chouse@gmail.com
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I just signed The-BOB up for a program at the colocation center where, for a few extra bucks a month, they will purchase renewable energy credits for the server. So we can say now that we are officially powered by renewable energy.
Anybody got a graphic or want to make one that we can put on the-bob.org that says “Powered by Renewable Energy!” with maybe a wind turbine or something? That would be cool.
After a week of not running any services and not hearing any complaints about it, I cleaned up and shutdown both our original server and the “new” one that I planned to move to over a year ago but turned out to be too underpowered for our needs.
The-BOB was founded Feburary 21, 2002 after a vote in the old forums about what to call the place. “Brotherhood of Blogs” was chosen.
“cricket” was the 2nd iteration of the original “cricket” server that originally hosted The-BOB and a few charter subscribers. The second iteration that was recently shutdown was hosted at serverpronto for $29.95/mo with 200GB bandwidth transfer limit (pretty paltry these days). It was an intel celeron with 512mb of ram which turned out to be pretty horrible as the number of mysql users and web visitors increased over the years. I’ve had the server since November, 2004 and over the years have paid  about $1,855 from subscriber fees. I set this server up during junior year of college when Chelsea School District (CSD) asked me to remove the original “cricket” server that I’d had parked in their datacenter since graduating in 2001.
The “cricket” name comes from the cricket monitoring system which I had been toying with for CSD during high school. It worked out pretty well for graphing the district internet connection which was pretty interesting, but Merit was doing the same thing so I dropped it but left the server in place and on the internet when I graduated.
The “new” server was set up around March, 2008. I had been wanting to move to a new server for a long time since I knew the old one was pretty outdated both in terms of hardware and software (running FreeBSD 4.9!). Â Aplus.net had a decent deal for $79,95/mo for an intel celeron server with 1GB of ram running Fedora. So we got a much cleaner more modern OS with slightly more memory, but the same crappy single-core celeron processor. After moving about 60% of subscribers to the new server over a year’s time, it became clear that even the new box could not handle everybody. Over the course of the year that we had this server, we paid about $1,052. That $79 fee plus the $29 fee for the original server was straining The-BOB budget and Mr. MasterCard was not too happy.
Around this time a server at work became available after running out of warranty and usefulness. An HP DL140 with 4GB of memory and a dual-core intel xeon processor. It only had an 80GB drive so I bought a 160GB IDE drive and added it to the system. I also started checking out Ubuntu server which is totally built for systems just like this. “colo” was born and installed at a datacenter in Southfield and has been completely happy ever since. The extra memory helps but I think the greatest thing is the dual core processor because MySQL can be processing some hefty query on one core while the other core is free to serve content to visitors. It works out really well and load on the system is very very low.
I moved people to the new server over the course of about a week thanks to a script I wrote over a weekend that zipped up a user’s directory, copied it over along with their web stats, dumped and imported their mysql DB, and then set up apache and DNS for their domain. What took a year to go from cricket to new now took a week to go from cricket+new to colo. Very cool.
And the rest is history.
Tags: colo, cricket, serverpronto, the-bob
Just moved my personal account & sites to the new server and it works great! pretty speedy and no major issues. I use wordpress and gallery2 so by moving my site first, I figure out what software is missing, get it installed, and make note of any changes that need to be made to the configuration in order to get things working. So far no big deal, just installed a few extra packages that I didn’t have before, enabled a few apache2 modules, and corrected a few permissions on the gallery image directory.
Everything looks great. I need to test out awstats and all the other maintenance things that happen regularly to make sure they pick up on new sites, but other than that, not much else to do besides start moving people.
I even wrote a script that does just about everything for me including adding a new user with the same password as the current server, compressing their home directory and copying it over and then expanding it (maintaining permissions) and then copying over their databases and creating their database accounts automatically, followed by their awstats compiled webstat history. The only thing I have to do is verify things came over correctly and then update DNS manually and restart it and apache2. I ran the script against my own account last night and everything went well. I love scripting.
Well, looks like colo.the-bob.org in its current iteration will not be tenable for hosting.
Unbeknownst to me when I signed the hosting contract was the unspoken fact that our internet connection would be rate limited to 256k/sec. This caused some extreme slowness when accessing sites hosted on colo that I had moved over a weeks time.
My first inkling that something was not right was inbound bandwidth dropped from 3meg/sec to about 640k/sec. A big difference but not problematic, however that was incoming bandwidth which was what I was seeing transferring site data to the server.
What visitors were seeing on the internet was vastly different. This 256k/sec limitation effectively choked the server up so accessing any of the sites was extremely slow. I should say the code portion of the site loaded fine, but images were downloading like you were on a 56k modem. And if I tried to download a file from the server, it was coming down at a paltry 4k/sec.
I discussed this with the host and learned about this rate limitation. They raised it from 256k/sec to 512k/sec but it literally made no difference. I installed ntop on new.the-bob.org to see what kind of bandwidth could be expected only to discover that we routinely do about 700 Kbits/sec bursting to 7 Mbits/sec.
So the bandwidth offerings of the colo host were not going to be any good.
They kindly offered to let me out of the contract (which is great because otherwise I’d have to pay 90% of the 12 monthly payments).
I am moving the people back to new.the-bob for the time being, and DNS has already been put back there as well.
In looking around the internet for possibly a dual-core dedicated server to lease, I discovered that ServerPronto where the-bob.org is hosted has a partner site ColoPronto that offers colocation at dirt cheap rates including 1U for 29.95! Unbelievable.
I have inquired with them as to any bandwidth limitations and if all sounds good, I will see about shipping the server out to them.
Regardless, i think any slowness problems with the-bob.org or new.the-bob.org have to do with the single-core celeron processors that they’re running. Colo is much faster because while it is only a single processor, it is hyperthreaded so Ubuntu Server sees 2 cores and schedules threads across them. So a hefty MySQL query doesn’t hang up the server and make apache and other processes wait for processing time.
If ColoPronto doesn’t work out and colo never finds a home, hopefully I can find an affordable dual-core server which should last us a number of years.
the-bob.org at ServerPronto went live on the internet in 2003 I think, so it’s been a good ride with them but that box is a celeron with 512mb ram and its time is up.
Tags: colo, serverpronto, the-bob
This is probably the most exciting event in the 9yr history of The-BOB – the launch of our first actual colocated server that we own and can physically access if we need to.
I took the server over to the US Signal datacenter here in Grand Rapids and went to put it in the rack only to discover that the rail kit that I had for it is for a standard rack, not the shorter telco racks in the datacenter there!
The staff was kind enough to let me shelve it on top of another server for the time until I can get a rail kit that fits.
Today I looked up the parts for the server (an old HP DL140 G1) at HP and discovered that the Telco rails that we need are $129!! Rediculous! Part number 353359-001. So, I don’t know how we’re going to pay for that, any money we take in we spend on hosting. So, I guess I’m accepting paypal donations to chouse@gmail.com if you want to contribute a few bucks. I don’t know how long I have until to get new rails in but they said they didn’t have any scheduled to rack above my server so we’re safe for now.
Anyway, the server itself is 1U in size, has a xeon hyper-threaded 3ghz processor and 4GB of memory. An 80GB IDE drive hosts the OS and a 160GB IDE drive hosts /home. More info at http://colo.the-bob.org/phpsysinfo
I’ll continue my year-long process of moving users off the original the-bob.org server, as well as moving off the since-april new.the-bob.org server. So, stay tuned.
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