We’ll be experiencing some short downtimes while migrating some virtual machines – the largest of which is our own lagniappeinternet.com website. It was down for 9 minutes while migrating. Most others should see no more than a few seconds of downtime. The vm’s that are being migrated will be housed on faster nodes… so this is a good move that has been planned for a while.
Since the Christmas eve event where all servers, pdu, switches, etc briefly lost power in Dallas, the GT20-1 server has not been behaving well. Virtbiz in Dallas worked hard to get the server back up and going, but it’s simply not reliable. Any change to CMOS settings and it doesn’t want to boot… So we don’t want to put it back into production. They’re going to ship the server back to us, and we’re going to migrate off of that chassis to one of the spares we have here. We’ll likely do an signifigant upgrade to the hardware at the same time.
For what it’s worth… Our decision of virtualizing all customer facing servers and backing them up and copying the backups to other servers worked. We’re looking at refining that backup procedure to decrease the downtime in the future. We apologize for the downtime and will be contacting affected customers shortly.
All nodes, power distribution system, etc. lost power for a moment. They are restarting now, and should be available shortly.
Update: gt24-2, x335, x306 are back up, and all virtual servers on them are running.
Sent support page to the d.c. for gt20-1
Update 2: Virtbiz’s support and company websites are down. The gt20-1 node is taking a long time to come back up.
Update 3: I’ve paged a virtbiz support tech, but have not gotten any responses. Their support site is down. The This affects the DirectAdmin virtual server plus a couple others. We apologize for the downtime, and will post Virtbiz’s response when we get one.
Update 4: Since we can’t seem to get in touch with Virtbiz (we will be getting a LONG-TERM resolution to that problem!) in any way shape or form. We’re restoring last night’s backups from gt20-1 to alternate nodes. It will take apx 30 minutes to have the virtual servers done. We apologize, and will be contacting the affected customers in the coming days. One quick note: DirectAdmin customer weren’t affected by gt20-1 extended outage. That virtual server had been migrated to gt24-2 previously for load balancing.
At apx. 9:55pm central time, GT24-2 had an issue and kernel panic’ed. The node is coming back up now, though it is taking some time for drive array checks, etc. All vps’es on it should be run again in the next 10 minutes but with reduced speed while the array consistency check completes. It should be back to normal within the next couple hours.
GT24-2 is being rebooted for a (hopefully) quick fsck of a filesystem.
This affects several virtual servers including the DirectAdmin reseller.
I dont expect it to be long provided the fsck repairs are not too extensive.
9:30 : The server has been renooted and one fsck done on the node’s filesystems… It wasn’t pretty. We’ll need to reboot again. I’m going to migrate the vps containers to another node. so that gt24-2 can be diagnosed and issues addressed properly.
10:30 : The server is up and fscks are now clean… I’ve stopped the migration of the vps containers. We’ll monitor the server and if we need we’ll live migrate the containers to another node.
We are working to implement the SolusVM VPS management system… it has come a long way in the past few months and is taking a quick lead over the other offerings. This is however requiring us to rearrange the vps container numbering. This is a number behind the scenes, but SolusVM needs it a certain way for management purposes. Each vps will be done individually and should only take a few minutes each. During the conversion the VPS will be taken offline. This is true for reseller accounts as well, as reseller servers are virtualized.
This is an entirely internal process. Nothing on your logins, ip addresses, etc. will change. VPS customers will be given a login to the new management console after their vps has been converted.
We thank you for your understanding in this process. We’re expecting to convert all vpses to SolusVM over the next 2 to 3 weeks.
Just a quick update on some lagniappe we’ve arranged… With their help, we have arranged for our U.S. customers to receive Ping! magazine free of charge. Ping!, http://www.pingzine.com, is now celebrating their 7th year as the premier magazine for the webhosting industry. We are very proud to be partnering with Duncan Publishing Group to bring you this magazine and hope you will enjoy reading it as much as we do.
New customers will also be getting subscriptions after 1 month of service! If you’re not already a customer, check out http://www.LagniappeInternet.com/ to sign up, and get some lagniappe. Offer valid for U.S. customers only.
Sincerely,
Rob
Just a quick announcement about a new feature! We’ve been looking on how to give a little something to our customers and we’re working on something major (but can’t talk about that yet)… So we’ve added RVSiteBuilder Pro to the server. All cPanel Resellers may use this immediately. RVSiteBuilder Pro includes over 600 templates with WYSISWG editor, as well as Blog, FAQ, and Newsletter components. We hope you enjoy it, and find it useful in marketing your webhosting services.
As always, we thank you for your continued support. We hope you are pleased with our service and if so tell others. If not, please let us know how we can improve.
Actually it officially happened last month, but we took our time and ramped up services over time originally, so we’re going to make August the celebrated birthday month. The past year of our returning to the world of webhosting has been quite a ride, and we’re enjoying every minute of it. We’re very happy to be part of this exciting community once again.
In celebration, we’re lowering prices!
For VPS accounts:
Basic VPS was $29.95, now $26.95!
Advanced VPS was $44.95, now $39.95!
Premium VPS was $64.95, now $54.95!
Both cPanel and DirectAdmin Reseller accounts are being reduced too!
Basic Reseller was $14.95, now $11.95!
Advanced Reseller was $24.95, now $19.95!
Premium Reseller was $34.95, now $27.95!
All prices quoted are for monthly payment. Prepayment for longer terms are even lower per month…
The website will be updated shortly with the new pricing (some already has)… The ordering system has already been updated!
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