We have received a small number of issues being raised about slowness and sluggishness of accounts during the late night and early morning hours. This is due to the backup process that is running on all of our servers. Our backup process runs during these hours because it makes more sense to run the backups during the time when the servers are less active. The servers receive fewer visitors during the overnight hours than they do during the daytime hours.

All of our servers run a nightly backup process to back up accounts. Most of the servers split this task up throughout the week in different methods. We don’t specifically advertise our backup system because we feel that in doing so users will be less inclined to keep their own backups. It is always a good idea to have your own personal, up-to-date, backup of your account! The backups that we created are intended to be use in disaster recovery, for example a hard drive failure. But again, you really should not depend on us as your sole backup, you should have a personal backup copy of your website stored on your personal computer.

With all of that being said, I have made some adjustments to the way that the backup process runs on all of our servers. I am going to try out these changes for about a week and see if there are any noticeable performance gains or any problems.

Scott

We plan to continue the Apache 2.2 server upgrades tonight and across the next few weeks. We are not writing the affected accounts any more because the upgrade goes very smoothly. We have upgraded a few servers to use Apache 2.2 and I can’t think of any support tickets we have received concerning the upgrade or the downtime associated with the upgrade. We will at least try this set up and see what kind of responses we receive.

Right now, I would like to have all of our shared hosting servers upgraded to Apache 2.2 by the first of May. I think this is very achievable, but I have also been in this business long enough to know that setting hard deadlines can be detrimental to the quality of service that is given. So while I am hoping to have this set of upgrades completed by May 1st, I am not going to cut corners just to reach that deadline.

As always your feedback is appreciated.

Scott

I am going to be doing kernel upgrades on all of our servers this afternoon. This will result in reboots for all of our servers. The reboots mean that your account may be offline for about 15 minutes while the servers come back up. The kernel upgrades don’t really fix any major security concerns, I just believe that it is best to stay on top of new kernel upgrades just in case there are undisclosed concerns.

Scott

The Apache 2 upgrade that we scheduled for this week has been completed. Everything once again went smooth with this upgrade. We will monitor the servers and any input from our clients concerning this upgrade and then will proceed further with rolling out this upgrade across all of our servers.

As we head into April and because we are not seeing any problems with these upgrades we may begin to speed up upgrade schedule meaning that we may be upgrading more servers within a given week. We are not receiving any complaints regarding the upgrade or any effects of this upgrade and as a result we will likely forgo sending out specific e-mails to the affected accounts.

Scott

The Apache 2 upgrade we did a couple of weeks ago seems to have gone over very smoothly. We have not had any problems reported because of that upgrade. As a result we are going to proceed with the second round of server upgrades.

The second round of upgrades will be scheduled for March 24 through March 29. Again the upgrades will be done during the early morning hours, probably between 12AM and 4AM CDT. Downtime for each server is expected to be right at 1 hour. For this second round of upgrades we will be performing this upgrade on two servers. Users on these servers that will be affected by this upgrade will receive an e-mail notice regarding this upgrade later this week.

Please be sure that you have updated contact information on file with us! You need to be sure that your e-mail address you have on file with us is up-to-date and and address that you check regularly. If your e-mail address we have on file is outdated then we will have no way of contacting you. We have a lot of e-mail addresses on file that are no longer active, but we have no way of knowing what e-mail address you use. To update your contact information visit our Account Management Area and click the Update your Contact Information link.

We will again re-evaluate the situation after we do this round of Apache upgrades. It looks like we may do a third round of upgrades after this upgrade. Just stay tuned to this blog for more information concerning the Apache 2 upgrades.

Scott