t had a single issue with the VPS, thanks to my superior sysadmin skillz (hah!) and the great job of the guys at ARP Networks. Their servers have RAID 10, redundant power supplies (on separate circuits and UPS), they run their own multi-homed network, support native IPv6 (this may be my next blog-related project), and their equipment is located in the Wilshire Annex facility at 900 N. Alameda, in Los Angeles. If you’re looking for a VPS provider, check ‘em out (and, before you ask, my only relationship with them is as a paying customer).

Reliable hardware and network, and a rock-solid and stable operating system, this is the right way to run your website!

In case you hadn’t noticed (or if you haven’t been here before), I haven’t updated this site in nearly five months.  I have instead started blogging on a new site, “common abnormality” and you’ll find my more recent posts there.  Eventually I think I’ll just let this blog die off.  If you’ve find any of my content interesting, check out the new blog.

Thanks.

Just wanted to give a heads-up to anyone looking for web hosting: avoid IX Web Hosting!

Let me rewind a bit…I used to purchase my web hosting from 1&1.  I was always completely satisfied with them but about a year ago, I purchased a VPS from VPSLink.  I decided I wanted “full control” of my web hosting environment and the ability to control everything about it. A big factor in my decision was that I wanted to customize my mail services as well (SpamAssassin, ClamAV, postfix, virtual domains, etc.), so I switched to the VPS. The VPS worked out quite well for me and I was happy with it. There were two instances of downtime (to move my VPS to another physical server) and both times I was made aware of it well in advance. The downtime was minimal.

A few months ago I moved my e-mail services to Google Apps and, for the last several weeks, was not using the mail services on my VPS. In fact, postfix was “turned off” quite a while ago. I finally decided that the VPS was overkill and I could save some money by getting rid of it (it was costing me $39.95 a month). Thus my search for a new web host began.

I came across IX Web Hosting’s site and began looking at their services. I was sucked in by “The CEO’s Promise” “30-Day 100% Money Back Guarantee“, “Any-Time Money Back Guarantee“, and “Uptime or Cash Guarantee“) and signed up a few moments later and paid $95.40 via credit card for a year’s worth of service. That was on November 17th.

Since my VPS was still active and hadn’t yet been cancelled, I wasn’t in any rush to move my websites over. I moved this blog over first and, two weeks later, happened to be doing some work on it when some “weird things” started happening. That lasted for a few moments until the entire site was unavailable and visitors instead received the infamous “Wordpress database errors” message. I waited about 20 minutes to see if it cleared itself up. When it didn’t, I created a support ticket.

Two hours later, the site started working again. I started messing with it some more. Ten minutes later, it was down again (note that it wasn’t me causing the issues!). After a bit, it was straightened out and everything was well. Remember that IX Web Hosting had a 99.9% uptime promise — they’d already ate up about half of their available downtime for the next year.

That little incident pissed me off and I was ready to cancel, but I stuck it out. Two weeks later, the same thing happened again; more problems with the mysql400.ixwebhosting.com MySQL server. I decided enough was enough, headed back to 1&1’s web site, and signed back up for their Business package. With their end-of-year special, I even got a lower price ($17.27 for three months, with a year agreement). I backed up my files from IX Web Hosting and copied my database once the MySQL server came back up and promptly created a ticket for account cancellation. This was on December 17th, exactly 30 days after I signed up (remember the “30-Day 100% Money Back Guarantee”?).

While creating the ticket for cancellation, I was asked to provide an explanation:

Please provide reason of cancellation? I’d be happy to. I was blindly suckered in by your outrageous claims regarding the quality of your service. In the last two weeks I have experienced no less than *THREE* outages due to database issues. I was going to cancel two weeks ago but when I realized you’ll keep half of the monies I already paid, I backed out. Well, not this time. I’m done. I’m going back — no, *RUNNING* back — to a former provider. They (1&1) provide better service, and at a better price to boot. Please terminate this account immediately. Monetarily, rape me for whatever your contract allows — I don’t care. At this point, I’d just about pay you to be done with you. Good riddance. Jeremy L. Gaddis

Yeah, I was a little pissed. =)

IX Web Hosting’s package came with two “free” domains, which I promptly registered. They were stupid domain names that I’ll probably never use, but hey, they were “free”, right? Uh, no. Of the $95.40 I paid to IX Web Hosting, they:

• credited me $57.45 “for unused but prepaid period of Business Plus”
• charged me $18.21 for the first domain
• charged me $18.21 for the second domain
• refunded me a grand total of $21.03

I don’t mind paying for the domains.  Well, I don’t mind paying reasonable rates for the domains. Everybody and their brother can register a domain for seven or eight bucks, so I know that the two domains didn’t cost them $18.21. Apparently “30-Day 100% Money Back Guarantee” doesn’t really mean that. Likewise, apparently CEO Fathi Said doesn’t keep his promises.

Fortunately, I had already went back to 1&1 by this point. Once again I’m happy with my web hosting and haven’t had any issues with them. Altogether, I’ve used them for a few years and I imagine I’ll just stick with them. With what I ended up paying IX Web Hosting for one month, I could’ve gotten nearly a year’s worth of hosting from 1&1.

In summary, I’d stay away from IX Web Hosting if I were you. Their service was unreliable, support tickets weren’t responded to in a timely manner, and they kept over 75% of the money I paid them. If you’re looking for a reliable web host, do consider 1&1.

Just a heads-up… I moved the blog’s RSS feed over to FeedBurner (RSS feed here). Using the WordPress plugin provided by FeedBurner, everything should just work. I was able to subscribe to the feed using Google Reader, but please let me know if you run into issues. Thanks!