Engineering 2.0
by Matt Lightner, February 19th, 2006 | 1 Comment
The New Engineering Site is up!
Engineering.Site5.com
Check out the new design, learn more about the developers, and stay in the loop on all of the current projects.
Behind Closed Doors
by Kevin Hazard, February 18th, 2006 | 2 Comments
Who are these guys? Well, as a special treat, we are taking you behind closed-doors to experience a management team meeting… almost live and in person.
As a note, you will not see all five of us together in any of these pictures for the sole reason that we are hidden in a bunker for security reasons, and it is our policy not to allow anyone else entry for their own sake; if they tried to grasp some of the awesome plans that we have during these times, their heads could very well explode… and no one wants to sit through a meeting in excess of 20 hours straight (read: No sleeping, lots of energy drinks… See Matt’s “Leaning Tower of Energy” below).
What is the outcome of a meeting like this? To a certain extent, that answer is confidential, but because you are a faithful reader of Quintextual, we can circumvent a few of the restrictions: After this one-day meeting, we established an ambitious development timeline, redesigned the Site5 website, created/implemented a brand new promotional plan (MultiSite Express). Below is a completely un-posed picture of one of our discussions in the creation of MSExpress.
It would appear as though I am always making a point… or at least pointing at something. In the picture below, I , along with my energy drink, am explaining how I am glad that I am from Texas, not from Canada (hence Todd looking like he wants to beat me up).
Matt and Rod, Site5’s infamous co-founders, are shown below as they talk about the new (now replaced) site design. Site5 is known for its innovation and leadership in the web hosting industry, and much of this reputation is due to the hard work and dedication of these two guys.
Below, to close out this now-long post, is a great picture (early in the meeting… not much Red Bull or Starbuck’s on the table yet) of Rod, Todd, Adam, and Matt. Keep checking in with us in the coming week, and we should have some big announcements coming up for you.
PRIMEtime Today
by Kevin Hazard, February 16th, 2006 | 1 Comment
FlashbackPRIME was successfully loaded onto our first production server yesterday, and everything went off without a hitch, so we will be rolling out FlashbackPRIME to our servers within the next few days (to be cautious with the loads that may be produced during peak hours at the end of the week).
To everyone that has waited, both patiently and impatiently, we very much appreciate your understanding as we have essentially gutted the original Flashback and replaced the foundational system… not an easy task. It is a great honor for the Engineering Team to feel the pressure of demand for the new-and-improved system (or just Flashback itself) since Flashback is an innovation in web hosting, and our customers see the potenital it has for awesomeness (might not be a word, but it encompasses the idea).
This morning, as I was gathering up the teaser screenshot and finding a clean bowl for my breakfast of champions (read: Cinnamon Toast Crunch), I saw Matt discussing what a web host’s engineering philosophy should be (note: This may offend our competitors or give people the impression that Site5 is better than everyone else… Good 
) :
[09:21] Matt: Everyone else is too focused on selling and packaging the product–not the engineering process itself. Most of these companies outsource their engineering, when, in actuality, it should be their core competency if they want to deliver a superior product.
[09:22] Scott: A-men to that!
[09:23] Matt: That’s why we’ll always win. We’re smarter than them, and smart people have too much perspective to self-destruct 
[09:24] Scott: I self-destruct all the time. I must be a bozo. 
[09:25] Scott: I often feel like Marvin holding the P32 Space Modulator.
[09:26] Matt: “Whadda ya know… it disintegrated!”
In that glimpse, you can also see that it is so much fun to be a part of this team because everyone has fun with what they do, and that makes an amazing work environment *and a better product.*
Stay up-to-date on the engineering process at the Engineering Team’s Recent Activity page.
Rollout Update: So far so good, things will progress over the next few days. Seeding is much quicker in PRIME, but still a pretty intense process. Expect another update in the near future! -ACG
Operations: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
by Kevin Hazard, February 15th, 2006 | 2 Comments
As the most devoted server statistics fans (and Todd’s growing fan club) already know, Site5’s COO, Todd Mitchell, started a blog nearly a month ago to provide up-to-date information on maintenance schedules, software installations, and Canadian whiskey.
The intention of a predominantly-operations blog (with Todd’s random rants and raves) is to provide a one-stop shop for all meta-operations here at Site5. It seems like everyone has an RSS reader these days (if you are like me, you take advantage of the google.com/ig RSS feed reader… not the best out there, but it’s very easy), you can subscribe to Todd’s blog to get projected roll-out dates of larger features like PHP and MySQL as well as scheduled outages for hardware and software maintenance.
Previously, we tried provided this information through our Community Forums, but we have shifted things around in the forums (as is evident in our recently-updated Forum Rules and Guidelines), but by separating this blog, we are able to consolidate the important operations-related information while allowing the Community Forums a bit more autonomy.
Be sure to check Todd’s blog often to get the skinny on server-scene or [joke about Canadians] just to make fun of his accent [/joke about Canadians].
FlashbackPRIME… Like Optimus Prime, but not a Transformer
by Kevin Hazard, February 13th, 2006 | 11 Comments
Remember how awesome Optimus Prime was in Transformers? Take him… Put him on a rails framework and make him become a Website Time Machine, and you’ll have FlashbackPRIME.
A few months ago, Flashback came on the scene with capability of revolutionizing web hosting file management… The problem we ran into was that it was slow as molasses on a cold day in Canada. The process of installing the system on each of our servers involved a seeding process to index all of the files on the server and linking them together for each user, and as we tried to roll it out to our established servers, we saw increased loads during the seeding process which could take hours upon hours. David Felstead, one of our home-grown Engineering Gurus, explains “Once upon a time there was Flashback. We built it, and the people came. On the outside, it was beautiful… even under the surface it was quite elegant, but the underlying guts were black and viscous, a wildly mutating mess of native code and ruby bindings… the ruby interface to subversion.”
This is another one of those instances where I could post more info about the detailed changes (”FlashbackPRIME is a replacement for SVN under Flashback. Its external interface remains largely untouched, but it has been completely gutted and refitted with what amounts to an almost pure-ruby solution. The result is that it’s orders of magnitude faster, easier to manipulate and since it’s built from the ground up to meet our needs, doesn’t consist of hacks and workarounds. As an example, file versions in the original Flashback were simply references to previous revisions, identified by hashes – in FB’, file versions exist as distinct entities rather than just references to particular revisions.”), but I will let you test it yourself as FlashbackPRIME is going through its final tests and will be rolled out onto (hopefully) all of our servers within the next week or two.
If you haven’t seen Flashback in action, here’s a glimpse at what your site will get soon…
