Hi all,

I’ve been spending my morning tabbing between P2L and my other sites checking out how the server updates are going and I thought I’d take a second to give you guys an update on what’s happening. I decided to leave already Server4sale for a couple of reasons:

1. I just feel overall they weren’t able to deal with the constant issue of Apache locking up. Basically the server wouldn’t load any sites until someone restarted the Apache service, and this lock up would happen at least every 48 hours, although sometimes it would happen every 6 hours. This has been an issue since pretty much the first day I signed up, and a month later it was still happening. S4S tech support is lightning quick and they would quickly reset the service very quickly, but the fact that the server was so unstable and didn’t seem to be getting any better bugged the crap out of me.

2. The server underwent a couple of minor ddos attacks apparently and I didn’t like the way it was dealt with at all, plus the LayeredTech datacenter has no ddos protection on it’s network at all unless I pay additional fees for hardware protection. When I was with ThePlanet, their network had some basic protection as well as some hardware in case the ddos was significant. So I feel that between the DC and the host, they just couldn’t deal with it effectively and I was basically hanging out to dry.

I started looking around this week for a new datacenter and finally settled on SoftLayer, which has several ddos mitigation tools if required. I bought the box directly from the DC so there is no middleman, and I ended up with the same box I have now with double the RAM and a bit cheaper. Nick was able to transfer all the accounts for us and I went with a company that specializes in server management called Platinum Server Management, which monitor and maintain the server for me. So far they’ve done all the optimization and OS hardening and the server is running great! None of the initial issues I had seem to be cropping up this time around, so already that’s a great sign.

Now I just have to wait until the DNS changes kick in around the globe and see how the box runs under a full load.

That’s the deal with the servers… sorry for all the jumping around guys, I’m just trying to find a stable and solid solution I can stick with.

Dan