PurgeHosting.com – Blog

About a week ago, we noticed some drive failure errors on the ph03 server here at PurgeHosting.com. We immediately took the initiative to make plans and take care of this before matter got worse. Thanks to our server cluster, we were able to successfully migrate over 900 websites with little to no downtime.

After running diagnostics on the server’s main drive, it was determined that a new drive was needed, which also meant doing an OS Reload on the box. This is always bad news, and no one enjoys dealing with this, but luckily, thanks to ThePlanet the whole process went very smoothly.

It took a total of 21 hours to transfer the accounts to another server in the cluster. We rerouted all traffic appropriately, and 24 hours we took the server down for the reload. Less than 2 hours later, the server was back online and reconfigured with the PurgeHosting network. 24 hours after that, we transferred all the accounts back to the ph03 server, which took another 21 hours.

In the end, we had successfully reloaded over 900 accounts in just under 4 days on a server with a failing drive, since replaced. A big thanks goes out to the staff at PurgeHosting, and of course, ThePlanet.

Chris PurgeHosting

It’s not news anymore that our main server was under a huge DDoS attack for more than two weeks. But it can finally be said, the attack has ended. Over the last two weeks, we were in constant communication with ThePlanet (Our DC), who had a Cisco Guard with custom proxy templates loaded. Here’s the low-down:

Peak Malicious Traffic Mitigated: 684 MBPS
Average Malicious Traffic: 400MBPS
Total Time for Attack: Over 300 Hours

I can’t even begin to imagine the total amount of traffic filtered, it’s easily in the Terabytes. The server was absolutely taking a pounding from this attack without the Cisco Guard online. Once we had the Guard mitigating the traffic, operation returned to almost normal, and for one reason. The traffic was not easy to filter, we have thousands of visitors daily who access the server, in other-words; lot’s of legitimate traffic we don’t want to filter.

Unfortunately, during the attack, many people experienced random outages and questionable connectivity to the server under the attack. This was not because the server was down, but because the Cisco Guard was filtering non-malicious traffic by mistake.

By the 10th day, we had figured out exactly what to block, and by what means to do it. Normally it wouldn’t take us nearly this long to properly mitigate an attack, but this was such a massive DDoS attack, that it took us this long to track down exactly where it was coming from. We ad to sift through thousands of spoofed IP’s.

Once we had this solved, there was no more questionable connectivity for random visitors, and a custom proxy template to better mitigate the malicious traffic. Less than 48 hours later, the attack had ended, presumable because the attacker gave up.

Big thanks goes out to PurgeHosting Staff and ThePlanet NOC Team.

Chris PurgeHosting

Over the next few months we’ll be adding several new services to our website. Including, but not limited to the following:

• Game Server Hosting
• Ventrilo Hosting
• TeamSpeak Hosting
• Templates, Free Designs and Custom Web Designs

We’re always looking forward as we expand our services. As always you can expect these to come with great support and low competitive prices. So stay tuned to updates, and announcements.

Chris PurgeHosting

Last week, thanks to ThePlanet, we had a chance to get picture of one of our servers down at the DC. Kevin Hazard ran a fun and very short campaign and a “Mission”  ThePlanet customers had to complete to earn this picture. Of course, we jumped right on it. The campaign was called ShowMeMyServer, and here was our Mission:

1. Post a Tweet saying “I’m Powered by @ThePlanet. #showmemyserver”
2. Post a comment on this blog that includes “My website is _________, and I’m Powered by The Planet.”
3. Send an email to twitter @ theplanet.com with the name you want included in the picture (or we’ll default to your Twitter name), your The Planet account number* and the IP address** of the server you want pictured.

We had these tasks completed within 15 minutes and sure enough, a few days later we got that picture of our main server. And I thought we should share it with everyone else!

Click for High Res!

Chris PurgeHosting

These days one of the most important requirements to maintain quality service, other than great customer service, is server uptime. We use a combination of server side monitoring applications and 3rd party services that monitor different aspects of our servers. Using these services makes maintaining uptime and quality of service throughout PurgeHosting.com, easier. Luck for you, we’re going to share some of our secrets.

We’ll start off with server side monitoring services.

The Munin Service Monitor. (Visit Website)

Munin the monitoring tool surveys all your computers and remembers what it saw. It presents all the information in graphs through a web interface. Its emphasis is on plug and play capabilities. After completing a installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort.

Using Munin you can easily monitor the performance of your computers, networks, SANs, applications, weather measurements and whatever comes to mind. It makes it easy to determine “what’s different today” when a performance problem crops up. It makes it easy to see how you’re doing capacity-wise on any resources.

Munin uses the excellent RRDTool (written by Tobi Oetiker) and the framework is written in Perl, while plugins may be written in any language. Munin has a master/node architecture in which the master connects to all the nodes at regular intervals and asks them for data. It then stores the data in RRD files, and (if needed) updates the graphs. One of the main goals has been ease of creating new plugins (graphs).

vnStat (Visit Website)

vnStat is a console-based network traffic monitor for Linux and BSD that keeps a log of network traffic for the selected interface(s). It uses the network interface statistics provided by the kernel as information source. This means that vnStat won’t actually be sniffing any traffic and also ensures light use of system resources. However, in Linux at least a 2.2 series kernel is required.

Now, here are our two favorite 3rd party monitoring services.

Pingdom (Visit Website)

With Pingdom it becomes easy to see how much downtime your site has (and when) and how responsive it is. Charts and tables show your uptime and performance over time, so it becomes easy to spot trends and potential problems.

Pingdom works because it checks the server’s availability from multiple places simultaneously. Whenever Pingdom detects an error, additional tests are automatically performed to help you with your troubleshooting and an alert is dispatched immediately. With Pingdom you can monitor websites, mail servers, DNS servers, FTP servers, networks, and much more.

Server Density (Visit Website)

Monitor CPU load, memory usage, processes, disk usage, network traffic and Apache status. Keep an eye on your servers and get e-mail/SMS alerts when things go wrong. Reported data is displayed on an interactive graph. Select date ranges or zoom in for a more granular view. Set up alerts for all checks to be notified by e-mail and/or SMS within minutes of things going wrong. View the state of your server at any point in time with a resource usage breakdown by process.

Thanks to these services, PurgeHosting is able to monitor every aspect of our servers. With all of these services combine, then we can keep track of every moment at any moment. And we’re the first to know, within seconds if any problem is to arise so that we can respond as quickly as possible. And in doing so, we’re able to preserve the quality of service you, as a PurgeHosting Client, receive every day.

Chris PurgeHosting