Modwest Blog

Modwest Mentioned in New York Times

For the past couple of years we've relied almost exclusively on word-of-mouth referals to grow our business. So, it's especially nice to get a little free press once in a while. Modwest is mentioned in a recent Times article by Tom Vanderbilt. 

If you're intrigued by the mysteries of the "cloud", or how internet infrastructure is rapidly changing, see the article: Data Center Overload. 

Tom Vanderbilt, we owe you a Modwest pub glass. 

- Steven

New Database Server Deployed

We've just deployed another MySQL database server for customers on the shared system. It goes by the name of "db2.modwest.com", and it's running MySQL 5. It's a powerful, brand new server and we encourage anyone using the older database servers to switch.

Adding a new database on the new server is easy. Just log into OnSite and click Add or Drop Database. Right now, the migration process is manual, but we'll be glad to assist upon request. One caveat: if you're running an older PHP application and currently using "db.modwest.com" (which runs MySQL 4.1), double check that your application is compatibile with MySQL 5, because there are some differences, such as new reserved words.

Enjoy!

Storage Server Issue: What Happened

Earlier this week we experienced a storage server problem on the Modwest shared hosting system. I just wanted to give you the low-down on everything that happened and how we responded.

Late Monday night, the server had warned us about a possible hard drive issue; it contains a whopping 24 drives, so one drive having a problem is no big deal. So, the next day, we prepared to replace the drive, which wasn't marked as "bad", just "unavailable" for some reason.

To make a long story short, we hit a glitch related to the confluence of Sun's Solaris operating system and LSI RAID hardware. The server crashed, and wouldn't restart. And, the 500GB of customer data on it was inaccessible.

Because something similar happened last year too, we immediately began preparing an alternate server to take this one's place. The new one runs good ol' Debian Linux.

But we needed access to the current website data. We opened a ticket with Sun commercial support and they couldn't figure it out beyond "hardware problem", but agreed that reinstalling the operating system might work. Some 12 hours later, after numerous attempts, our server team succeeded in accessing the customer data and began transferring it off the problem server onto the server we had standing by and ready to take its place.

It takes a long time to copy millions of files totaling nearly 500GB of data between servers, even on our fast internal network, and so then a waiting game began.

We know our customers' sites are important to them, and we are analyzing all aspects of the entire event so we can improve our operation and prevent a similar recurrence in the future.

During the outage, our awesome Support Team had the chance to speak with countless customers about the issue. We did our best to provide timely, accurate information about the work in progress, and kept the public Status Page up to date frequently. Did we do ok?

The Ops Team put in a tremendous effort over two days to get things up and running again as safely and quickly as possible. If you have a congratulatory haiku for the guys, please post it here: https://feedback.modwest.com/topic/103/Soothing_haikus_for_Modwest_engineers

We've recently hired a storage specialist who is now part of the team responsible for monitoring, maintaining, and improving our entire infrastructure. I'm much more confident now that the sorts of problems we endured with you this week will be less likely in the future. Thanks for your patience and understanding, and feel free to send us an soothing haiku!

-JM

PHP upgraded... and everything else

We have known for quite a while that we needed to upgrade PHP. In fact, it was a top requested answer to the question "What else can Modwest do to help our clients succeed?". We're listening! The answer is is now marked as "Done"!  =)

We gave a brief introduction to the new environment for shared hosting accounts last month, and thanks to great feedback from some intrepid customer beta testers, we have now made the new environment the official environment for all new shared hosting accounts at Modwest.

The cool thing is that anyone who signed up before May 2009 can be switched over to the new setup easily.  Yesterday, we added a new FAQ for people ready to switch:

 Modwest FAQ: What do I need to know about the new environment?

So, if you're an existing customer and trying to install the latest version of Wordpress, Joomla, or Interspire products, you've got a modern version of PHP to work with.

Enjoy!

-JM

50-50

A reminder, or perhaps an announcement for 05-05:

We have a limited number of Modwest pint glasses, and we're sending one to each of the first 50 customers who earn 50 points in the Modwest Community.

Here's a tip: Some of the best ways to gain points are to add topics that attract many answers and/or answers that attract many votes.

Once you receive your glass, be sure to take a picture and add it to the "Show us your pub glass" topic!

Here's a few examples:

(RSS Readers may need to click through to see the examples.)

-JM

Barcamps and Ecosystems

Some people say that while Missoula may be an awfully nice place to live, it comes with a significant disadvantage: insufficient access to a critical mass of talented and creative people. They go on to say that if you really want to build a successful tech company, you'd better relocate to a vibrant tech/business ecosystem like Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, etc.

This past Saturday, I attended the 2nd Annual Missoula BarCamp, which challenged that notion.

Thirty-eight creative designers, programmers, sysadmins, entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and nonprofit leaders came together for five hours and, in recommended Barcamp style, collaboratively developed a session agenda that included social networking, storytelling on the web, Twitter, biomimicry, Drupal, shopping carts, helping nonprofits catch up with technology, and using open source to promote social justice, among other things.

The cross-pollination of skillsets and backgrounds and interests was fascinating, and everybody learned something from somebody. The flexible non-agenda ensured you could always be at a session that interested you. And it was great to meet so many talented folks in Missoula.

One attendee summed it up:

Many times during BarCamp 2009 when I closed my eyes, I could have been back in Palo Alto minus the traffic, noise and sky high housing prices. Great ideas and discussions.  It really showed that you can develop tech companies and expertise just about anywhere so why not in one of the most beautiful and creative communities in the nation? 

- Russ Fletcher of the Montana Associated Technology Roundtables

Here's the photos from the 2009 Missoula Barcamp.

Many thanks to Harold Shinsato for being the spark that got these Missoula Barcamps started.  I am sure there's more we can do together as a community and region. What other ideas are out there for developing the tech/business ecosystem of Missoula and the Northern Rockies?

- JM

New Shared Hosting Environment - an Introduction

As we've mentioned previously, our shared hosting environment has a long overdue upgrade in the works. We're really getting close now, and we thought we'd offer a few technical details about the new environment and what to expect.

Some things will stay the same:

• You'll be able manage your website in the same ways (SSH, SCP, SFTP),
• Files within your account will look pretty much the same,
• Your scripts will still run as your user in the context of your hosting account, as we describe on our "Advanced PHP" page,
• You'll still have your own php.ini file to adjust as needed.

Some things will change a lot:

The new environment is based on Debian 5 and so all the system software is new:

• PHP 5.2.6-1+lenny2 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2
• Perl 5.10
• Imagemagick 6.3.7
• Ruby 1.8.7
• Python 2.5.2
• Vim 7.1
• Graphviz 2.20.2

Since the new environment contains software several years newer than the old environment, a mass migration or "cut-over" isn't feasible, as older sites might be relying on older server software. So, our intention is to run the two environments side-by-side and allow site owners to decide when to switch. This complexity added a lot of engineering work, but it was required in order to ensure the smoothest possible migration path.

If you'd like to switch your site to use the new shared hosting environment ASAP and help us test its stability, we'll be able to do that in the next few weeks. Just let us know and we'll coordinate a switch-over with you.

-JM

When You Need a Boost

A common challenge in running shared hosting servers is how to ensure everyone gets a fair portion of the shared resources, and prevent any one misbehaving or resource-intensive script from affecting the performance and stability of the server for everyone else. One of those shared resources is memory (or RAM).

A site needs memory, and the server needs to provision it, at the instant a visitor arrives at a website, and during every successive page load. Simple HTML websites need very little memory; complex sites, based on robust content management systems like Joomla or Drupal, can use quite a bit.

Where memory really gets eaten up fast though is during on-the-fly image resizing, a feature common to many content management systems, image gallery applications, and banner ad management software.  Even if an image is only three or four megabytes on your hard drive, resizing it on a webserver can take ten times that much memory!

The actual formula is something like (pixel height * pixel width * color depth), plus some overhead for data storage. To illustrate, I just built a quick image resizing memory requirement estimator tool. Resizing images on your computer prior to upload is an easy way to reduce your server memory requirements.

To manage shared memory and preserve service quality on the Modwest shared hosting system,  we maintain generous resource limits, and today we have some new flexibility to announce.

When memory limits are exceeded, the page will fail to load, display a dreaded Internal Server Error and usually throw a line in your error log similar to:

FATAL:  emalloc():  Unable to allocate 11306785 bytes

If resizing images prior to upload is not an option, or if you're exceeding memory limits for reasons other than image resizing, there is a solution:

We can now increase memory limits on a site-by-site basis.

We're calling it a "Memory Boost". It's not advertised on our website yet, but it is available now.

Each Memory Boost makes an additional 32 Megabytes of memory available to your scripts running on the Modwest shared system.  Up to two may be added to a site at $5/month each.

Memory Boost won't make a slow site run faster, but may come in handy for memory-hungry sites on our shared system that are bumping up against those service-quality resource limits from time to time.

Need a 'Boost? Just contact us.

Bad Guys Want Your Password

It might be tempting to assume that since you're a good person and have nothing to hide, strong passwords are unnecessary. Here's why that's not true:

Every day, Bad Guys try to break in to every computer on the internet. This is an automated process conducted by a network of criminal-controlled "bots", continuously trying usernames and passwords that might be valid.

Last month we experienced two painful reminders of this fact; both involved customer passwords being guessed and their accounts used without their consent. Both events caused brief service interruptions.

Too early on a Sunday morning in January, our operations team received alerts that the number of outbound email messages being refused by remote servers had suddenly increased. Upon investigation, we discovered that a single authenticated user was sending tens of thousands of messages through one of our mail servers. The messages were coming from multiple sources (in China, Indonesia, and Romania) and contained various advance fee scams (where a wealthy heiress offers you 10% of her 38.5 million dollar fortune, just for helping out).

We immediately terminated the connections, deleted the outbound mails, and changed the customer's password.

Also in January, we experienced several network disruptions caused by brief but massive floods of data emanating from our SSH shell server. It turned out that one customer's account was being used by people in multiple countries as a launch point for probing thousands of other servers, for the purpose of identifying additional easy-to-guess passwords! (And the cycle continues...)

While we have further work to do on the matter, we've recently made changes to OnSite to require stronger passwords.  For a super-strong password, you should use eight or more upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters (like #, @, %). For assistance, Microsoft offers a password strength checker and pwgen.net will generate random strong passwords for you.

We're also talking about password strength in the Feedback Community, so please drop by and let us know what you think.

The Bad Guys show no indication of slowing their continuous assault, so we hope everyone will take this opportunity to review and update their passwords. Even if you have nothing to hide.

-JM

First Fruits of the Modwest Community

A couple weeks ago we launched the Modwest Feedback Community.  Already, we have heard important ideas form customers and implemented changes in response!

Here's a few examples:

• radiohead correctly pointed out that while Subversion (svn) is available in all Modwest shared hosting accounts, we hadn't done a very good job of letting people know. We quickly made a few changes so that it shows up on the big features page as well as the main webhosting page under Site Management. Thanks radiohead!
• In a comment thread, squiggle advised that our System Status page should continue displaying maintenance and issue alerts for more than just a few days, to aid our clients in debugging any issues they may be tackling. We took care of that a few days later, and now the last 30 days of notices display. 
• In an OnSite feature request topic, bryanb suggested we provide a more direct way for site owners to get into webmail. Turns out that already existed but we never told anyone! There are two options:

http://webmail.modwest.com
https://beta-webmail.modwest.com

As an example of what's being discussed right now, here's a recently popular topic (click it for details!):

So, we'd say our "kick off" was a great success. If you haven't visited recently, check it out, and participate for a chance to win real prizes like this one:

-JM