February 2011 :: New Virtualized Approach

[Jason]

Advanced warning -- this may be a little bit "techy" -- I have a lot of customers who are developers or resellers themselves and I want to provide all the details:

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My how technology changes!

Charlottezweb is proud to announce its venture into the "Cloud" space! 

I've looked at cloud hosting for a year or two and haven't seen the need to move to that space for a  number of reasons -- not cost-related but software-related.  Whereas it's an exciting concept in theory, there are disadvantages in some areas and some of the "experts" out there are against the concept.  Some of the initial "VPS" (virtual private server) options have lost steam and have been discouraged by some in cases due to poor performance and management -- perhaps by the provider.

So why now...

What are the advantages?
-> Harddrives are distributed and RAID-based meaning multiple drives are simultaneously being used.  If one harddrive fails, we should see no outage.  Present day, we have 1 primary drive in our physical servers.  If that drive fails, all sites will be down for the time it takes to replace it, reinstall the operating system, restore sites, etc.  We use top-notch equipment and have been incredibly lucky over the last decade to only face a few harddrive issues but I'd rather not rely on luck. 

-> Ability to scale-up on demand.  Unless you are on a dedicated server through Charlottezweb, your account is on a shared setup where there may be up to 70+ other websites also on your same server.  Yes, I said 70 -- if that seems high, it's honestly not.  Many shared hosts have several hundred (and often much more) other accounts on a single server.  That's part of my business model all along that I keep it extremely low, account-wise per server.  Our viewable server loads confirm this approach.  What I mean by this is that should we find ourselves in a situation where an account holder has a significant spike or needs to scale up, we can do so (at a cost to that customer of course) without requiring server migrations or dedicated server expansions right from the start.

This doesn't mean that there aren't scenarios where a customer may need to move from Shared hosting to something more dedicated however this means a customer has the option to pay for a temporary boost to cover their needs while we figure out a better plan vs. facing an outage due to capacity limitations.  Let me know if I didn't do a good job explaining this as I'll be happy to provide some examples.

-> 100% network uptime SLA by datacenter.  The dc that offers this setup has a 100% network uptime guarantee.  We've had a few assorted issues at our current dc in the past year or two that several customers have been unhappy with.  Here's the scenario to address what should be guaranteed regardless.

-> Backup images -- The new setup is configured to allow us to restore an entire server image within approx an hour if required.  This is amazing.

-> Daily backup retention -- currently we manage one daily and one weekly backup between our local and off-server setup.  The new configuration stores all backups remote meaning they are not locally impacted by any event at the server level.  Whereas Charlottezweb has not guaranteed them 100% they have almost always been available as a value-added feature at no cost to your hosting fees.  Going forward, we should have a much higher guarantee that they will be there if we require them.  Note, this is not an excuse to not excerise proper backup procedures. 

-> Monitoring and full support by the datacenter.  We've had this before but I've experienced a much faster turnaround with the newer datacenter lately. 

So...Summarized, why is this the plan?

1.  Fault tolerance -- the ability to avoid any full outage based on a single primary harddrive.
2.  Network tolerance -- higher uptime guarantees.
3.  Scalability -- ability to upgrade/downgrade the server as needed.
4.  Backup options -- less load intensive than present options.
4.  Support from the datacenter and their guarantees.

What are the disadvantages?
-> Hardware specs?  Having a fully dedicated server certainly still has it advantages depending on what it's built with -- don't get me wrong.  A dedicated server with one customer doesn't have to contend with other sites.  It gets everything the server can offer for itself.

If you want to compare the Shared environment that 95% of our customers are on today to this new approach, it will be no different or maybe even slightly faster.

Going forward, new accounts will be installed to this setup unless there's a request otherwise.  In the near future, I may migrate some of our older boxes this way as well.  Thus far, I've been extremely pleased with the performance it offers.

If you've read this far, I appreciate your business!  I apologize if this is "techy" but I see a mix of customers who love to know what we're doing vs. those who just want to know that their sites are always online.

Cheers,
Jason