What does mean for you?
We’re not just another hosting company relying solely on a single upstream internet provider, claiming to operate it’s own network. We speak a protocol known as BGPv4, which is used by Internet Service Providers to share route information over the Internet. This means that even if we lose a connection to a direct upstream Internet provider, our network has the ability to self-heal and continue operating as if nothing happened. It also gives us the ability to adjust routes to improve performance when remote providers are experiencing issues.

We also now own our own IP address space, instead of utilizing another provider’s allocations, which gives us the ability to have Points of Presence in multiple facilities around the world. We have also started a project to implement IPv6, the next generation of the Internet Protocol, which is right around the corner.

What does our new network architecture look like?

Want to learn more about the Sliqua Core Network?
We have setup a Public Looking Glass to display all sorts of geeky details about our network performance. This includes real-time network utilization between our Core Network and our upstream providers, Smokeping statistics for our connectivity between Tier 1 Providers, 3rd Party Monitoring of our uplinks to our Internet Service Providers, and the ability to Traceroute to remote addresses to see our performance for yourself.

This is a big milestone in Sliqua’s history
We hope that you enjoy the new network performance as much as we do. It has been a long time coming, and we’ve finally hit this milestone.

R1HPP volume license discounts enable Sliqua to offer its Enterprise Shared Hosting customers reliable data protection with a two-week backup retention free of charge. Sliqua Complex Hosting customers benefit from the discounts as well with the option to add CDP for a low fee. As an R1Soft Hosting Partner, Sliqua also acquires access to priority technical support and an assortment of sales and marketing resources to help it effectively market and implement R1Soft CDP software.

Sliqua uses R1Soft’s high-performance, disk to disk backup software to protect its customers Linux servers and MySQL databases with consistent, hourly backups and bare-metal restore capabilities. In the event of a disaster, Sliqua can rapidly restore the customers’ websites within minutes from the last point-in-time snapshot of the website data. R1Soft CDP technology allows Sliqua to perform real-time, table-level restores of MySQL databases.

“Sliqua’s customer base largely consists of bloggers and businesses that rely on their website as a primary source of income, so we needed a solid data protection strategy that would provide our customers with hourly backups of their critical data. We also needed a solution that uses minimal server resources. R1Soft’s overhead for the backup processes is so low we don’t even notice that R1Soft is running in the background, it just works,” said Alexander McMillen, President and CEO of Sliqua.

Since offering R1Soft, Sliqua has received plenty of positive feedback from customers who can appreciate the importance of having reliable backups available.

“R1Soft has gotten me out of a jam more times than I can count. There is nothing like the peace of mind you have when you know all of your valuable data is there and ready if the worst should happen, or you break your code,” said Sliqua customer Robb Sutton of RobbSutton.com.

About Sliqua Enterprise Hosting

Providing hosting solutions since 2002, Sliqua is committed to dedicating the time and resources to help its clients achieve success online. Sliqua also maintains a strong dedication to customer service. With resources available to scale your website without downtime and offering multiple mediums of support beyond email, Sliqua is ready to assist you 24×7. Sliqua also ensures a consistent customer experience with a board of directors that works side-by-side with technical support representatives.

What features are provided for me?

• InterWorx 4.1 – The most reliable hosting control panel in the industry. With a proven track record, InterWorx has delivered a highly reliable and secure platform for managing websites and servers. The 4.x upgrade adds many features, including a “snappier” web interface driven by AJAX (an emerging Web 2.0 technology).
• SimpleScripts – A streamlined one-click installer for blogs, photo galleries, forums, and more. From within our SiteWorx control panel, you can install open source scripts, and upgrade them with ease.
• Hardened PHP 5.2 – This was a tough move for us to make, as we are strong believers in the nature of Enterprise Linux, which simply back-ports security updates. However, due to popular demand from customers, we have made the leap to PHP 5.2. Our hardened PHP packages are maintained in-house, and include the Suhosin hardening patch and extensions. As with our previous release, PHP executes as the user, within a jailed chroot environment.
• Memcached – We have included memcached as a part of this release, after seeing it’s production use on sites like Facebook. Memcached gives our customers the ability to accelerate their websites with a second layer of caching beyond MySQL. Using extensions such as W3 Total Cache in WordPress, some customers can cut their website load times in half, by caching their Database Queries in memory.
• Ruby on Rails – We have included Ruby Enterprise Edition, Rails, and Phusion Passenger as a part of this release. Ruby on Rails is a web application framework that’s optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity.
• ModSecurity – We have included a new series of ModSecurity rulesets, with streamlined updates, to protect your websites against the latest web application attacks. This is our second layer of web application protection, beyond what the Suhosin Patch and Extension can provide.
• R1Soft Hourly Incremental Backups- Our backup systems automatically backup your data hourly (at the block-level), with two week data retention. For our shared hosting customers, we also backup MySQL databases at the table-level every hour. This ensures we can quickly, and reliably restore your website to any hour in the last two weeks.
• Configuration Consistency – With the release of Sliqua Server Environment, we are now able to streamline package and configuration updates, with our latest performance and security optimizations. The update process is entirely scripted and change logs for each server are maintained to ensure consistency. An added benefit is that we eliminate the chance of problems during upgrades and migrations between servers.
• Anycast DNS – This isn’t a new feature, but is worth mentioning. We host your domains’ DNS off-site on a global Anycast DNS network. Unlike most providers, we host all of our DNS services in this fashion, to provide instant DNS scalability, and eliminate downtime.

How do I get Sliqua Server Environment?

If your website is hosted on a Shared Hosting or Managed Hosting plan, you’re already running on the Sliqua Server Environment. If not, contact us to find out how Sliqua Server Environment can help your website strive online.

As always, we appreciate your business and will continue to develop ways to better serve you.

The Sliqua Labs Team
Alexander McMillen, Joe Cooter, Jeff Johnston, Amin Murad
1-877-4-SLIQUA / Intl: 1-703-621-4813
support@sliqua.com

At approximately 12:12 AM, the technicians arrived on-site and began diagnostic work on the routers to determine the root cause of the issue. At approximately 12:15 AM, full service was restored.

We do not expect any further outages, and have received assurances from our upstream provider that the issue has been corrected. We apologize to all of our customers affected, and promise that we will take every reasonable measure to insure this doesn’t happen again.

If you have questions about this, or any other outage – please contact us by emailing support@sliqua.com, or calling our main support line at (877) 475-4782.

“After trying what felt like all of the so-called reliable hosting services online, I finally hooked up with Sliqua and now I no longer have to worry about my hosting or lost revenue due to down time. They have been perfect from day 1 with top notch support that can not be matched. I have found my last hosting company.”

–Robb Sutton, OneNinety8, Hosted since 2009

We highly recommend reading his blog post, entitled “Choosing a Reliable Hosting Company for your Blog.”

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are available at +1-703-621-4813, send us a Twitter message, or open a support ticket by e-mailing support@sliqua.com.

—–
Start Date: Saturday , July 25, 2009; 11:59 PM (EDT)
End Date: Sunday, July 26, 2009; 02:00 AM (EDT)

Locations: RES1 (11513 Sunset Hills Rd, Reston, Virginia 20190) and IAD1 (21635 Red Rum Dr. Ashburn, VA 20147)

Summary of Work: We will be physically moving all customer equipment from RES1 to IAD1. All network configurations will stay the same.

Impact: Due to the nature of physical server migrations, we will experience an extended outage. This outage will affect all Shared, Virtual Private, Dedicated and Co-location servers.

We expect this outage to affect all hosting customers for no more than two hours. During this time, we will have an experienced team of 5 systems administrators transporting all of our customer equipment between facilities in an efficient manner. Please be aware that while we are expecting the outage to be under two hours, we’ve built in an extra hour in the event something doesn’t go according to plan.

During this outage, the following services will remain available to customers: IP Transit, Postini, Clustered Email, Phone and E-mail Support. All other services will be inaccessible.

We recommend that customers concerned about the outage follow us on Twitter, as we will be posting updates throughout the migration.

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

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.

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