9 Jun
Increasing redundancy. A thousand part series.
We had a brief outage last night at the Seattle location related to a network switch and the switch was replaced. While in there I took the liberty to put in a future scheduled upgrade.
At our Seattle location, cabinet 1 we run some high end servers with many VIP clients that have dual power supplies each pulling from different power sources. The cabinet runs 30 amp A and B power feeds. The data center has had a couple of rare outages on the A feed. The network switches and the network KVM only have single power plugs and these often plug into A or B. What we have done is installed a device called an automatic transfer switch. What this device does is monitor both power feeds and pulls from one. If for example, the A power feed (primary) goes down, the device will immediately pull from the B power feed or vice versa with the plugged in devices never noticing the difference. This allows us to keep the network switches and other devices always on in case of rare power outages.
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4 Jun
CDP Backup Install Now Complete
All of our shared hosting plan servers now have R1Soft CDP backup up and running. The system will backup your account content every day for up to 10 restore points. Another great feature with it is you can now restore individual files instead of an entire account backup! We are charging no additional fee for this service at this time. It is free with our shared hosting plans.
If you log into your hosting control panel you will find a new icon in the “Files” section entitled “R1Soft Restore Backups”. Once clicked it will take you to the backup server, leave the Host Description the default and log in with your cPanel username and password. Once logged in you will be see an IP and a Disk Safe0. Click the plus next to the Disk Safe, then again next to /home, and from there you will see the available backup points each with a date and time stamp. You can open any of these up to restore individual files from your account. This is very useful if you recently performed an upgrade which did not go over well and you didn’t have a backup before the change.
We hope you enjoy the new additional service!
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29 May
Continuous Data Protection Backup Coming to Shared Servers
We have just purchased some hefty licenses for our shared servers for R1Softs CDP backup protection. This will allow our users to restore their account from specific backup points on the fly! This will also reduce load on our servers nightly backup processes.
We will be offering this as an available service upgrade option to our dedicated server clients as well.
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28 May
Developers Wanted!
From time to time over the years we have clients that request special design or development services. As we are primarily a hosting provider we are looking for designers and developers to refer them to. Most often we refer our clients to popular websites such as iFreelance. As an additional resource we have launched a developer website which you may use to advertise your services to our clients.
http://developers.ultrawebsitehosting.com
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27 May
New Upcoming Changes
Billing/Ordering:
In the coming weeks we will be switching over our billing system to new software that has a more simpler layout yet has a larger feature and support base. We will be importing our existing data into the system and verifying functionality before moving over to it.
New Design Coming:
After a lot of feedback research we will be scrapping the mascot and redesigning our website. We will be going with a simpler layout with some eye candy and a more enterprise look as we will be expanding our dedicated server options. We will take a hit from search engines, going from #2-#3 in our target keywords to possible page 2-3 as our text content will be greatly reduced but the user experience will be much enriched and easier.
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24 May
New Monitoring System Deployed!
We have implemented a new server monitoring system which allows us to not only monitor services on our servers as before, but also monitor hardware statuses including voltage, temperature, power supplies, memory and hard drives.
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21 May
New Fail-Over Server
After some work, we now have a new fail-over server setup for our main server in the case of failure. If our main website is down for whatever reason, remote DNS which also monitors the server, will automatic update to the fail-over server which is located in a different data center. The fail-over server is synchronized in both data and MySQL with the main server at all times so fail-over should be somewhat seamless. There may be up to five minutes of downtime as DNS updates and any DNS caching with an ISP will also need to be cleared (there is not much that can be done about that by us) but this will allow you to always be able to get a hold of us and receive status updates.
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19 May
Increasing Redundancy
We are always in the quest to further increase redundancy. We are now working on a new server in a different data center as a failover server in the case our main web server ever fails to respond to automatically take over so you will always be able to receive up to date information and contact us. We plan on having this server completed in the next 48 hours.
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15 May
New Remote Backup Server Complete
Our new remote backup server is now complete! We are running a Poweredge server with a SAS Powervault attached. It is running 10 1TB drives in RAID 50. What that means is it requires more than two drives to fail for the array to fail. RAID 50 is two or more RAID 5 arrays striped into a single RAID 0 volume for speed. Speed + Redundancy for 8 TBs of remote backup space. Backups are ran over the secondary gigabit ethernet interface on the local network to reduce any bottlenecks.
To simplify, LOTS of space with a bit of speed. We have backups of your accounts in the case one of our servers has multiple failures. This covers shared servers and dedicated servers where the dedicated client has elected the remote backup service.
This backup server will eventually be moved off site to California (but still function as if it is local in Seattle) as part of our disaster recovery plan.
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9 May
All Accounts Successfully Transferred!
All accounts have been successfully transferred to our new data center.
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