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Hi All,
It's been a few days since my last update so I wanted to go over a few things.
High resource usage suspensions
We've been constantly tweaking this and have found the major cause of the issues with people being wrongly suspended. cPanel runs certain processes as you, the user, which counted towards your usage. We are going to disregard these involuntary processes which should stop anyone from being wrongly suspended. We will also set everyone back to 0 warnings once our modifications are complete.
There have been questions of why we put this in so soon after all the maintenance and changes. We get roughly 500-1000 new sign-ups ever day, that is a lot of people that try to abuse the service. We needed something to be implemented immediately to deal with these people causing the servers to lock up, slow down, and have issues. Well this could have used more testing before implementation we were having some major issues with the abuse and couldn't wait.
Backups & Lost Accounts
I have another open thread about this but I thought I would mention it here just in case. We are still actively trying to recover the backups that are stored on our backup server. The commercial software we purchased (r1soft.com) was like a lot of other software we use... not tried and tested for free hosting. When we went to do a massive restore the backup software used all 8GB of memory on the backup server and corrupted it's internal database making all the backups inaccessible. While we've been trying our best to get answers out of r1soft we have not been successful yet. As of right now it looks like we are not going to be able to recover these backups. I hope to have a definite answer today.
Changes\Maintenance\Etc
Maintenance on the free servers is coming to a close, we only have a few small things left to do that should not affect you at all. Frontpage, ASP.NET, postgres, mail, the sitebuilder, and fantastico should all be back and enabled. Logs will remain disabled for the short term future while we work on a solution to an issue with them. I saw a complaint about 'catchall' being removed... it was never removed and can still be enabled by accessing the ASSP icon in cPanel, it is disabled by default. If we forgot to enable any other features that we had before the maintenance please let us know.
Communication, Feedback, and Assumptions
I wanted to address this in my update thread and hope everyone reads it. For the most part I do get around to reading all the threads posted on the forums and am very aware of the current issues and feedback. What I am getting tired of seeing is people assuming they know exactly how x10 runs and what challenges we face and for some reason think they could do it better.
[rant]
Free hosting runs on a very slim margin, we do not have the resources to have tons of test machines with different configurations to test every change we make. When we make migration plans we have a short period of time to do it and have to hope for the best. If every free hosting account paid just $1\mo no one would have even noticed the move because we would have the extra resources to pull that off. There is A LOT of work that goes into moving 30,000 accounts and we have very limited resources to do it with. I would happily challenge anyone to attempt to do this with 30,000 live accounts on a small budget within a 7 day period.
Just because you have some linux or system admin experience does not give you insight on how x10 runs. Unless you are part of the admin team you have no idea how the backend works or what is involved in moving just a single account between servers. It's not just copying files.
I've stated this before and I'll say it again, honestly if you have such an issue with our free hosting you're welcome to leave or upgrade to paid hosting where these issues don't exist. With the economy taking a nose dive most other free hosts have closed their doors, even geocities is shutting down and they're owned by one of the largest companies in the US. We have been around for 5 years now and have a strong and aggressive plan for growth. I'm not going to make our business plan public but we are not going anywhere and we are still growing. So yes, we have a plan, and have had a plan for 5 years. This plan has allowed us to be here when others couldn't. I don't appreciate the negative criticism by people when they have no idea what they're talking about. We are open to feedback that is posted in a constructive way. If you are unsure how to do that don't post it. We're not perfect and I understand things need to be improved.
[/rant]
As I said, I do try and spend some time on the forums each day reading user posted threads so I have an idea how the community is feeling about things. There are some great suggestions I've seen and now that things are settling down I'll be trying to get them implemented. Some things that are already in the works and will be coming soon:
A blog will replace the news to make it easier for people to get updates and also have a single place they can get an RSS feed on updates.
We've been working on a knowledgebase for the past week to help centralize information on x10. I'm not sure when we'll release it but hopefully sometime in the next few weeks.
A new site is being developed. We have been working with a designer for the past month on getting a new design for the main site. We will be trying to improve the navigation and flow of information on the new site.
A new account panel has been in the works for a few months now and should be out by the end of summer. We will be centralizing a lot of stuff into it including paid upgrades, support tickets, and account information such as resource usage stats, suspension reports and communications from x10.
Discuss this thread here:
http://forums.x10hosting.com/off-topic/99055-news-thread-response-6-29-09-a.html
It's been a few days since my last update so I wanted to go over a few things.
High resource usage suspensions
We've been constantly tweaking this and have found the major cause of the issues with people being wrongly suspended. cPanel runs certain processes as you, the user, which counted towards your usage. We are going to disregard these involuntary processes which should stop anyone from being wrongly suspended. We will also set everyone back to 0 warnings once our modifications are complete.
There have been questions of why we put this in so soon after all the maintenance and changes. We get roughly 500-1000 new sign-ups ever day, that is a lot of people that try to abuse the service. We needed something to be implemented immediately to deal with these people causing the servers to lock up, slow down, and have issues. Well this could have used more testing before implementation we were having some major issues with the abuse and couldn't wait.
Backups & Lost Accounts
I have another open thread about this but I thought I would mention it here just in case. We are still actively trying to recover the backups that are stored on our backup server. The commercial software we purchased (r1soft.com) was like a lot of other software we use... not tried and tested for free hosting. When we went to do a massive restore the backup software used all 8GB of memory on the backup server and corrupted it's internal database making all the backups inaccessible. While we've been trying our best to get answers out of r1soft we have not been successful yet. As of right now it looks like we are not going to be able to recover these backups. I hope to have a definite answer today.
Changes\Maintenance\Etc
Maintenance on the free servers is coming to a close, we only have a few small things left to do that should not affect you at all. Frontpage, ASP.NET, postgres, mail, the sitebuilder, and fantastico should all be back and enabled. Logs will remain disabled for the short term future while we work on a solution to an issue with them. I saw a complaint about 'catchall' being removed... it was never removed and can still be enabled by accessing the ASSP icon in cPanel, it is disabled by default. If we forgot to enable any other features that we had before the maintenance please let us know.
Communication, Feedback, and Assumptions
I wanted to address this in my update thread and hope everyone reads it. For the most part I do get around to reading all the threads posted on the forums and am very aware of the current issues and feedback. What I am getting tired of seeing is people assuming they know exactly how x10 runs and what challenges we face and for some reason think they could do it better.
[rant]
Free hosting runs on a very slim margin, we do not have the resources to have tons of test machines with different configurations to test every change we make. When we make migration plans we have a short period of time to do it and have to hope for the best. If every free hosting account paid just $1\mo no one would have even noticed the move because we would have the extra resources to pull that off. There is A LOT of work that goes into moving 30,000 accounts and we have very limited resources to do it with. I would happily challenge anyone to attempt to do this with 30,000 live accounts on a small budget within a 7 day period.
Just because you have some linux or system admin experience does not give you insight on how x10 runs. Unless you are part of the admin team you have no idea how the backend works or what is involved in moving just a single account between servers. It's not just copying files.
I've stated this before and I'll say it again, honestly if you have such an issue with our free hosting you're welcome to leave or upgrade to paid hosting where these issues don't exist. With the economy taking a nose dive most other free hosts have closed their doors, even geocities is shutting down and they're owned by one of the largest companies in the US. We have been around for 5 years now and have a strong and aggressive plan for growth. I'm not going to make our business plan public but we are not going anywhere and we are still growing. So yes, we have a plan, and have had a plan for 5 years. This plan has allowed us to be here when others couldn't. I don't appreciate the negative criticism by people when they have no idea what they're talking about. We are open to feedback that is posted in a constructive way. If you are unsure how to do that don't post it. We're not perfect and I understand things need to be improved.
[/rant]
As I said, I do try and spend some time on the forums each day reading user posted threads so I have an idea how the community is feeling about things. There are some great suggestions I've seen and now that things are settling down I'll be trying to get them implemented. Some things that are already in the works and will be coming soon:
A blog will replace the news to make it easier for people to get updates and also have a single place they can get an RSS feed on updates.
We've been working on a knowledgebase for the past week to help centralize information on x10. I'm not sure when we'll release it but hopefully sometime in the next few weeks.
A new site is being developed. We have been working with a designer for the past month on getting a new design for the main site. We will be trying to improve the navigation and flow of information on the new site.
A new account panel has been in the works for a few months now and should be out by the end of summer. We will be centralizing a lot of stuff into it including paid upgrades, support tickets, and account information such as resource usage stats, suspension reports and communications from x10.
Discuss this thread here:
http://forums.x10hosting.com/off-topic/99055-news-thread-response-6-29-09-a.html
Last edited: