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!

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.

Well, first let’s state the obvious reasons. We like to keep out servers using the most up to date supported software and recommended server configuration to maintain server stability. We like to keep our servers fast, but most of all, our clients happy, like always. And one of the ways we do that is by periodically updating the backend server software.

MySQL 5 has been available for over a year and is now the standard, recommended version, according to the company that makes MySQL. Any modern script that uses databases should work properly with MySQL 5, but we should mention that we’ve heard reports of MySQL 5 database incompatibilities with a very small number of older scripts. That’s why you may want to check with the authors of any scripts on your site to verify that they are compatible with MySQL 5, as we’ve previously suggested. If you do have any errors, we ask that you open a ticket immediately. Free Hosting or shared hosting we’ll work with you to get your website back up and running.

If you’re a technically advanced customer and you want to know exactly what changes need to be considered for this upgrade, the MySQL 4.1 to 5.0 upgrade page has plenty of details. Where possible, we’ve taken care of the obvious things (for example, we’ve already converted any ISAM tables to MyISAM), but there’s a long list of rarer, subtler issues that are impossible for us to check without examining each SQL query that a script makes on every website we’re hosting.

In the very worst case of a customer using a script that simply will not work with MySQL 5, we are keeping a separate MySQL 4.1 server available that we can temporarily use for that customer’s databases to for up to 30 days, giving such customers a chance to resolve the issue.

We apologize for any inconvenience this upgrade may have caused. We tend to be very conservative about major upgrades, and we don’t undertake them lightly, but this one is definitely necessary.

Read More in the News.

After many requests to get this module installed with PHP, it’s finally been done. We’ve installed the following components for FFMPEG on the PH02 server.

MPlayer, Essential Codecs, Flvtool, Lame, Libogg, Libgsm, Libvorbis, Vorbis-tools, Libtheora, FFMPEG, ffmpeg-php, wmf Lib, faad2, facc, a52dec-0.7.4, xvid/div decoder, x264, AMR 3gp, Encoder and decoder

So, it’s official! As of today, paid clients can stream, upload and convert flash content on their website! This is very exciting. We’ve tested it on a few of our own websites with complete success.

We’re currently under a very large DDoS attack. This is why we have had limited to no connectivity all day today. We’re currently working on fighting this attack with every resource we have. We’ve blocked thousands of IP addresses and ranges, but they just keep coming. I can assure you that we are making progress, as you can see I was able to post in the blog.

I will keep everyone updated as things progress. We’re also under the GUARD thanks to ThePlanet which is able to mitigate a large portion of the attack.

UPDATE (1pm): 9 More IP ranges blocked.

UPDATE (2pm): 247 More IP Addresses blocked.

UPDATE (3pm): 632 More IP Addresses blocked.

UPDATE (6pm): 292 More IP Addresses blocked.

UPDATE (1am): The Attack Appears to have ended.

Update (05/04/09)

The attack is still continuing, we’re making large efforts to block the attack.

Update (05/05/09)

The attack is still continuing, we’re making large efforts to block the attack.

The Attack has ended, 05/06/09 – Services returning to normal.

---

If anyone would like a discount to cover the last few days of questionable connectivity, I understand and if you wish, can be applied to your account. I sincerely apologize for any inconveniences this may have caused you, but I assure you we had every resource available to rectify the situation.