Is 100% uptime Possible?

Well the simple answer is no and that is what most people will say. I mean at the end of the day how can you offer 100% uptime if your upstream providers (datacenters, network providers, hardware etc etc) can not offer a 100% uptime gaurentee. Then of course there is the fact that servers should be rebooted every now and then when there are important updates…. So the question should be is 100% uptime possible when you dont include scheduled downtime?

Well lets take a look at the numbers

Uptime %        Downtime per Month       D’time per year
100             0                                 0
99.99          4.32 mins                  52.56 mins
99.9           43.2 mins                      525.6 mins
99.8           86.4 mins                      1051.2 mins

Ok so at a first look 43.2 mins downtime (the average that datacenters offer) is a lot, but when you look at it in a yearly perspective it seems much better. But anyway thats diverting from the main topic, I meant to show these numbers just to give an idea of what you are dealing with in terms of guarentees.

What can you do to maximise uptime?

There are quite a few things that you can do to stop downtime, and to make sure that you offer the best uptime possible. I am going to split this into two, there are some very easy things you can do that are mainly common sense and wont cost you anything (but time), and then there is the more costly and that will squeeze that last few percent away so you can truley achieve 100% uptime.

So lets start with the easier and cheaper method:

• Monitoring - This is the easiest and probably the way you can maximise your downtime the easiest. Monitor your servers so that if they go down you can get to it quickly and fix it. This can save hours of downtime.
• Checking Logs - It may sound very time consuming but once you get an eye for it you can scan the needed logs (messaages, httpd error etc ) quickly and look out for certain lines which warn you about certain things.
  A simple command like cat /var/log/messages | grep fail
• Constant Security - Securing your server properly can help keep your server up. I shouldnt need to state why. This security includes Updates to software on the server and site software (eg blog software).
• Optimization - Make sure your server is running as well as possible. Doing this will make sure that any small spikes in traffic will not harm you
• Monitoring Load - Make sure you log in during peak time to check the load, memory and general performance of the server. Do not overfill the server and take heed when you may need to upgrade

Okay so that was the cheap and easy option. Its pretty simple really and it is generally a good idea to do all the above just to keep your server running well.

So now onto the more expensive solutions for the people who require that extra 0.0001%. I would not reccomend this unless every minute of downtime costs you, as these options are by no means cheap and are not easy to do.

I want to keep away from a bullet pointed list on this, as there is no “set” list of things you do to keep the server up 100% of the time. It can be small things to installing a more effecient web server just as lighttpd to creating a dedicated database server. This really should be customized on a site-to-site basis, you need to analise where the server weaknesses are and fix them. That is the basic way of doing it.

However if you want 100% uptime gaurenteed, well thats the interesting bit isn’t it. You then need to discount for all different types of downtime including network downtime. Well for this sort of solution you are looking at Geoloadbalancing, that is servers that are based in multiple locations around the world. To make this option viable you are looking at having to spend a lot of money, and having to custom code syncing solutions so that the website and databases are as up to date as possible. As for the geoloadbalancing there are multiple ways of doing it and the best is getting a “portable” IP which allows you to “move” it between locations. Thats pretty complicated and they are hard to get so the other way is roundrobin DNS. I will let you google that, and maybe I will explain it later in a blog… but right now I think I have blogged to much and your probably falling asleep. So yeah, if you have any questions go ahead and ask

During this time there may be some issues in responding to downed servers and services. We do apologise for this. If you have any issues please create a ticket.

We appreciate your patience and will update you once this has been solved.

[UPDATE 2nd September 21:44 GMT (15.44 CST)]

This has now been solved. Internap have shut down their peering loop with Cox communications and this has solved the issue. If we have any more updates we will update you

Based in New York City, the United States technical support team operates 24/7/365 and is comprised of highly qualified technicians, boasting a range of certifications including RHCE, MCSE, A+ Linux, and a variety of hardware and network certifications. The team specializes in server security, server optimization, database restores and troubleshooting, code troubleshooting, compiling and configuring software, fixing control panel issues, and solving end user problems.

“By adding a team in the United States, we are able to provide a high-end option for transparent outsourced technical support. For many Web hosts and Internet Server Providers, customer support is ultimately their key selling point, and it is imperative their support representatives are not only knowledgeable and trained, but as importantly, courteous and respectful to the concerns of customers,” said Steven Clarke, CEO of SeeksAdmin. “We go the extra mile, and our customers know it.”

SeeksAdmin is unique in its personal approach to customer support. It provides end-users with direct chat and telephone accessibility to the technicians working on their ticket. Through its rigid Service Level Agreement (SLA), SeeksAdmin guarantees top-notch and timely technical support for virtually all problems, large and small. Most problems are resolved within a maximum of 30 minutes – a rare feat in the outsourced support market. SeeksAdmin also maintains support teams overseas, in the United Kingdom, India, and Pakistan.

In addition to transparent technical support, SeeksAdmin provides Linux administration and a variety of other managed services.

To learn more about United States based outsourced support from SeeksAdmin, please visit http://seeksadmin.com/outsourced_support_usonly.html.

To learn more about Linux administration, please visit http://seeksadmin.com/administration_server_usonly.html

About SeeksAdmin
A leader in outsourced technical support and server administration, SeeksAdmin serves hundreds of businesses internationally across a broad range of industries. With support offices in the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, and now New York City, SeeksAdmin offers a competitive edge for its clients.

We get a lot of requests each week asking for advice on server hardware and what the server hardware should be. So that is the topic of this article and I hope that you find it useful.

Main Considerations

When thinking about a new server the main thing that you should be thinking about is the type of site you run and what resources it uses the most of. That is whether it’s database intensive, has a lot of visitors, or its a shared host.

CPU

In this part of this blog I could go into the differences between AMD and Intel; however, I will try to keep away from that argument,  I will give you what I personally think and what many people in the industry think. That is that Intel currently have the edge over AMD on higher end processors and because of this in most cases I recommend that you go for an Intel processor.  Now the question is what clock speed and how many cores should it have? Well that deeply depends on the type of task you want it to complete.  For a VPS you will want more cores and processors as you will be sharing these out, and for a shared hosting site you will want a reasonable amount. You should concentrate on clock speed if you are planning to have a large number of processes which is common on application servers or on some database servers.

It is obviously hard to give you an exact guide on which CPU you need however hopefully I can give you a few things to think about. If you have any questions or want some help with exact specifications please feel free to drop sales an email for a free consult.

As a quick summary below are the rough specifications that you will need for certain types of servers:
Shared/Reseller Hosting:  Single/Dual Woodcrest 2Ghz
VPS Hosting: Dual Clovertown/Harpertown
Database: Singe Clovertown

RAM

Ram is always an interesting issue as you need as much as you need and it depends on server configuration,  the type of sites/application running on the server and the configuration of the server.  So this is one thing that you will need to keep an eye on, however in this day and age 2GB RAM is the minimum I would advise for a server. You need to keep checking on your free memory and make sure you have at least  a couple of hundred MB of memory free.

I will again write a semi-summary of what I believe is needed:
Shared/Reseller Hosting: 4GB minimum
VPS Hosting: 8GB minimum
Database Hosting: 4GB minimum

Hard drive

Now this is the interesting part and there are so many possibilities. In most cases you will be fine with a normal 7500rpm hard drive, however if you are expecting to do a lot of reads then a faster hard drive may be better.

In general for database servers you will want a much faster hard drive, normally I would advise the SA-SCSI hard drives for database servers. This will offer much better performance and will speed up the server more than a faster CPU and RAM will do.

Then you come on to RAID and all the different types. I just thought I would give a quick summary of the main types of RAID and what they do.

Raid 0 - This is a stripped disk array and will provide an I/O improvement . It requires at least 2 drives and the result would be the hard drives appear to be joined. We recommend this for gaming servers and high volume websites.

Raid 1 - This is a mirroring array and provides high performance, as its able to perform 2 separate reads or writes per mirrored pair. This is a full redundancy array and we would recommend it for any website that requires on the fly backup. However I would not suggest that you use this as your only backup.

Raid 5 - This requires a minimum of 3 drives. A Raid 5 array offers highest data transaction Read rate, medium data transaction Write rate and good cumulative transfer rate.I would recommend this for high volume MySQL based sites

Raid 10 - Raid 10 includes high Reliability and performance embedded in a single RAID controller. The minimum requirement to form a RAID level 10 controller is 4 data disks. This solution is good for all sites, as the increased reliability

Picking a server can be a daunting task for anyone and I hope this guide has made it easier for you. I wish I could give a personalized guide to you but I believe that I have given a rough guide that should cover most bases. Feel free to ask any questions that you come up with and hope you enjoyed the blog

I’ve bumped into a few blog and forum posts on the net that complained about the outcome of the giveaway. To those of you that were not satisfied and/or pleased with the results I do apologize that it did not meet you expectations. We’ll make up for that next year! I fully support the giveaway and disagree with all claims that it was a scam. The contents rules and regulations where posted right on the table next to the entry box. I know we here at SeeksAdmin were were excited for someone to walk away with the Harley and was slightly disheartening when no one won. We had a blast though, and would certainly back Ping!Zine in the future.

Be sure to look for us at Hostingcon 2009! We made sure to register with iNet as soon as we could at the convention. We’ll be there and we’re planning on giving away something BIG next year with a GUARANTEED WINNER! I figure if we can avoid the fine print altogether everyone will be a lot happier with the outcome.

Thank you again Keith, Mindy & the whole Ping!Zine Team.

Can’t wait to meet everyone at Hostingcon 2009!

As some of you know, we sponsered the Harley contest, which was my last blog post. So I think I will start off with some photos of that beast. It definetly got some attention which was great.

As can be seen here, is the Harley, and of course we had to get in the Seeksadmin banner behind it. Doesn’t it look sexy? and the bike too. This exhibit definetly got some attention which was great.

This being our first HostingCon we have taken away a lot of plans for what to do next year. I would like to say that it was great to meet some of our customers, and have a nice talk. Its always nice to put some faces to names, and it was a great experience. For those of you who didn’t go to HostingCon I am sorry that we were not able to meet and below is an image of two of our staff members with two of Softlayers (Sorry Amanda and Arielle).

From Left to right: Steven, Arielle, Soliel, Amanda

For those of you who have not seen enough you can access our full photo album here.

Seeksadmin HostingCon 08 Images

Once again thanks to everyone we met, and everyone at hostingCon to help make the event so fun! See you next year!

Harley-Davidson motorcycles (popularly known as “Harleys”) have a distinctive design and exhaust note. They are especially noted for the tradition of heavy customization that gave rise to the chopper-style of motorcycle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley-Davidson

Yes Harleys are one of the best motorcycles in the world. No matter what type of bike you like from sporting to touring, you will have heard of Harley Davidsons and now the best part of this is that you can win one!!!! Yes thats right, I am not just going on a random ramble, Seeksadmin is sponsering PingZine to give you the opportunity to win of these things.

If you want more details just email sales or come and visit us at the PingZine booth. We also have a lot of other goodies to give away from T-Shirts to pens. We also have special offers, however if you are a current customer or a prospective customer we would love to meet you!!!!

Generally the hackers will get in due to one of three reasons:

1. Out of date scripts - Everything from Kernels to Apache have updates and a lot of these updates are to fix security bugs. So if you are running out of date scripts with known security holes. A lot of hackers will take advantage of these holes and gain root access to your server
2. Insecure Scripts - Most of the hack attempts that we have to deal with at Seeksadmin are due to insecure scripts such as PHPbb, Vbulliten or many other common scripts. If these are not kept up to date they are very dangerous allowing a hacker to gain root access.
3. Insecure Passwords: Not much explanation is needed, if you have a short or weak password it is easier to guess and it can easily be brute forced.

So what can you do? Well keep everything up to date, and use a decent password? It wont ensure that you are 100% secure however it will go a long way to stopping you being hacked.

At the moment Seeksadmin is concentrating on security and we are trying to raise awareness in security and how to keep your system secure. In accordance with this we are offering a FREE remote scan and a $5 local scan. After these scans you will recieve the security holes in your system and we will reccomend a few things you can do to help secure your system. We also have free security consultation so if you have any questions please contact us at sales[@]seeksadmin[dot]com

So why buy of Seeksadmin instead?

Well there are a few reasons for this, but effectivly by doing so you cut out the middle man and on a lot of that “lag” that may occour. If you have a problem and we need to contact the data center, we do it and we do not need to wait. This can stop major downtime as we can react instantly. This in itself is a major benifit as it can avert major disaster, but there is more.

We get our servers from the Softlayer datacenter located in Dallas, Texas. They are argubaly the best datacenter in the world at the moment. I have to admit at being one of Softlayers largest fans, this is because they are dedicated to their clients and are always updating their services and technology. For more information just read my review which is in this blog, I dont want to clog this post up with to much about them. Anyway, I did have a point, and that is that all our staff members have worked with and know the Softlayer system and staff. This means if your server doesnt boot or you forget your password, we can immeditialy get the server up in single-user mode and sort the problem instantly.

The last advantage is probably the smallest one, and that is that it makes your bill management easier and saves you the trouble of having to contact the datacenter. This may seem silly but in the busy world we live in those extra minutes (or hours) can be everything.

Management Portal
Before there was always one huge advantage of going with the datacenter instead of going with a reseller, and that was simple. The management portal where you can reboot, and manage your server. However we at Seeksadmin have spent a few months developing our own portal to provide you the ability to see your server stats, the hardware, the bandwidth usage and graphs, to allow you to reboot the server, to control the port speed and more. This has definetly been a major project and I am very proud of it having done a lot of the work myself.

Our portal gives you every feature you need and is on par with Softlayer’s own portal. We now provide every advantage and more of going with the datacenter. Our prices are equal to the datacenter and you also can get your management from us.

This is more of an unusual blog post from me, a bit of sales pitch here and I feel a bit like I have gone around in circles, and I am sorry for that, but I thought it was important to mention our new servers and also the portal. I will make anouther post in the coming days with screenshots of the portal and a full feature list, but for now I will keep you waiting just that bit longer

New Services - We have added a few new services and modified some of the existing ones.

• • Full & base server administration services are now backed with a money back guarantee. One hour response time guaranteed for full and two hour for base.
  • Outsourced support is now readily available to all prospective clients, with many dedicated staff member available for hire.
  • Our 911 Service now provides clients with immediate access to a SeeksAdmin server administrator to fix emergency situations.
  • SeeksAdmin has also partnered with some great vendors to provide you with affordable solutions to assist your business. More can be seen on our additional services page.

Monitoring System Redone…

Well, not exactly redone, but even better. We have decided to scrap the system we were using for monitoring as it was producing far too many false positives among other things. SeeksAdmin will now be providing all its server administration and monitoring subscribers with HyperSpin monitoring!

All new accounts will be setup by default with a HyperSpin monitoring account. Current clients are being migrated and will be updated once their account has been moved.

Payments Made Easy - We’d like to make it as easy as possible for all of our clients and prospective clients to pay for their invoices. We now accept credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex), paypal, e-gold, moneybookers, and mail-in money order & checks.

Website Redone - Some of our clients were getting lost with our previous design. We’ve redesigned our website to make it more appealing to the viewers eyes and make information easier to find. We find it to be a great step in the right direction considering where we’ve come from:

SoftLayer Portal Access - Our managed dedicated server clients will now have complete access to stats and reboot functions of the SoftLayer server portal via our custom panel that taps into their powerful api system.

Client & Support System Migration - To take advantage of some more powerful features offered by the Kayako helpdesk system we are migrating our support to a new helpdesk system. Clients will still be able to easily email support tickets to us and check the status of their tickets online. Should you need any assistance working around the new systems contact support.

SeeksAdmin is making improvements everyday. If you have any suggestions, feel free to drop us a line. Be sure to look out for our affiliate program, coming soon.