To set up the new version we may have to eliminate our last 10 restore points from version 2.0 as they are not compatible. We will try to keep what we can.

This migration will take place on Monday, February 27th starting at 11am PST.  Please note that no action is required by our customers.

In shared hosting, the most common reason for downtime is a single account slowing down other accounts on the server. CloudLinux helps control this by isolating and controlling resource spikes. ?CloudLinux utilizes a technology to set resource limits per user. This ensures an user account can never use more than the resources given to them.

We have deployed CloudLinux on our latest server, fayrfax.hosting-nation.com and it has worked well. Look for it to come to other servers later in the year. If you have any questions about CloudLinux at Hosting Nation, contact info@hosting-nation.com.

I get to chat with customers on Twitter, Facebook, the blog and the forums, and a lot of my interactions have been about pricing: “I used to get X server for Y, but now it costs Z.” The trouble is that it’s tough to compare many of the offerings apples-to-apples.

If you were to create an apples-to-apples server comparison, you’d see that a SoftLayer server is the equivalent of a server from The Planet with a KVM, a private network, additional geographic network points of presence, increased network capacity, the ability to select where you want your server provisioned, faster provisioning, seamless integration with cloud solutions, and a lot more automation… And these are just the differences that came to me as I was writing.

And after having the type of service Softlayer provides us and our customers, using a “low cost” server datacenter isn’t quite the same. And let me tell you that KVM can be a godsend sometimes. Softlayer has our business because they do it right.

As a result of an automated mail system update in the early hours of Tuesday, November 25th, Hosting Nation Clients would have been unable to send or receive email.

The specific reason for this was that after the update, the mail system defaulted to a simple default configuration leaving out custom settings. As a result port 26 was disabled; and there were some problems with sender address verification.

At this time, the issue has been repaired – and you should be able to send and receive email as normal. We do know what caused the issue, and are certain we can prevent it from happening again. To verify whether an email was sent, you can check your ‘sent items’. If the message is showing as sent then it got through. If you received a ‘message rejected’ response, or the mail came back to you – it will have to be sent again. We regret any inconveniences this may cause you in your day to day business dealings.

We would really like to be able to promise 100% uptime with no outages or issues, but we simply don’t feel that’s possible. What we can promise is that 100% of the time we are committed to providing increasingly better levels of service and stability, and that when issues arise we are equally committed to resolving them as quickly as possible – most always within 12 hours or less.

As a service to clients, we are constantly working on our knowledge base – located at http://support.hosting-nation.com. In the event that you experience any issues with website outages or issues, we encourage you to submit a ticket to our helpdesk – we endeavour to respond to all tickets within the hour and resolve all issues within 24 hours.

Although we have yet to decide on this software’s backup scheduling policy, The CDP solution can create recovery points every few minutes in a short amount of time. It also has a nice web GUI for our administrators and support staff to browse down and restore even a single file.

We will also be taking advantage of the MySQL addon that allows us to restore at the database or even table level from “consistent point-in-time block level snapshots of running MySQL instances.”

The staff and I are really excited about adding this technology.  Keep your eyes on Hosting Nation over the next couple of weeks for an announcement on how you can have access to this great new feature.

Randall Donald is the system administrator for Hosting Nation Data Inc.  Hosting Nation provides hosting packages and hosted applications to everyone.

On October 24th, we updated the nameservers to reflect the new Seattle location. We’re happy to report that the move was a huge success, and the nameserver records have been updated.

For clients that updated their websites during this time, possible effects of the transfer are listed below.

1) If you downloaded your email via a POP account, you may receive emails on October 23rd that you had already received on the 23rd. The reason for this is that your mail (in a POP account) gets downloaded to your local machine from the server. Normally, mail downloaded to your POP account would be removed from the server (unless otherwise specified). In this case, to ensure that all websites remained stable, files remained on our servers in Dallas while we moved copies of all files to Seattle. So anything downloaded would still have been copied, and would be downloaded again by your POP client.

2) Content that was created and uploaded to your hosting space on the 22nd went to our servers in Dallas. It’s possible that that same content didn’t get moved over to the servers in Seattle, depending on when you uploaded the content. Example: You wrote a page of content on the 22nd at 10:00 am. That content was uploaded to the server in Dallas. Your files, email and databases were moved at 9:00 am to the servers in Seattle, but your site was still being served from the Datacenter in Dallas (a symptom of waiting to update the nameservers). On the 23rd, the nameservers were switched over, but no transactions or updates that occurred on the 22nd would be reflected, as they updated to the servers in Dallas. As a result, any updates or transactions would appear to be missing.

3) Transactions occurred on your e-commerce site after your files were moved to Seattle, but before the nameserver update. The copy of your database in Dallas would have recorded the transactions, but would not be reflected in your transaction reports – as the transaction is recorded only on the files in Dallas, not the copies in Seattle.

The good news is that nothing is actually lost. See, all the transactions and updates happened, they just happened in a different place at a time where your files in Seattle were dormant. As soon as the files in Seattle were made active, they reflect all updates and transactions that occurred up to the point just before they were moved. Randy, our system manager, is repairing the issue by ensuring that all databases living in Seattle have the transactional data that occurred up to the point of the switch.

We still have all the data in Dallas, as all updates were still being recorded right up to the point where we threw the switch. If you entered content or recorded a transaction on the 22nd, and you are not seeing it reflected on your website, please let us know immediately so we can resolve any issues. Contact support@hosting-nation.com for assistance, or use our support ticket system at http://support.hosting-nation.net to submit a request for assistance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p11lJOnALS4

I first started using virtualization when the Workstation product from VMware was first on the scene. As recent Mac owners now know, using a virtual machine to access those needed Windows applications while maintaining the use of one’s main operating system is an amazing tool.

Since then, I have used or toyed with VMware server, OpenVZ, qemu, VirtualBox, Boschs, user-mode-linux, and PearPC to run Mac OS 8 for fun.

At Hosting Nation we use virtual computing in a number of ways. On our Linux desktops we use VMware Workstation to run those few Windows programs that we need, e.g. Internet Explorer for browser testing.

Currently I’m trying out the new Unity feature of Workstation 6.5, something I’ve had various levels of success with using qemu and VirtualBox with rdesktop. We use a combination of OpenVZ and VMware Server on the server side. They are mainly used for simulating live server environments and custom configurations. We also use VMware Server to evaluate systems that have Virtual Appliances available. I am also hoping to get a Xen system running internally and maybe in the future a Hosting Nation offering. Xen is one of the major virtualization systems used by VPS providers and cloud computing environments like Amazon’s EC2.

Randall Donald is the system administrator for Hosting Nation Data Inc.  Hosting Nation provides hosting packages and hosted applications to everyone.