Well Enom has done it again, they are now offering a new TLD for “.PRO”. They have some premade domains that you can buy a subdomain on for a discounted price as well. I went out searching for a few good ones but they were already taken, maybe they will get “.PROS” sometime soon.
In the mean time, check it out: http://www.enom.com/tlds/dot-pro.aspx
I gotta say that over the years I feel that Dell has burned a hole into my heart producing cheapo equipment just to make the sale. Well in the past 2-3 years it seems that Dell has really kicked the quality of their product line up a few notches. Today I was working with a client on our Managed Colocation service, we needed to order his servers so we went ahead assembled them on the website then called dell.
To my surprise the business sales rep was quick to load up the saved cart and begin to check it over with us. After we made sure everything was listed correctly the rep instantly told us that he could save $600 on the R710 and $400 on the R610, We didn’t even begin to haggle him. After we agreed on that pricing we then made the one and only request to get more for our money, we asked for idrac enterprise on both servers for free, our wish was granted instantly.
Typically we buy all of our servers through a reseller but for this particular client I felt ordering direct would be a much better experience for them and it paid off. I have to give my congrats to Dell on earning back my trust in there sales team, I’m absolutely happy to work with them and to use there new servers.
On a side note for any one looking at buying a new OEM server the R610/R710 are absolutely phenomenal buys, and they come with the newest intel E5600 series CPUs.
Update: June 17th 2010.
Dell shipped the servers 2 days ago (Wednesday) they some how got the incorrect address and sent them to the entirely wrong state, thankfully we caught it and had them redirected to the correct destination. I think this is terrible on dells part, not to mention they confirmed the address multiple times.
Update: June 21st 2010.
The servers in fact arrived at the WRONG address. After several calls to dell with no resolution I contacted one of my Business reps at dell and within an hour received a call with an “upgraded” server being shipped overnight to the CORRECT address. They added a 2nd CPU and 15k SAS disk vs 7200 SATA Disk.
We will see when it gets here if it was worth the wait, the other server is scheduled to arrive tomorrow without issue.
Backing data up in MySQL is super important. The site content is often replaceable, however your board posts, ecommerce orders, etc. are far far harder to replace, if at all possible. The other nice thing is that with a lot of database driven web sites you retain most content even if you only back up the databases. You can still lose things like images, but by and large your posts will still be there even in event of a crash. Since bad code, etc. happens there are a few reasons I would recommend doing backups of the databases.
There are a few ways to do backups, but the most common for people who don’t use command line interface is probably going to be PHPMyAdmin. Quite frankly, I do not like using it for database backup and restorations. There are two reasons for this pertaining to reliability
The way I honestly prefer to back my databases up is mysqldump; this allows one to have a lot of control over what gets dumped, do a full backup without worrying about doing it individually etc. It also allows us to make a nice easy cron job to do these backups too if we want.
The way we back a particular DB is up is:
mysqldump dbname > backup.sql
This will put the database named dbname into backup.sql. I believe you can separate multiple DBs with a space as well, however I don’t normally use that functionality. Another thing you can do is you can back up everything with:
mysqldump --all-databases > backup.sql
and this will do everything on the server. Handy for migrations, etc. Definitely way easier than trying to do this via a web interface and having 1,000 DBs.
How we restore these is fairly simple as well, we just run the command as follows:
mysql dbname < backup.sql
If you have a full DB dump you wouldn’t specify anything for the name when restoring. Notice how the carrat points in the opposing direction though. Don’t screw this up otherwise you will likely end up with a blank file and have to re-dump or re-move the file. I usually make 2 copies on the destination server especially when it’s not easy to get a second copy. There are other ways of moving the DBs over, such as copying the raw MYI files but that will be another blog.
We’ve been offering VPS for a few months now and have been paying close attention to our competitors. After doing the math several times I’m still baffled as to how people can offer 512mb ram on a VPS and sell it for $10 and make a profit.
Say the each host node has 24GB of ram, this allows for roughly 44 VPS giving the node some free ram for cache. Now 44*10 = 440, $440 is what it cost to maintain a server with 24gb ram + bandwidth, power and high performance disk. Where do you make profit at this price?
And it seems like the cheap host always say “we don’t oversell”, well how do you not oversell something like that, whats the point of running a business if you don’t make any money? A lot of the providers are offering 512MB under xen, As far as I know its a LOT harder to oversell a Xen node than it is OpenVZ.
Regardless, even if you do somehow run this server for less than 300/mo I wouldn’t consider the profit made effective once you factor in paying people to handle support tickets ect. To o ensure that you get the best out of your VPS solutions, check out this place at vpsserver.com for details.
Keep that in mind when your shopping for a VPS, paying the least you can does not mean your getting a good deal.
Paying attention to your Nagios alerts can pay dividends in regards to server uptime and security. Just as an example, If you have an SSH alert come up it’s likely a very good idea to check your logs for failed login attempts. See cool-one-liners-1/ for more info. Chances are someone is eating your connections up and the monitoring server can’t connect.
Working on servers, people seem to think there is a cheat sheet to it at times. While there are many ways to simplify and automate a lot of configurations on a server, MySQL is not the time nor the place to cut corners. If you bog MySQL in turn the system will feel the wrath of your misconfigurations. Here are a few super common mistakes.
Besides this there is the single biggest reason of all:You will probably have lousy performance compared to a custom my.cnf. When tuning databases, one needs to keep in mind that the my.cnf is tailored to a combination of the database content, how the database is used and the server its self. If there was a magical my.cnf that would make any server work great don’t you think that Oracle/Sun/MySQL would have included it with the server software? We will go into a few things in later blogs such as software to help tuning MySQL, what the parameters mean and how to actually tune a database properly.
I’ve often wondered how often this happens but this story is pretty cool.
I’ve been working on some new business solutions for a while now involving heavy Colocated setups. Finally have the foot work done and have started offering a solution called “managed Colocation” to clients. Some of you may have heard of this concept before, RackSpace current offers something slightly similar. RackSpace offers managed Colocation in the sense that you have full control over the hardware and can get custom parts installed but never actually “own” the base system. The idea of Colocation is to rent space and bandwidth to the customer for any gear they want, if you’re not allowing them to have ownership of their servers or hardware then its NOT Colocation!
We’ve began to offer a solution that allows clients to ship us their gear or have us order it directly for them. We then rack it for them and take care of any hardware or extreme software failures that may happen. We are essentially a babysitter for their hardware, this is extremely valuable to small/medium business where hiring someone to handle it just simply not cost effective.
Now here’s a topic a lot of people truly don’t understand and I see them paying WAY more than they need to for servers. Just recently one of our new clients migrated to our Managed Colocation from Liquid Web, they were paying around $1,800 a month in server rental for 3 mid range boxes. With managed Colocation they are now paying $700/mo for 5U Rack Space, Bandwidth & Power. They also now own their hardware so you will have to account for failure of disk and power supply’s, thankfully most OEM servers have a 3 year warranty on all components. Depending on how important your server is you will need to at keep extra disk and power supply’s on hand. Over the period of 3 years we will have saved this client $30,000.
Interested in our Colocation services? Give us a call http://beyondhosting.net (1-724-790-4678)
It’s not daily but I do have to deal with customers that feel as if I should be doing nothing but slaving over them and their web projects. Today one of my newer customers, 2 months now, asked me to setup a store and update a few pages on his website for him. Went ahead and invoiced the work, got it paid and started the procedure. Turns out his entire site is a Frontpage mess and a total headache of scattered unclosed tags. Trying to figure which tags went to what was an absolute nightmare. One of these moments actually,
Anyway, this customer also wanted us to post some ads from CJ.com on his site, no idea where he wanted them or how he wanted them placed, just throw them on there. Well he calls up after we make the changes saying how terrible they look and how he didn’t want them on certain pages, see the irony yet?
Just another one of those days dealing with people who truly have no idea what they want. I won’t even mention how the e-commerce store went over, apparently credit card processing is something magical..
The series of blogs I write is actaully a lot of tech support questions that are common. This question gets bonus points because it is actually very difficult to explain over the phone due to the complexity in which DNS works. That being said pictures are worth their weight in gold. For this reason I have included the pictures below as well captions explaining what you need to do.
First off this is the domain menu. If you look here, the name servers are already defined. Chances are that unless you have a new domain, they will be pointed to the DNS of your host or your old server. What we are going to do is scroll all the way down the page, at the bottom left where it says “Host Summary” then click “Add.” This will open the next menu.
There are two fields we are going to edit here. The first one is for the Host record that the DNS server is going to be called. Normally I use “NS1” and “NS2.” don’t sweat capitals or not here, it’s not case sensitive. The other field we need to change is the one labeled “Host IP 1.” After this is done, we click “ok” and simply repeat the procedure for the secondary name server. When I set a new dedicated up I prefer to set it up with the first two IPs as NS1 and NS2 respectively.
Now that this has been done, we can finally add our name servers. Please note that if the other information hasn’t been updated in Godaddy’s information that it can take some time for it to allow you to do this. If you have NS1 and NS2 showing up in the Hosts Summary but it gives you an error about the name server not existing this is why. If you already have this set up, the only other change required is to change the Host Records so that the IPs are pointing to the new server and wait on propagation.