WebIntellects Employee Blog

AIS Power Outage

Josh Elson — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:24:31 +0000

Things have finally settled back down here at WebIntellects after the power outage we experienced last month at the AIS data center. I finally have a little bit of free time to sit down and blog about it. It is crazy how the loss of power for a few seconds could cause almost a month of work to get things back to normal. My name is Josh and I am a Systems Administrator for WebIntellects. I have been working here for almost 8 years and have been involved in a few of different outages during my tenure here. As a Systems Administrator when these things happen my life goes from a normal eight-hour workday to anywhere from twelve to sixteen hour work days. If I am not at the data center fixing various server issues, then I am back at the office working remotely or even from home working to fix important issues to get things back to normal in a timely manner.

Once power was restored after the brief loss, we had to manually start turning on all servers in our cage. This is a tedious task as it involves hundreds and hundreds of servers. In cases like this, there are always a few that do not come back online either. Most likely either a power supply failure, hard drive failure or worse - a fried RAID card or motherboard. With this outage we had a little bit of everything. We had a couple managed dedicated servers that needed power supplies replaced. We had one of our VPS servers sustain a corrupt RAID array resulting in the loss of all data on the server. We also lost one of our R1Soft backup server’s arrays, so weeks worth of backups were lost. This sort of loss takes weeks to recover, as we have to rebuild the server and its RAID array and then start recreating all the backups.

Times like these are particularly tough for the clients of WebIntellects as well as the staff. Nobody wants their websites and email to be down and we as a staff do not want this either. Unfortunately some of these things are out of our control. We really do appreciate the kind words from customers who understand when these things happen. We also understand the unhappy clients who have their websites down or even lost data because of the outage. Believe me there is nobody more upset about these outages than the staff at WebIntellects.

I will be posting here from time to time just to say hello and let everybody know what is going on in the world of System Administration at WebIntellects. Now I am off to start a server migration to migrate some of our clients off an old hardware/software solution to a new one. This is just another day in the life of a Systems Administrator.

Green Hosting?

Len Geiger — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:20:41 +0000

What does “Green Hosting” mean? You now see it every where on the Internet. Some web host even have it in their name. What do I think it is? For many companies out there, it is just another marketing buzzword that people are quick to pounce on to try a make a buck. Every so often a new buzzword or opportunity hits the hosting world and some host are quick to ride the wave without even really understand what it means. Some simply false advertise.

Now I am all for lessening our impact here on earth. In fact I do my part where I can. I use low-waste water heads to irrigate my landscape and will soon have solar panels to heat my pool and power my house. These are just two examples what I am doing personally. But that is not my point. My point is about host out their that are misleading people online to get them to sign up or purchase service. When I research these host or ask them questions about their “Green” Policies, I am usually disappointed. One of the biggest lies out there right now is the use of green to advertise the source of power for servers. They say they use only renewable power for their servers. Did you know that for every watt of electricity that a server uses, 1-2 watts of electricity are typically required to cool it? It is true. But almost ALL “Green Host” don’t tell you they only are green on powering - not cooling. They do NOT offset the electricity used to power their servers. Did you know that many data centers buy power from providers that already blend with renewable energy? Does that make them Green? Apparently for some host it does.

Another thing I find funny about some of these hard core green host that really push the fluff is the replies you get when you ask about other green options. Do their employees ride bikes to work? How about take the bus? Is the boss driving a Hummer or a Prius? I once saw the comment “We’re not just neutralizing our environmental impact, we’re reversing it!” used by one host. How misleading is that? What are they all driving, eating and wearing? Where do these magic servers come from that are made of rice? What do the large back up generators run on - water? I think that if you are bold enough to say that then you should probably let us know what all your employees do since they are all part of the equation.

I think you will find we all care about the environment. We all want to do our part. I can not think of any host that does not want to limit their impact. But who really monitors these host that call themselves “Green”? Anyone can throw that word on their website when no one is monitoring it or providing guidelines from which they must abide. So be careful. Green means many things and for a lot of host it is just another way to trick people into buying. Don’t expect your dollars to be going to a good cause unless you thoroughly question it. In the end you might actually be putting your dollars with a “Green” host that is actually less green then the many host out there that do not advertise it or try to market it.

##Plesk on irc.freenode.net

David Eddleman — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:43:37 +0000

So I’ve been asked to contribute to the blog so all of our customers, current and future, can see what sort of persons work here at Webintellects. Anyone who’s put in tickets or called has likely talked to me before, I’m David. I’m a 23 year old resident of Vista, CA with a BS in Computer Networking & Security. I’ve been working at WI for about a year now. Aside from that, I’m a rather large geek, as is typical.

I’ve been assigned to write about some of my semi-extracurricular activities that I do in my spare time that relate to the company. In this case, this would be through the IRC channel of ##Plesk located on the IRC network Freenode (irc.freenode.net). This is a sort of unofficial Plesk channel where people can come to ask about issues they have with Plesk or general questions, such as “if I install this will it break something” or “does Plesk work with this package”. And as is the course for IRC, there’s often a lot of general banter about miscellaneous things and items relating to Plesk that aren’t necessarily on-topic.

So, why do I do it? You might be asking yourself ‘why does he work on something related to work but doesn’t get paid for’? That’s a good question, and the answer is simple. It helps me learn. I see new problems and questions appear that I don’t ask and I can assist with the troubleshooting to see what causes this component to fail, or what bugs exist when you mix these two packages together. It also gives me a place to throw my own questions into the fracas if I encounter a problem that I’ve never seen before and the other staff present don’t know how to solve. For instance, a while ago some customers on one of our shared servers would’ve experienced issues trying to get Sitebuilder to publish webpages, with Sitebuilder throwing errors back about how SQLite wasn’t installed. This was due to the uninstallation of that package when we used an updater to update the server’s PHP from 4 to 5, a dependency error forced us to uninstall the package. I worked with the update provider (who hangs out in ##Plesk, he’s one of the founders of SWsoft!) to get the packages pushed forward, installed them, and all was fixed.

Plesk is not the only item we talk about. We talk about other Parallels products, like Virtuozzo, which we use for our VPS Hosting. Various questions get asked there like how to migrate people under different circumstances, about different kinds of virtualization software and how to tweak Virtuozzo so it performs better. We also throw around questions like if we modify this on a server running in a virtual environment, will it break and if so, how can we modify it without the server breaking?

New changes and upcoming events

Len Geiger — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:08:16 +0000

Well, I figured it was time to get the blog running after a few months of waiting. After the last few years where I got married, bought a house and had two kids, I realized it was time to focus back on WebIntellects full time. Family can sure take you from your business. The first step was launching our new website. This has been done and we included many new offerings and also launched many plans that are now much cheaper then ever before. This includes the new Business Plan which allows for unlimited websites for just $6.95/mo. We also released new Virtual Private Servers and lower-priced SSL Certificates.

Around the time of the website changes, WebIntellects completely changed out its nighttime support staff. Realizing the need for more advanced support representation at night to support our clients in over 80 countries world-wide, we hired and trained a few Systems support representatives to handle the broad spectrum of support request we get. As usual, all employees are dedicated to WebIntellects and trained by us. While other host outsource to Call Centers, WebIntellects keeps it all in-house.

Shortly, WebIntellects will be announcing two new service improvements. The first will be the release of cPanel shared servers. This has been a long time request of many customers and we feel it is now time to offer two solutions. Plesk and cPanel. The second announcement will involve the release of 24/7 sales and support chat. We are in the final testing phases and hope to go live by March 15th. So stay tuned for these announcements.

Hello world!

Len Geiger — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:48:47 +0000

In an effort to open up our company to the public I have decided to get with the times and start our own company blog. Our post will give insight into the world of hosting from the eyes of myself and my employees. Please check back as we will be adding post often.I also ask that you join our WebIntellects Forums so we can grow our forums into a large, interactive community.