Weblog

We're Moving - Part Deux

Beloved TextDrive customers,

As you may be aware, we’re about to commence a migration from our old servers to brand new Dell hardware in a first class data center, running right beside some of the biggest names on the internet. With such a large scale move, we feel it’s important to keep our customers informed of the changes.

This move will lead to improved stability, better network performance, greater control over our hardware, more flexibility over the services we provide, and put TextDrive in the best possible position to meet the needs of our customers for many years to come.

In most cases, this move will not require any action on your behalf, but please review the information below, and feel free to email migration@textdrive.com if you have any questions, concerns or queries.

WHEN?

We plan on migrating all the shared servers starting Wednesday, August 24 and plan on finishing up by Sunday, August 28 at the latest. We will post a detailed schedule Monday, August 22nd on our weblog (http://weblog.textdrive.com/) and in our forums (http://forum.textdrive.com/).

THINGS THAT WILL BE CHANGING:
—the IP address of all shared hosting servers—SSH fingerprints of shared hosting servers

THINGS THAT WILL NOT BE CHANGING:
—the name of the server your web site(s) are hosted on—your usernames, passwords, email addresses, etc—the configuration of the software on each server—the document root of your web site(s)—the IP addresses and configurations of the TextDrive DNS servers

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO:

The majority of customers (those who have their websites and email hosted with TextDrive, and have their domains delegated to TextDrive’s DNS servers) won’t need to do anything—we’ll take care of it all for you.

However, if you’re using a 3rd party to host your DNS, the DNS records will need to be updated to reflect the new IP addresses of our servers as your server is migrated. The new IP addresses are as follows:

SERVER        OLD IP ADDRESS    NEW IP ADDRESS
-----------------------------------------------
one           70.84.207.130     207.7.108.21
barclay       70.84.207.162     207.7.108.37
bidwell       70.84.207.226     207.7.108.125
nelson        70.85.91.228      207.7.108.85
pendrell      70.85.100.4       207.7.108.149
davie         70.84.216.2       207.7.108.101
gilford       70.84.216.34      207.7.108.53

If you’re using DNS Made Easy, you can add these IP addresses in as the failover address for your current records (See http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/s0306/prod/dnsfo.html for details).

For those of you with your own IP addresses, we will be contacting you individually with your new IP addresses, and if you are using lighttpd on your own IP, you’ll need to adjust your lighttpd configurations to reflect the new address if you are binding to a specific IP.

DISRUPTIONS TO SERVICE:

We do not anticipate any interruptions to the service of your websites, databases or email during the migration period.

However, we will need to lock the configuration of each server for a period of around 6-12 hours, during which time you will not be able to access the Webmin or Usermin control panels.

For those of you who run your own Lighttpd server, we ask that you do not make any changes to it’s configuration during the migration period.

NOT SURE WHAT TO DO?

All this information may be a little overwhelming for some of our customers, but we’re here to help. Please feel free to email migration@textdrive.com with any questions, concerns or comments you may have about this process.

If your websites, DNS and email were set-up by a consultant, freelance web designer or someone else in your organization, please forward this email to them, so that they are aware of the situation and can advise you of any changes that need to be made.

Regards,
Ryan Schwartz
TextDrive.com

·:· Posted 22 August 2005, 07:38 by Ryan Schwartz to Web servers | Got something to say?

Just how much is 10GBs/month of bandwidth at TextDrive?

It’s a common question that I’m asked (and usually followed with why don’t you have shared plans with 200GB for a nickel like Dreamhost?).

Sharing some real data from a somewhat popular “weblog”:

Total Sessions	365,533.00
Total Pageviews	710,040.00
Total Hits	2,123,598.00
Total Bytes Transferred	7.88 GB

Average Sessions Per Day	11,791.39
Average Pageviews Per Day	22,904.52
Average Hits Per Day	68,503.16
Average Bytes Transferred Per Day	260.25 MB

The two most popular pages are actually 37KB and 65KB on this site, but notice that the average page size then is 3.7KB.

This is because we get about 65-98% compression on each and every hit, combine that with Last-Modifieds and intelligent caching, and average page sizes (with mainly text) do generally come out at less then 5KB.

The main TextDrive page for example comes out in about one TCP packet (it’s 1.6KB) and then an example of what happens as a page get’s larger and larger, with more and more text would be this one, which is a 330KB page that’s served out as a 5.8KB compressed file. Not bad.

So how much is 10GBs? At least from the numbers above, it’s about 2.5 million hits a month, ~80,000 a day.

Where’s the 200GB a month nickel plan? You likely don’t need it, won’t use it and we’re simply honest.