Thanks, UK2… No, really, thanks.
Sarcasm? No, that wasn't sarcasm. I never use that.
You may have noticed most of my websites have been very ugly for the past couple of days. The reason for this is that UK2 have seemingly used some very underhanded business tactics to shut down SimpleCDN, their customer and my Content Delivery Network responsible for delivering much of my static content.
Over the next day or so all of our sites should be fully back online, albeit temporarily without a CDN while we get set up somewhere else.
I'm not in a position to say that SimpleCDN has done nothing wrong, and that it's all UK2's fault (though that is what outward appearances make it seem). However, I would certainly recommend that anyone thinking about signing up with them watch this situation closely and use its final outcome as a determining factor in whether they are someone you wish to do business with.
You can follow the situation from SimpleCDN's perspective here. If you're as frustrated as me by the situation, I urge you to do as I have done and contact UK2 to voice your opinion.
Related articles
- What's a CDN? Content Delivery Network (marketingtechblog.com)
- SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning (admin.simplecdn.com)
Finally…
Though the title, and the fact that you're here now, says enough already, I am happy to announce my new server and websites are back up at yet another new host.
Over the next few days, I'll be tweaking things, updating my core WordPress and Drupal installations, and causing general mayhem throughout my entire environment. My monitoring systems need to be overhauled completely and until then I will not have any good monitoring in place.
Let me know if you experience any odd issues--I haven't changed anything in any of my databases or files on the new server, so it's possible something won't work right until it's updated. Although I've kept all paths identical to avoid many such issues.
Apache issues resolved, sites back online
Yes, finally, with a little help from the cPanel team, I got Apache/PHP to rebuild correctly, and my sites are again working properly!
Of course, I am still working on the slowness issue. Even with page caching, Apache and suPHP thrash the CPU for several seconds the first time a large dynamic page is loaded. I'm trying to narrow this down to either server configuration or a VPS issue.
I have definitely experienced this before on an over-allocated VMware array, so it's a possibility my web server is just on a busy host box. But I'm still tuning things on the server and trying to minimize the load in every way I can, because more often than not these things are caused by configuration oversight or lack of proper tuning (and user naivety perhaps, in my case).
Monitoring System In Place
In a further effort to make all sites and services in the DE network stable and ensure the highest uptime, we have deployed a full-scale monitoring server at an off-site location in Germany.
This means that we can get a full picture of our network and service status at a glance at any time. It also means we are notified when anything goes down, is running slowly, or becomes unresponsive. In addition, we have the ability to automatically bring things back online and resolve some issues without having to wait for me to fix them.
This is a big jump forward for our network infrastructure, and this means we are now running four full network servers in four different datacenters spanning three countries to provide our sites and services under the highest quality and most ideal circumstances.
Let me know what you think! Have you noticed a difference in any of our sites and services? Is there anything you'd like to see, or any changes you'd like made? We'd love to hear from you!
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