Start Date: Saturday, May 16, 2009; 01:00 AM (EDT – reported incorrectly as EST in the email)

End Date: Saturday, May 16, 2009; 03:00 AM (EDT – reported incorrectly as EST in the email)

Locations: RES1 (11513 Sunset Hills Rd, Reston, Virginia)

Summary of Work: We will be replacing our current core network infrastructure with two new routers which we have been burning-in for the last week. These replacements were purchased in response to our outage on 5/3/09. We hope that this upgrade will allow us to provide a more stable hosting environment for your business. This process is fully scripted and should take about an hour to complete. However, due to the implications of replacing routers, we have scheduled an extra hour in this window.

If the router maintenance is a success, we will also perform some routine server maintenance tasks including some server reboots to prevent long FSCK (file system checks) in the future.

Impact: Sliqua server and hosting customers will experience an outage during the maintenance window, as we will be replacing our core routers and possibly rebooting servers. If the maintenance goes successfully, all services will be back online within about an hour. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause. IP Transit, Postini and Clustered Mail customers will not experience any outages during this period.

Best Regards,
Sliqua Network Operations
+1-703-621-4813 x0
noc@sliqua.com
Twitter: @sliqua

At approximately 3:12 AM, the technicians arrived on-site and began diagnostic work on the routers to determine the root cause of the issue.  It was determined that multiple hardware failures caused both routers to fail, and repair work to the secondary router began at approximately 3:40 AM.  At 4:32 AM, repairs on the secondary router were finished, and service was restored.  The primary router required replacements parts that were not on-hand at the time, and so as of now, has not been repaired.

We have taken measures to insure that future incidents are not as severe, including ordering replacement’s for both routers, and ordering spare parts for all router components that are not redundant.  By doing this, we expect that any issues that arise in the future can be dealt with much quicker.  We apologize to all of our customers affected, and promise that we are doing everything reasonable to insure this doesn’t happen again.

The most complicated monopoly setup ever.

Can't wait for the iPhone OS 3.0

Unfortunately we had to cut our game short, so there is no winner.  The competition continues this weekend – we’ll be sure to let everyone know who won.

UPDATE (5/3/09): We *finally* got around to finishing our game.  Joe “Crash” Cooter swept up, with a final tally of 36M to -1.6M

Recently, we realized that we were limiting our customers in the sense the only documentation we had publicly available was on the InterWorx site. Most folks simply opened a support request by e-mailing support@sliqua.com or calling us, rather than looking for the answer online. Thus, we have launched http://support.sliqua.com , a knowledge base for customers to find answers to commonly asked questions. At the present time, there’s around 60 tutorials available on there, which we hope to extend based on customer questions.

We also realized customers enjoy communicating with other customers and staff in an informal setting. Thus, we decided to launch a Customer Chat community for customers to network with each other, in addition to providing a medium to get even the smallest questions answered. We hope that you will join us by visiting http://support.sliqua.com/chat and use our new Sliqua Chat Client, which was developed in-house by Joe Cooter.

The last post was all about DNS and how speeding up DNS speeds up everything else. We mentioned OpenDNS, a company that offers a free service for users so that they don’t have to use their ISP’s often slow DNS servers. However, the visitors to websites aren’t the only people who use DNS servers. DNS servers also are used to hold records for a website, and answer when needed. Most web site owners use their host’s DNS servers as a part of their hosting deal, however this is less than ideal in many of the same respects as using your ISP’s DNS servers: they aren’t optimized, they are slower, and there are fewer servers to answer based on geographic location. This is why many people are looking into Managed DNS (and those that aren’t probably should). Basically, Managed DNS is a web of servers with the same information to resolve your domain to the ip address of your web server. This does three basic things that improve the quality of your DNS servers:

It adds redundancy. In many cases, the default DNS servers given to you by your host are on a single server, or maybe two servers on the same network. In the case of many smaller hosts, this could even mean your DNS is sharing a server with your website and email. If the server goes down, the network goes down, or there is some physical problem (perhaps the facility has a power outage, or fire), your DNS won’t be accessible. Without DNS, your entire domain won’t do anything, even if some servers are still up they will not be accessible because the translation from www.sliqua.com to the ip address won’t take place. Managed DNS services (good ones, at least) typically have multiple servers (5 or more per customer), each in different physical locations (dispersed across the country or around the world), and on different networks. This all means that it’s terribly unlikely that your DNS will ever totally go out, even if an absolute disaster strikes (this is, of course, barring major worldwide disasters of apocalyptic proportion; but at that point, you shouldn’t be worrying about your website anyway).

It speeds up response time. If you’re on the east cost, you have your website hosted on multiple servers across the globe, but your DNS servers are all in one place, that is going to slow down people accessing your server. If you have many different servers, all scattered at key points around the globe, then you will have universally fast response times, and the faster someone can load your site the better off you are.

Managed DNS is more resistant to hackers. I hate using the term hacker in that sense, but it gets through to people. One of the most common types of attacks against a website (or internet server in general) is to use what’s called a DDoS attack. This attempts to flood a server with bogus requests, so that it doesn’t have time (or bandwidth) to respond to legitimate requests, effectively taking the server offline. One of the common ways to do this is to flood a DNS server with requests for a domain name, so that it overpowers the server and makes it stop responding. If you have multiple servers, this makes this type of attack significantly harder to execute with success, as even if one server stops responding, the others will still be alive and kicking.

There are websites that simply do not need Managed DNS. Personal websites, project websites, etc, don’t really need to have the absolute fastest and ultra reliable DNS service that Managed DNS offers, but for businesses and e-commerce websites, it’s absolutely essential. We have all been looking around for something to buy and had the website we were trying to reach be down. I know you didn’t try particularly hard to contact that company either, just move on to someone else. Well, that company lost a sale, and they probably lost more than one sale. If you think you need Managed DNS, there are several providers. Sliqua does indeed offer a very high-caliber Managed DNS service, but there are others in all sorts of different price ranges. Many domain registrars will offer Managed DNS to their customers, as will many hosting companies. There are also standalone Managed DNS companies that specialize in Managed DNS. These tend to be more reliable, and the fastest, but also cost significantly more. Other companies worth mentioning are: DNS Made Easy, UltraDNS, and EasyDNS. Also, a quick google search for “Managed DNS” will turn up countless results. A good way to test their DNS services is to use a website that I absolutely love, called dnsstuff.com. This website has a whole bunch of tools that you can use to test DNS related things as well as general internet tools like IP lookup. The best tools to rate DNS servers is the DNS report tool and the DNS timing tool. The report will give you a detailed report about the DNS server, while the DNS timing tool will give you the time (in ms) that it took to receive a response from the DNS server. All you need to do for these tools is put in a domain name (Sliqua.com, to test the DNS servers we use) and hit go.

As a side note, thanks for all of the people who are subscribing to our blog, and we hope you’ll keep reading to learn how to make your internet experience awesome! We have an email address setup for blog feedback (in addition to comments) at blog-feedback@sliqua.com and we have a Facebook group for more personal interaction with the staff and supporters of this site. Thanks again, and I hope you’ll continue to support us.

From now until January 1, 2009 — Sliqua Enterprise Hosting will be sponsoring Holiday Hits USA.com, an internet radio station playing non-stop holiday hits with no commercials!

With songs ranging from Christmas classics to contemporary holiday hits, Holiday Hits Radio has a little something for everyone.

Check it out at http://www.holidayhitsusa.com

Happy Holidays from your friends at Sliqua!

As many of you know, we have been a long time user of Ubersmith, which is a billing system designed for Web Hosts. Over the last year, they have released a single minor update. In addition, they have yet to address major issues such as PHP 4’s End of Life announcement. This put us into a pretty tough position, as both a customer and reseller, as we keep our customers’ credit card numbers on-file for processing and do not risk that trust with customers.

For this reason, and others, we have decided to switch billing systems. Our billing system of choice is Freshbooks.

We have been watching the development of the Freshbooks service over the last two years. They continue to innovate in every aspect of corporate billing, and offer services that make this process simple, for both merchants and customers.

Freshbooks has been analyzed and reviewed by The Usability Institute, CNET News, and Canadian Business. One recurring theme from every article that I’ve read about their service, is that it’s easy to use.

I’m very excited to start using Freshbooks as our billing system. Our goal is to make every aspect of your web hosting experience easy as pie, and this is one change that we hope will make your life a little easier!

Some annual pre-pay customers will notice invoices coming in the mail a few days prior to their due date. The invoices will be sent Business First Class, and include a pre-paid envelope if you choose to mail back a check. If you would like to pay online, a web address will be listed on the invoice, giving you instant access to pay your bill online. In addition, e-mails will be sent closer to the invoice due date, providing a single link to pay the invoice online.

As of today, our billing website has been moved to https://sliqua.billingarm.com. We ask that you update your records accordingly.

Our previous billing address, https://my.sliqua.com, will redirect to the new billing system as well.

All customer account information has been moved over to the new system. Please take a moment and attempt to login to the new billing system and verify that your contact information is still up-to-date.

If you have any questions about the change, please contact our support department by e-mailing support@sliqua.com.

The Web Hosting Show – Episode 121

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 121!
Running Time: 5 minutes | File Size: 2.33 MB