Please note: This site is now an archive, visit Atomic Ninja Labs for the latest content and updates.
You’ve may have noticed that this site has been under maintenance and unavailable for the last twenty hours or so — the “retooling outage” went live around 24 hours ago.
The reason has been due to migrating to a new Virtual Server based hosting service.
Whilst I have been impressed with the Media Temple gridserver (gs), the persistant sluggishness1 is not exactly something I have enjoyed. It’s made worse by the fact I know just how well the grid can perform without such brakes.
Indeed (mt) have been engaged in a game of whack-a-mole for some time in attempting to improve overall performance. They are determined to win and I don’t doubt for a moment the last mole will feel the full force of the engineer’s mallet in short order.
Don’t get me wrong, the grid ticks a number of boxes, in the shared hosting and entry-level space it universally wedgies the opposition. Hands down.
This upgrade path is as much about gaining more control of my hosting environment, as it is a thirst for more power and reliability. Not that having more horsepower is a bad thing. I’ve grown very accustomed to it over the last 24 hours and can well see why (dv) users speak so highly of it.
Part of entering the (dv) community is a raft of self-actioned changes, such as tweaking Apache to push performance into the stratosphere, or configuring php5 as the default PHP engine, combined with a small handful of requests sent to the (mt) crew for actioning. Both were actioned very quickly, the second was processed in less than two minutes.
That’s tight. It takes me longer to make a cup of coffee.
And have I mentioned speed? Intel Quad Core CPUs running at 2.3ghz have zero issues handling anything. I’ve yet to nudge the load out of 0.00, which is almost creepy to observe. Extremely cool, very fast and worth every penny.
Even though the virtual server entry level is a mere 256 kilobytes of ram, the four rampaging Baskerville Hounds ensure there’s no delay in handling requests, mitigating a lot of the typical cache-and-wait slower processors introduce.
Stage one, moving to improved hardware, is almost complete. Things should have settled down for most folks within the next few hours. Stage two is changing platforms, which is now well-and-truly under way.
- which sadly ruins an otherwise fantastic service (↩)
"When all was said and done shawnblanc.net looked exactly like it did before." — another convert, Shawn Blanc, to the same awesome mediatemple (gs) product used here. And the move had the best possible result; business as usual.
This is a classic example of why I left dreamhost for (mt).
Since only one of our three data centers is losing power, not all servers will be shut down. Unfortunately, our core routers and our upstream providers are in that data center, so there will be no network to any servers during the window. #
Despite the on-going problems with unexpected router and network issues, taking large numbers of their hosting systems out, Dreamhost still don’t get that the above is a real problem that needs a real solution.
Due to an unscheduled fault, the smackfoo mySQL db decided to reject connections for the last couple of hours or so.
We are currently experiencing periodic and intermittent issues involving connectivity from customer applicatoins to MySQL. (mt) Media Temple engineers are aware of this issue and are actively working on a resolution.
However, as the (mt) guys rock, we’re back in action. This would be the first unscheduled outage in, err, 5 months? Having come from dreamhost where outages are an almost daily occurrence, this whole not crashing, always available thing (mt) have going, quite frankly rocks!
All done.. welcome back.. the ‘foo is now clustered, baby!
Brace yourselves..
I’m about to migrate to the new (mt) grid server technology that has just gone release.
It never ceases to amaze me how much of an impact it can heave have, releasing a
wordpress related
theme or
plugin.
The move to
(mt) Media Temple from
dreamhost has been the single best hosting move bar none. I cannot emphasise strongly enough just the staggering difference of having a rock solid hosting service means […]
As has been noted by a few people now, smackfoo has experienced some issues issues recently with mySQL db corruption and severe post duplication.
This is yet another lengthy post, so if you’re reading this via your RSS reader of choice, you might want to check out the full post. :)
It’s amazing how quickly one […]
After running
Google Analytics for a month or so now, some interesting trends have emerged.
Now, before I begin, it should be noted that I don’t particularly use Google’s Analytics engine to help find the advertising ’sweet spot’ - rather it’s a tool for me to identify the content and layout that works best for you, […]
If you’ve had a wander around smackfoo earlier today, or spotted my mischievous comments elsewhere, you may have been noticed my
gravatar has changed. I have now officially begun work on my first fully self-coded design. The image to the left is a hint of the new logo I am working on, along with some […]
As promised, I’ll cover some of the techniques used in the design, handling of URIs and the tricky htaccess rules all used to glue the whole concept of ’smackfoo’ together.
The weekend as a whole has been a massive learning experience - while there have been some frustrating moments, the results are far far better than […]
It is done.
Dear Brendan, Your new Account with (mt) Media Temple has been successfully activated.
