Site5 Web Hosting Blog

Movin’ On Up

Posted by Kevin Hazard, April 3rd, 2007

If your interest was piqued by the “big news” I was hinting at in our community forums, you can scoot back off of the edge of your seat and release the breath you have been holding for the last month. Let the April Fools’ speculation begin…

The Quick-and-Dirty

Over the past few years, Site5’s customer base has grown exponentially, and we have focused on scaling our business to accommodate our new customers while maintaining our reputation for quality service and stellar support. We would have never been successful without the incredible business relationships we established with Net Access Corporation and LiquidWeb (our two current data center providers), and we owe a great deal of gratitude to them for the work they have done with/for us. In both cases, the data centers have grown a great deal with us, and they have endured their own growing pains in the process (which, in a few cases, translated into “Site5 growing pains”), so we directly relate to their experience in wanting to provide the highest quality service through the course of their growth.

Recently, Site5’s management team has been evaluating the prospect of moving/consolidating all of our servers into a single location/data center and concurrently upgrading every server in our fleet to the newest, most reliable, and fastest hardware available (as a “Thank you” to all of our amazing customers). Clearly, a move of this magnitude cannot be taken lightly, so we researched whether or not our current hosting infrastructure with NAC and LW would provide the highest quality of service for our customers (which would then be an indicator of how it affects the company as a whole), and we feel we were able to summarize our findings in a “Declaration” of sorts:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…

I know you are captivated by my writing skills, but I have yet to pen anything worthy of bulletproof glass protection, so that wasn’t exactly what we came up with at the end of our research. However, we did essentially declare ourselves independent of our current hosting infrastructure; we were completely open to all options.

I will save you the details of the amount of work we put into finding the right fit for our business and cut to the chase: Site5 has established a long-term business relationship with The Planet! We’re boxing up our servers, tossing them in the back of a ‘67 station wagon, and we’re movin’ on up to the Southwest side.

Because we couldn’t locate a ‘67 station wagon that could house a few hundred servers for the trip, we will probably have to move each of our servers over a vast computer network linking smaller computer networks worldwide… Luckily, as a web host, Site5 is familiar with such a network.

Following several meetings in Texas with The Planet’s new (and amazingly helpful) management team and a few intensive tests on their hardware, we inked our intention to move our entire customer base to The Planet within the year. In their enterprise-grade data center, Site5’s customers will be hosted on brand new servers running a RAID 1+0 hard drive configuration (even better than RAID 5!) with two dual-core Intel Xeon 5350 processors and 4 GB of RAM. We are in the process of establishing a time line for the move, but a bulk of the move will be done in a six-month span (which will begin in about a month). The Site5 engineering gurus will be using this interim month to develop and test several automation scripts for the recursive actions performed in moving each server so we are not rushing customers onto the new servers all willy-nilly.

While we would like to just CTRL+C -> CTRL+V everything from our current servers to the new servers, there are a few server-related issues in making the move (IP changes, scheduled downtimes when the switch is flipped on each server, etc.). Stay tuned to our community forums for updated information on how/when your server will be affected by the move.

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