Free server migration for us...thoughts?

[Handruin]

This was offered to me in my mail today:

Dear Voxtreme clients,

Over the last few months, we listened to our clients and took advantage of many suggestions made by them and combined with ours to continue our motto to provide quality hosting. We are now very pleased to announce our new line powerful of servers featuring Dual Core dual 265 processors with a minimum of 4 to 6 GB of RAM with Raid1, built for faster performance and better reliability.

We have had many issues with the reliability of the hard drives within our servers. To protect our valued clients and their sensitive data online, we have implemented Raid1 into our new lines of powerful servers. Unfortunately, we could not add Raid1 to our existing servers as it would require formatting the current hard drives which would result in complete data loss.

A Raid1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on two disks. The benefit of Raid1 is increased data integrity, fault-tolerance, throughput compared to single drives as Raid1 array of two drives can be reading in two different places at the same time.

We encourage you to take advantage of our new offerings and benefits of our new powerful servers. By volunteering to have your account move to one of the new server, we will be very delighted to offer you a FREE upgrade to our new plans. You will also qualify to receive the freebie that comes with our new plans such as: Private SSL, WHMCS Billing System, and custom branded cPanel Flash Demos.

Please note that we will be transferring one account at a time and work closely with you at your preferred time. To volunteer for free upgrade, please send in an upgrade request by submitting a new ticket to billing department. Please, be sure to include any special instructions we should be aware of such as custom DNS, dedicated IP's, SSL, etc.. Also, include the date and time when you preferred to have your account transferred to the new server. To eliminate downtime, we can lower your TTL down to 600 (10 minutes). This would result in most of the ISP’s around the world to request for your DNS every 10 minutes.

 

[Will Rickards]

My thought is they are a web hosting company not running some sort of raid on their servers in the first place?!? And just raid 1? I'd think they'd want raid 1+0 or whatever number that is when you require at least 4 drives and 1 spare and have mirroring and striping.

I should probably check what dreamhost is doing. Maybe this is standard practice not to run raid.

 

[P5-133XL]

There are several issues here.

The first question: What has actually been causing their downtime? Has it been because of HW? Because, if that has not been the reason, there is absolutely no reason to think new HW will solve the problem.

Next, I worry about the gottcha's with the new plans. They offer a free upgrade to the new servers with new plans. Well, do the new plans cost more on a monthly basis? Me being a the person I am, I would worry that they are operating like like Comcast (or any number of other companies) offering a free upgrade to digital cable at an increased monthly fee. Do they change the terms for bandwidth or other services that we currently depend on?

See, if there were no gotcha's, and I was simply trying to replace unreliable HW, then I would simply do it and simply tell my customers that this is what I'm doing on such and such date or if they were concerned about customer relations, then say we are doing this over the next few months and let the customers pick dates and times for their specific switchover to minimize disruptions. If the issues only relate to the reliability of the servers, then they would not be making this switch optional because they would really want to get rid of the old unreliable bad HW and not keep it around, long term.

 

[ddrueding]

Mark makes a very good point WRT what is causing our outages. IIRC, it was new accounts being added and a forced reboot? If so, wouldn't being the first account on a new server increase the number of new accounts added after us, making the problem worse?

 

[sechs]

My thought is they are a web hosting company not running some sort of raid on their servers in the first place?!?

Ditto.

My thought was, "Wait. They're no using RAID 5 already?"

 

[CougTek]

It's much faster to rebuild a RAID 1 than to rebuild a RAID 5. Read performance isn't better on RAID 5 than it is on RAID 1. Therefore, I'm glad they choose RAID 1 versus RAID 5.

If there isn't any "we'll suck more money from you" in small caracters at the bottom of the new plan contract, I think we have nothing to lose by switching.

 

[Clocker]

Save some $ if you can. We can all deal with a little extra downtime (if that happens) to save some $ for our generous webmaster.

 

[Bozo]

Actually, if the other customers move to the 'new' server, doesn't that reduce the load on the 'old' server? Staying on the old server might be just as good, except for the backups. Do they backup with tape?

Bozo :joker:

 

[Mercutio]

For about the last 10 minutes, SF came up as a either a blank page, a 403 error or a "Database Error" for me.

 

[Handruin]

Weird...I'll look and see if they rebooted/restarted something.