FlockHosting Blog

Faith Begins

I decided to start moving some of the larger accounts (1-2GB accounts) to speed things along so I can try to make it out to Church in the morning, but things are rolling, and things are looking good.

A big thanks to all of you for your prayers and patience in all of this! The moves are going pretty smoothly – there was a minor glitch in the Horde email system, but I will be checking and repairing this on Faith right away, but do check back here for more updates on Faith’s move, any delays/issues will be posted here, but if you find something out of place do open a ticket, but bear in mind similar things like SSL for cPanel will be last in coming in, and the same suggestions apply as Shepherd for making sure your connecting to the proper servers.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Shepherd 100% Complete

It is now official, the last tweaks and adjustments are complete, both FH1/FH2 report all shepherd based sites to the new server, the SSL certificate has been migrated and will shortly be function for IMAPS, POP3S, FTPS – all secure forms of email/ftp checking will be 100% signed SSL, so no more pesky popups, stay tuned for how to fully utilize those features in the coming days.

Faith will migrate tonight starting at 11pm, I apologize to anyone who already paused their websites, if you have not done so already, tonight at 11pm (GMT-8) be sure to lock it down, and let me know so I can re-activate it for you after the move is complete.

If you have noticed any problems, please open a trouble ticket via the client area and let me know – all data is still backed up and active on the old hardware, so if you hit any snags, let me know ASAP! Thanks again for your patience and prayers! More news to follow!

Migration Update

The migration is still chugging along, however it looks like Faith will be pushed to tonight – as it stands the current line is just not performing well (some attacks going on + migration = slow) – so sadly things have not moved as quickly as hoped, however some customers from Shepherd are 100% live on the new system, so your continued prayers and patience are appreciated. I hope to have further updates here soon, please bear in mind cPanel will most likely provide you with a SSL error, between the two servers – so just hang tight a little longer, working on wrapping up all of shepherd, then it’s off to Faith.

Stay tuned here for more updates on the move, so far sites running look good! So definitely Praise the Lord for that! More updates shortly!

Update: The Migration of Shepherd is completed – I am in the process of adjusting the hostname of the server to point to the new server, as well as get all parked/secondary domains properly aligned, I will post an update about the migration of Faith very soon, looking at possibly tonight or Sunday night. Stay tuned for more updates.

Final Countdown (4hrs till)

Just a friendly reminder, 11PM (GMT-8) the migrations will slowly begin, I would like to add there may be some additional latency on the current servers/connection as we push nearly 300GB of data from New to Old, so please be patient as things move forward this weekend, DNS should be ready to go by morning, I am going to try and keep up for the first few hours, but as the morning goes on, and I begin to run out of steam going into Saturday, I’ll change the remaining websites DNS all at once.

If you have any questions before the migration begins, please don’t hesitate to let me know! My email and the ticket system will remain where they are until after the move of FH services. I thank you for your continued patience, prayers, and kind emails! More to come soon!

Rolling cPanel Updates

Across the board to match up the old servers with the new servers in version of cPanel, a quick upgrade is underway, so there may be brief cPanel blips – if your currently working on the server I apologize for the quick restart, I am doing this in a rolling fashion so not all customers will be effected at once. All operations should be back to normal in the next 20-30 minutes.

The Spam Battle

Many folks are reporting a flux in how much spam email they get on average, and I can safely say “I know what you mean!” – the spam filter included on all accounts SpamAssassin is a great tool, but like most tools that battle spam, it can’t always be 100% – and most tools simply look to battle and reduce spam, aiming for that 100%, but sometimes falling much, much shorter in performance.

One of the older filters that was originally offered as a Add-on (still is, will be removed soon) still does filtering for some business customers, and even the tracking on that tends to bounce around, 93% is the average over a week, 93% of all email that comes in is spam. A scary thought – but bear in mind even though it has effectively blocked 93% that still means resources were used, the email still came in, the email was processed, and in some cases with a spam box, it is or did take up disk space.

So thus the new options in the works as mentioned in the newsletter, a commercial proxy based filter helps greatly, it receives the mail first, and what’s GOOD comes thru, so instead of being processed locally, it remotely gets filtered, scanned, and if good delivered to your inbox – and that in the end is what I am shooting for, a solution that is ultra-affordable, as well as accurate, providing all customers clean email at hopefully a simple “yearly” price, so one time a year you pay, and you get 365 days of protection on your email.

Another option in the works at least until enough desire for a paid service or a lower price is found, it is a new filtering system that will live on the servers, as usual I’ll be putting this thru its paces on a test server before even considering placing it on a live server, so hopefully 2-3 weeks, if not sooner if all goes well – but I’ll keep you all posted with more updates as I have them!

Preparing to Move

Upgrades, a mini-migration is all it takes to take you from 2 Cores to 8 The last few months of looking lead to this newest deal, and after reading up on the data center, reading up on things, over a year of positive feedback and reviews, so thus the move.

So the question for those of you new to hosting, new to migrations is probably How do I prepare? – Honestly a lot of this is automated now, after years of doing this for other companies, personal projects, etc. I have worked hard to give a good window with both servers running so if there are any data problems, the old copy is still there – so things should be pretty straight forward.

• Maintenance Mode: As noted in the Newsletter, one big suggestion is disabling your forum / comments systems on your website, most have a “Maintenance” mode which can be turned on, it will prevent your visitors from posting data to a database, thus you have the most recent version, if you do decide to go this route, open a ticket, let me know the location of your forum/script which is in the maintenance mode and once your account is moved over 100% I’ll adjust it so once your DNS updates – your online and good to go!
• DNS Freshness: Sometimes your browser can be your worst enemy in a move like this, or worse your ISP has old DNS settings, so the quickest way is to try a few things like OpenDNS – and rebooting your computer, be it Mac, PC, or Linux your computer will traditionally refresh DNS settings when rebooted, so any cached settings are cleared.
• Email Client: If you use a email client like Outlook, Outlook Express, Apple Mail, or Thunderbird (a few of the most common clients) turn off your email client before the transfers begin – this will make it so in the morning, your download email from the correct sever and not having a problem getting/sending email.
• Backup: While there will be an active mirror of all your files, a good download of your site/databases are always handy to have no matter what, while I make backups – they may not always be the freshest and I can’t always guarantee it’s validity, but all in all consider for working with a HTML based website to simply work on the site on your home computer and upload changes so the latest is always on your computer. More backup tips will be coming soon for various applications.

Stay tuned for more, and if you have any questions about the migration, do open a ticket or send me a email, I am always happy to answer any questions you may have.

MySQL5 in Testing

2008 is bringing a lot of changes to FlockHosting, a lot of it is the back-end hardware and software which powers things, thus I am actively working on testing the migration to MySQL5 which is the new “standard” so to speak, while active support has ended on MySQL4.x builds, they continue to support it thru 2009, it’s limited in the overall performance adjustments they’ll add etc. – so MySQL5 much like PHP5 is in the radar of things to upgrade.

Several test sites were put into a MySQL5 roll-out as part of a test of the new servers (coming soon!) and no issues have been found as of yet, a few more sites will be rolled out soon for further testing, like with PHP5, I encourage all customers to verify their applications in use work with MySQL5, most should, but if a large number of clients have issue in migration we will hold out fleet wide until applications are brought up to speed.

Stay tuned for even more updates, a Newsletter will be going out on Monday to explain some of the changes coming in the next 2 weeks, so hang tight, keep your eyes peeled here and in your email! Happy Sunday!

Need Help?

As some of you are starting into your Saturday, and finding issues here and there with your website, please don’t hesitate to open a ticket or email me directly for assistance in resolving your PHP5 problems (or other website issues/questions you may have) – things are getting patched up so some fixes may fix your problem, but don’t wait for it to come find you, find me.

Some exciting changes will be coming which will bring more fixes, more speed, more more more. So stay tuned, and don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions you may have!

Faith Upgrading!

The process has begun, there may outages during this time on Faith, I do apologize for the outage, but these upgrades are for security and stability of the servers, so please bear with me, things should be rolling smooth again here very shortly. I will update this post with an update as things progress, prayers are appreciated!

Update: A few sites had some issues, if you find yourself stuck, please feel free to open a trouble ticket, there may be 1 more quick re-compile (brief brief downtime, maybe 1-45 seconds) but we’ll see how the day goes, please try to keep all issues to a single ticket, so if you find more glitches, add to your current ticket. Some customers will see a ticket created by me, found a few bugs, some I could fix, some I can’t – so please open or review a ticket today if your having issues!

Happy Saturday!