We’ve recently made changes to how our bandwidth is managed.  Saskaweb hosted services will now be restricted to fifty percent of our internet connection.  The other fifty percent has been allocated to client virtual private servers and colocated clients.

VPS and colocated servers are capped at 2Mbit upload and 2Mbit download. We’ll be adding a proxy server to utilize our high download speed connections in the near future so download restrictions will soon disappear.

How did we come up with 2Mbit?  We chose the 2Mbit limit after carefully going over all our client usage graphs.  We found that with all our clients, 95% of their bandwidth usage over five minute intervals was well under 2Mbit.  We chose 2Mbit allowing for growth.

Why did we choose to limit the bandwidth?  We haven’t had any problems yet but the risk of one client using too much bandwidth is too great to ignore.  Our previous limit was much more generous but upon review it was found that one client pushing to this limit would affect other clients.  So instead we chose a flat 2Mbit limit that will be applied to all clients.

Our average peak utilization is around 40% after our recent bandwidth upgrade so we do have room to grow and of course we can always buy more of this expensive resource as required.

A few days ago we started using hyperdb for this blog.  Hyperdb is a plugin from WordPress to improve scalability with WordPress sites.  Our MySQL ‘master’ server is replicated over multiple slaves.  Because the replication is only in one direction, writes must occur at the master. 

The majority of traffic on our WordPress sites is read only:  The websites have more visitors than people who create the content.  Wouldn’t it be nice to spread all of this read-only traffic over our multiple MySQL slave servers?

This is where hyperdb steps in.  Hyperdb directs writes to the MySQL master server and reads to the slaves.  This way you can scale out popular sites by splitting the load over multiple database servers.

After changing over this blog as a test, we’re pleased to report no issues with implementing hyperdb.  We will be extending hyperdb to all of our client WordPress sites and implementing it with all new sites to improve their performance.

We’ve just finished purchasing additional bandwidth and should have it activated within a couple days. 

Our 8:30 am spike peaks around 80% of our capacity and averages around 25% capacity for the rest of the business day.  We’re purchasing more bandwidth to provide faster downloads for all our customers and hopefully take the bite out of that 8:30 spike.

It certainly wasn’t as seamless as we wanted, but the server move has been completed.

Most of our servers have been moved but we are maintaining some networking gear and a backup server in the original space.

Although we had a lot of trouble with bringing an Exchange server online, our legacy email was operational within two hours.  This included moving locations and changing our database structure from clustered to replicated.  So that part went well.

What didn’t go well was Exchange panicking over some active directory work we decided to do within our scheduled downtime.  That was a mistake — we shouldn’t have tried to get too much accomplished within the maintenance window.  The result was too many variables which made for difficult troubleshooting.

Another mistake that we made was focusing all of our attention on this Exchange problem.  We should’ve taken a break from this and bring other services online.  It took only thirty minutes to bring legacy flat web pages online, but this process wasn’t started until we had turned the corner on our Exchange problem.  We hadn’t prepared a triage plan, which was a mistake.

Back to the good news:

The cooling in the new space is much better.

This server was in a stubborn hot spot with our old room.  Notice the end of daily temperature fluctuations — our old system relied on building air circulation which was shut off at night.  The new system uses chilled water and the temperature control is much tighter.  With our climate the chilled water system will get ‘free cooling’ in the winter which means lower electricity use which is good for everyone!

We’ve secured additional hosting center space in Innovation Place’s Concourse building in Saskatoon.  The room isn’t huge but it will allow us some additional possibilities.

The biggest advantage of this additional space is a chilled-water based cooling system that will allow us greater density and lower our electrical power requirements.  We’re really trying to “green” up our business and this new system will be much more efficient for our hosting center.

Here are a few things we’re hoping to add with this second space:

• Failover router for our primary ISP.  Due to constraints with one of our clients this project probably won’t happen until September.  We’re planning on configuring a router in each space as a redundant, failover pair using HSRP and OSPF.
• More servers. Of course!  We’ll be moving most our existing equipment to this space although the long term plan will be to have redundant SANs in either space.  As above, we’re waiting on a client and probably won’t be setting up the second SAN until the fall.
• More reliable service. Cooling and power concerns have pressured us to gain this additional space. We expect downtime to decrease.

Saskaweb is currently in talks to obtain more space.  We’d like to get some extra racks up to handle more drive arrays and better manage power requirements.  We’re still shopping around but hope to be adding new equipment within the next couple months!

Saskaweb is pleased to announce the launch of our new support ticketing system! The system is email based and will generate a new ticket ID for each support request. Additional information can be appended to each ticket by replying to the relevant ticket (instructions enclosed with each ticket request).

We now encourage our users to submit their requests to: helpdesk@saskaweb.com.

We chose osticket (http://osticket.com) because it was very simple and fulfilled our current requirements.

For companies wishing to deploy their own trouble ticket systems, I’d encourage you to have a look at osticket.com. If you are a current Saskaweb hosting client, we’d be happy to set up a demo for you.

Saskaweb can host your support ticket system:  Current hosting clients can have a ticket system like osticket hosted for no additional monthly charge!  The only charge would be the initial setup fee ($75/hour). For requests please contact (you guessed it): helpdesk@saskaweb.com

I just finished http://www.rollotherm.ca. They’re a Saskatoon, Saskatchewan company that manufactures and installs roll shutter systems.  They’ve installed both manual and automatic roll shutters in residential, commercial, and vacation property — both inside and out.  Besides, the project went well and Gil was a pleasure to work with!

check them out: http://www.rollotherm.ca

Saskaweb IT Solutions has committed to offer an opensource alternative to all of our hosted Microsoft services.  (Details here)  The first service that we will be assessing alternatives for is Microsoft Exchange.  Due to its considerable collaborative features, Microsoft Exchange is known as groupware rather than just an email server or mail transport agent.  There are a lot of great features in the Microsoft Exchange/Outlook combo which is why Saskaweb decided to offer hosted Exchange services many years ago.  Here are our requirements:

• Synchronization of email, calendar, and contacts with an email client that runs on Microsoft Windows XP and newer
• Shared calendar and contacts
• Server software must run on either Linux (preferably Ubuntu) or FreeBSD and be able to work within our current mail transport and backup frameworks.  I know that it running on Linux or FreeBSD doesn’t in itself make it opensource but I don’t think it’d be fair to our clients to demand GPL for an Exchange alternative.

And here’s our wishlist:

• Server software should provide a web interface that has comparable features to Outlook/Exchange
• Server software would be licensed under the GPL or BSD
• Wireless synchronization of contacts and calendar for smart phones (similar to Saskaweb’s Blackberry service)
• Users can customize access control lists to contacts, calendar, and email

After a year or so offering Microsoft products through their Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) we’ve been frustrated to the point of doing what we should’ve done from the beginning:  We will be offering an open source alternative for every Microsoft product that we host.

That means open source alternatives to Exchange, Dynamics, and terminal services. 

We will continue to provide our current range of Microsoft hosted products.