DrakNet is announcing a new shared hosting package targeted to small businesses that need high availability and redundancy on a smaller budget.
The new DrakNet Shared Failover Package is an insurance package for sites that cannot afford down time, or what we affectionately like to call “poor man’s redundancy”. In most situations, when you want to guaranty high availability the amount that you pay is going to go up exponentially in relation to the amount of redundancy you wish to have. These solutions have always been available, but only DrakNet has brought it together in one single package under the banner of one company that takes care of at all for less than $100 a month.
The Shared Failover Package includes two Bells and Whistles accounts, one located at our primary data center with Liquid Web in Lansing Michigan, and a secondary backup Bells and Whistles account at one of our secondary data centers at Wired Tree in Chicago, Illinois.
Instead of using DrakNet’s standard nameservers, we provide you with 5 enterprise name servers with integrated monitoring and automatic failover from outside both data centers from geographically dispersed locations - if, for any reason, your site’s availability stops on our primary servers, the integrated failover system will launch into action and make an immediate change to your DNS sending your clients, customers or readers to the backup installation on the Wired Tree Server.
With the $60 a month package, you are given the logins and access to both. You can choose to mirror the site completely by setting up your own software to sync the installations, or if you have a static site you can set it up once and forget about it, knowing that it’s ready to take over should there be any issues whatsoever with our main data center or the server you are on. Once the crisis passes, your site will be moved back to the main server.
With the $90 a month package, we will mirror the data on the backup site once a week for you. If you have a dynamic site that constantly changes, we can mirror the data at any frequency that you specify. Contact us with your needs and we’ll be happy to provide you with a quote.
1-866-DRAKNET is no longer DrakNet’s phone number. Well, ok, it may currently still be, but it won’t be for long - I know, it was really, really cool to have our name in a toll free number and all. I’m a little bummed, too. But unfortunately, it’s time to retire it.
Now that we’ve taken on more staff, we’re moving over to Skype completely for voice communications which, honestly, there shouldn’t be much of.
Our new number, 1.512.377.6138, is our Skype-In line, enabling you to call us directly even if the concept of Skype freaks you out a little bit. Our toll-free line was nifty because it was exceedingly vain and had our name in the number and all that, but it was also limited to the United States alone and significantly limited our International clients and how they could contact us since we didn’t have a local number whatsoever.
As a small company, costs are always a factor and we’ve found that the lower accounts that call pretty much just ignore those invoices for calls, meaning an Intro Account on a ten minute phone call has become a loss leader that, frankly, were we anyone else, we would have nuked the account for the repeated phone calls. We also found that those of you that have been with us long term picked up the phone if you wanted to pick up the phone, and that was the end of it.
Phone support does cost a significant amount considering that doing support live while typing and looking into things takes longer - many, many hosting companies have cut out telephone technical support altogether due to the cost. We’ve sought different solutions to that cost/benefit ratio, and our first attempt was charging for support on the phone to balance out the costs of having it at all.
That didn’t go over too well.
Skype is not 100% as reliable as “regular phone service” yet, however, the costs are phenomenally lower than telephone service. It enables us to give cheaper and more widely accessible access that’s easily expandable as we add more staff while not utilizing hardly any extra power to do so (which we also find a really neat green solution) and without having to buy anything (which we find a cool anti-consumerism solution).
And oh, yeah - we’re not charging for the lower account levels anymore. If you’re an Intro account, you can call - you’d have to talk an awful lot for Skype to make your account upside down. (This does not change the fact that Skype goes to 1 person, and the ticket goes to an actual department of multiple people, so remember you’re not going to get serviced as quickly calling unless you get really lucky.)
We also find that a toll free number considering prevalence of cell phone free minutes anywhere simply isn’t necessary - and if you really don’t want to pay and have no other option, Skype us at drak.net - anyone utilizing us is almost sure to have a computer and setting us Skype was much easier than we thought it would be.
We’re also going to begin integrating Skype’s features to connect you to each other, and to us - we’re going to schedule Skypecasts on different topics of interest. If you have a topic you’d like to see, let us know and we’ll try to cover it. We even have some guests scheduled.
So, don’t think of it as losing the cool toll free number. Think of it as gaining wider access to the DrakNet community and staff! And if you’re trying to call us, remember to call 1.512.377.6138 or skype us at “drak.net“.
DrakNet has added an additional way to contact us - you can now call DrakNet free on Skype!
For those who don’t know, Skype is is a software program that allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet. Calls to other users of the service are free of charge, while calls to landlines and cell phones can be made for a fee. Additional features include instant messaging, file transfer and video conferencing - though, sorry, I am not doing the video thing. Ya’ll don’t want to see me in my pajamas reconfiguring Apache.
Currently, only Jen (that would be me) is on Skype, and you can connect with me by calling “drak.net“. Since Skype is free for us, calling me via Skype is free for you and you will not be charged the 50 cents per minute for any direct support that you feel you need via … um, speech. Because this isn’t really a phone.
We still wholly recommend submitting a ticket instead of calling, and we absolutely recommend submitting a ticket before calling - we’re still fairly adament that telephone technical support is not the most effective means of technical support and actually causes your issue to take longer to work out than it would via ticket. We do, though, understand sometimes you just want to talk to a human being.
If you have a microphone and speakers, you can download Skype and sign up for an account and call us from your computer at no charge. You won’t need to pay anything to sign up at all, and Skype to Skype calls are absolutely free.
Yesterday, we “upgraded” the four older servers to remove PHP 4.X track from your available options. As it’s getting close to the PHP4 End of Life moment (2008-08-08 is D-Day for PHP4) we wanted to go ahead and make the jump now as both versions have been running for almost a full year. We also took the time to upgrade PHP to 5.2.6, as well as compile mysqli as an option. Everything went well and it appears most of you have made the jump to PHP5.X, as there was no mad rush to the ticket desk.
We also wanted to let you know that there are two new staff members covering the tickets, and if you’ve submitted one within the past few weeks you may have met them. Thomas Williams, and Brian Hochstein have joined the team - they both have some familiarity with hosting, and while Thomas is familiar with hosting in general Brian’s pretty familiar with DrakNet as a whole, so give them some time to get up to speed and if you feel you need to have your ticket upped, please don’t hesitate to ask politely. As always, abuse of our staff is just not tolerated here - we’re geeky tech hippies and too laid back to smile while people call us names, so give them some slack while they’re learning about ya’lls quirks.
You’ve got a few weeks left to get yourself on the MySQL 5 server with some leeway time, as in mid-July we’re upgrading all servers to MySQL 5. We’ve had very few requests for this, so we’ll warn you now we’re not going to have an immense amount of sympathy if your stuff is not compatible with the current recommended version of MySQL. We can get you moved over in a few minutes while maintaining your old installation so if you need to take advantage, do so, and soon.
We should get back to our snarky banter posts soon.
This morning when you go into your cPanel, you’ll see a new button under Software/Services called Old Script Finder. Old Script Finder searches your web site for old, out of date scripts by searching for signatures on some of the most popular, and most security issue-laden if not updated, scripts being used today.
After installing, we ran a report on all five servers. There’s only eight sites on the new server and half of the scripts (3 of 6) were out of date. Half of them. Before you take a deep breathe in shock at that news (considering the server hasn’t even been up a week), let’s get to all of you other folks on the older four servers… I’m sorry to say wasn’t a single one that didn’t have 80% of the scripts out of date - ranging from just a few steps behind to woefully, woefully so far behind that the message was “script obsolete”. Even we were a bit surprised at the statistics.
Currently, we have only the most basic options on this script enabled - every Saturday, it will search all the servers and it will take stock of who’s scripts are out of date. That report will appear in your cPanel. It will tell you what script is out of date, where that script is located, what version you have and what the current released version of the script is. There is also a button for you to run the script on your own to take a look in your own directory if you install something - please use it sparingly as this is a fairly resource intensive endeavor.
The catch is you need to look at it, and you need to take action.
Hopefully, this handy tool will help you get a handle on updates and give you information you didn’t have before. It should also help folks that have installed scripts and forgotten about them - I took a look at some of the things that were found and I get the feeling that a few of you are going to be shocked at what’s hanging out in your web site.
If the statistics don’t get significantly better, we’ll take the next step and have the server email you regarding your out of date scripts. If that doesn’t get a response, at some point, we may start locking them down after repeatedly warnings are ignored.
For a list of scripts that are looked at, click the more information button below.
Alakazam is now up and running, and houses several folks that moved as well as several new sign ups. Since this are running smoothly there it’s time to address the rest of you antiquated folks.
We’re going to step each thing up slowly so that we can narrow down what upgrade is causing what problem, should you have any problems.
June 16, 2008
On June 16th, we’re going to cease offering PHP4 across all 4 remaining servers and move exclusively to PHP5 only. This is for security reasons, both for the server and because any php scripts that aren’t compatible with PHP yet aren’t really going to be scripts we want on the servers. You have had many, many months with both to prepare for the move over where you had both available to you and we feel it’s now time.
July 7, 2008
We’ll upgrade to MySQL 5 from MySQL 4. Again, we have a box with 5 now - if you have any question or concern that your site will not work with MySQL 5 or that you’ll need to do work on it to make it compatible, you need to speak up now. After July 7th, everyone will have 5 and if you need 4, you won’t be able to find it here.
August 4, 2008
Finally, we’ll be upgrading Apache. The only real issue will be that your password protection will need to be redone after the upgrade. If you have password protected directories, you may want to submit them to us so we can make sure they are re-secured.
Please note that the following programs have no need to be tested and are compatible with standard installations:
So, we haven’t been blogging and for the next few days, that’s likely going to be the case. Yesterday, we placed an order for our fifth shiny new shared server. DrakNet has been growing at a pretty good clip, and we decided that since Liquid Web added pipes and we were no longer living in fear of a DOS attack, it was time to step up..
In keeping with out Pokemon theme (but not our misspelled Pokemon theme), the new server’s name is Alakazam.
Alakazam are described as extremely intelligent. With an IQ of 5,000, they can outperform supercomputers and can memorize anything. Alakazam use their superior intelligence to immediately identify their opponents’ weaknesses and gain the edge in battles. This intelligence and superb memory are said to come from the fact that Alakazam’s brain cells never stop multiplying
The new server will start off advanced, with Apache 2 and MySQL 5. If anyone would like to get in line to move to the new server after we’re done making it peeples ready to take advantage of MySQL 5 immediately, please email support and we’ll put your site on a list of people to be moved. We’re likely going to be ready to open it up by the weekend, which would be a good time to scoot people over.
The move will involve an IP address change, but it should not involve any downtime nor any active DNS change on your part, and a move does move your entire account so nothing that you have should be lost or changed.
Like all our other servers, Alakazam is a high end, Enterprise level machine with dual processors and dual cores, starting with 4 Gigs of memory and expandable to 24 Gigs. We also chose the AMD Opteron Processor over Intel’s due to it’s power efficiency which, of course, makes it better for the environment
You really don’t want your clients to call you. Not ever. You don’t want to hear a peep out of any of them whatsoever, at all - because when you hear from your clients, it usually means one of two things:
Something is broken.
What you are offering isn’t clear, and they’re confused.
Now, the first thing you can’t really do anything about - granted, we can, and we do. One of the advantages to going with a smaller company is that we’re looking at every server, every single day as opposed to larger companies that have too many servers to actually hang out on and who are only alerted that something has gone wrong when the “Oh, crap, it’s down!” alarm goes off. Now, we have those alarms, too, but we’re a bit more proactive about trying to avoid the things that wake them up than larger companies can be simply because each server is 1/4 of our business.
The second you can do something about, and that’s where good documentation comes in. As a reseller, you have somewhat of an advantage in that you can mercilessly rip us off for the most part, as long as you’re paying us - since you’re our reseller, we want you to get big and upgrade. Then we want you to outgrow a shared box and get a VPS, then we want you to outgrow that and get a server, and then we want you to outgrow that and get many servers, and then we want you to overtake us so we can sell you our clients and retire to Tahiti.
Ok, I’m kidding about that last part, but you get the point - since we want you to grow, we welcome you to take whatever it is that we have built up for the past ten years that helps you do that. The data center that we started out at 10 years ago let us use their stuff, and that was our starting documentation. Generally, it’s how most people start - ripping off whoever they are reselling for.
Nowadays, though, manuals and text directions aren’t as good as the flash demo. We have switched most of that tediously written documentation over to flash demos because (a) most folks have flash and (b) most people’s eyes don’t glaze over quite as fast when they are watching a movie that shows them step by step how to perform an action and it is easier for people to understand something when it is visually shown to them. What isn’t covered in a flash demo is usually swept into sound byte chunks backended to a searchable knowledge base, or FAQ section.
Most people do not read a treatise on their hosting anymore - and they used to. People really wanted to understand it. Now, not so much - they want it up, they want it done, and they don’t want to have to understand why it works the way that it works, they just want to know how to get from point A to point B. These two forms of information are an excellent compliment to each other enabling the imparting of quick, clear, and precise information.
Now you have to learn flash, and create the demos.
Ok, I’m kidding - again, there are companies that do these demos professionally, and you can get them in a day or so branded. The previous “It Girl” was demodemo.com and we have used them. DemoDemo produces a quality product - however, our particular choice is DemoWolf.
Demowolf allows leasing of the demos, which is (in my opinion) vastly superior to owning the demos themselves due to the rapid advancement and changes in many control panels and software products. If you purchase a slate of demos and that product changes visually next month or the way to do something is completely different, you’re stuck with outdated demos that don’t adequately reflect the current product you are offering and worse, may confuse people when what they see in the demo is not what they see on the site.
This is the web - things change fast. We must have purchased and re-purchased the same set of demos 4 times before Demowolf showed up, and we’ve been happy with the cost and their quality.
One particular world of warning with their demos - make sure that you take a look at the Demowolf HTML files and you change the Meta information in them before uploading them to your site and using them. Demowolf places their own meta information advertising their own service in their files. Kudos to them for gumption, but if it’s your site, you want your own meta information don’t want to unknowingly be serving another company’s meta-information advertising someone else for free unless it’s your choice (or it’s required, like a “powered by” statement).
The cost of the lease per package varies, and without speech directions is in the neighborhood of $3-$4.
As far as knowledge bases, it’s almost impossible to recommend just one. Hopefully, your billing choice will come with it integrated but if it doesn’t, set aside two days and start googling ” knowledge base software”, test some out, and find one that merges into your own design and does not take it over . There really are such an amazing amount of choices that it could take up an article series on its own.
We’re getting our fingers into a few diverse but complimentary pies, and wanted to let you know about some of the other things we offer that you may not know about, and some new stuff that you definitely don’t know about!
Backup MX Records help a lot in making sure that you don’t lose mail - if you do a Google search for Backup MX Services you’ll find them offered from a number of places. What you find is them offered for as little as $1 per domain per month, and that’s what you’d pay us if you wanted it.
We only offer it at this price to DrakNet clients. We’ve offered it for a while and we have a number of you using it, but it’s possible some more of you may benefit from it. Backup MX gives you a secondary mail delivery point in case your mail ever goes down and won’t accept anything. It’ll stay there in a holding bin, so to speak, checking periodically to see if your mail server is up. Once it is, it will deliver the mail to you.
What that, you say? We have phenomenal uptime and you would never need that kind of insurance? Well, thanks for saying that and you’d be right if that’s all you had to depend on (and look, things happen - you buy insurance for things that are unlikely but bad). If you install a mailbox, leave a bunch of mail in it and your mail quota fills up, guess what happens to that mail? That’s right. It bounces like a rubber ball on asphalt.
What’s that, you say? You would never do that? Buddy, I got tickets going back years saying that you’re wrong. It is, frankly, the most common reason mail goes bouncy.
DrakNet Monitoring will allow you to monitor your web site or server routinely, alert you if there is a problem, or alert us if there is a problem - everything is defined by you. This can be added to your DrakNet account or purchased separately via PayPal on the Monitoring Site itself.
We have a 14 day free trial available here, as well as a demo site available if you follow the link above. This is a great buy if you want to monitor more than Apache on your server or VPS, or program it to harrass us for you while you sleep on the off chance anything goes down. If you’re a reseller, you can get a pretty graph to put on your site as well.
DrakNet Monitoring is powered by Hyperspin, so no, you’re not actually being monitored by the same network you’re on. That would just be silly.
DNS Failover and System Monitoring
If your website/service is down you can now automatically send all of your users to another system. This is meant for primarily static sites that need high availability, and is not meant for dynamic sites that are backended by constantly changing information without added configuration.
We can provide multiple sites on separate servers, multiple sites in separate data centers, and many other various configurations. Due to the possibility of several different configurations, pricing will vary on this service (including the hosting accounts for the multiple sites). Please contact us for what you are trying to accomplish, and we’ll get you a quote.
Shared Hosting Data Center Has Shiny New Pipes
Since we’re announcing cool stuff, here’s something you get for free - we’d like to announce since the last “Pipe Crash” connectivity slowdown at Liquid Web that they have brought two new pipes online and they are lit up and moving.
This now puts the Michigan NOC’s (the shared hosting data center) connectivity at twice available what peak time max’s out at. In plain English, a pipe can go down and now there is the capacity to re-route traffic without any routes seeing the latency that was visible the last several times there was a problem.
The Pennsylvania NOC (our VPS and Dedicated Data Center) has also recently upgraded its connectivity as well, and folks on those servers should be seeing faster speeds at peak time.
Hopefully, you’ve been thinking about how you want to charge your clients, because it is a fairly big decision. Rather than go over every single billing option out there, we’ll let you know about the WHT Wiki, which has an overview of Current Billing Software available specifically designed for web hosts.
We’re going to go ahead and caveat right now that we’re not a reseller for any of the following software, so nothing that we say here is in any way motivated by us being paid for the recommendation or referral. If you buy any of these products and say that we recommended you, the company’s response will be that that’s nice, but we won’t get anything out of it. (Considering the rate that people attempt to monetize blogs, we thought we had to say that).
We’re also only focusing on cPanel, Linux based software packages since that’s what we do and offer.
PHPCoin is located in your Fantastico area, and its free, so there’s a benefit for you right there. You know what they say about free, right? You get what you pay for and this is very true with the PHPCoin Software. It is very basic, and it functions for the most part. There is no integration.
We use Ubersmith, and have since 2002. Ubersmith, when we signed up, was expensive and extremely high quality - however, for smaller web hosting companies, their focus has wandered a little bit. We’re still pleased with the software but the developers are not as responsive as they once were considering the company itself seems to have shifted its focus to Ubersmith for Data Centers, and the Lite and Pro versions seem to resemble a tad bit of an afterthought. For us, though, we’re used to these features and so we’re sticking with it. We’re not sure we’d recommend it at this point for other folks starting out. It does come with an integrated support desk. It starts at $24.95 a month for a leased version or Lite, and $499.00 to own. Support is forum only unless you pay for it.
Modernbill has long been popular with web hosting companies, and for a long time was somewhat of the undisputed “It Girl”. It is free for up to 10 clients, $24.95/mo for up to 50 clients, and $49.95 a month up to 1000 clients - after that, you have to call for pricing. There is no owned version. You can get telephone support for it - for $150.00 an hour, which puts it out of the price range for most small resellers without knowledge to tweak it. It does have an extensive amount of features, though, including automation that is fairly easy to set up and integrate. As you grow, it’s pricey. (Disclaimer: We have not used ModernBill.)
Coming back down into the affordable range, we have AccountLabs Plus written by the same folks that bring you Fantastico and, as you guessed, it’s available in Fantastico - but is not free. It’s domain-based license is $45 initial year for a single domain, $15 renewal fee every year thereafter, putting it in the much more affordable range than many other offerings. It is a strict ordering/billing system without a support desk or knowledge base and may be appropriate for those folks who are designers offering hosting with no interest in being a full-fledged web hosting company. We have tested this system, and it was “ok” - we were a bit underwhelmed with features, however, they were more than adequate considering the price. Support is generally forum only.
WHMAutoPilot has been the other “It Girl” for a while. It’s developers have a pretty good reputation as being responsive to client needs, and the software package scales nicely. The pricing is also tiered, though less than ModernBill - free for up to 10 clients, $19.95 monthly for 2.x leased, and $199.95 for an owned version. Support is unlimited and free from them for the leased version, and for 6 months with the owned version. It does not have an integrated helpdesk, though you can purchase two (Kayako or Cerberus) and integrate them.
There is, however, a current “It Girl” called Web Host Manager Complete Solution, or WHMCS for short. Around the turn of the year, we helped migrate 7 different web hosting companies from the Alabanza platform to LiquidWeb servers and the cPanel platform due to the selling of Alabanza to Navisite and the complete and unparalleled botching of the technological merging of those companies. In every case, these established companies chose to go with WHMCS after testing multiple solutions due to cost, features, as well as the responsiveness of WHMCS to the emergency issues that were being faced by the unfortunate companies that got caught up in the Alabanza meltdown fiasco.
WHMCS attempts to be just that - a “complete” solution for a hosting company, including billing and automation and integrated support desk and knowledge base. A monthly lease is $15.95 if you leave the “powered by” line in it, and $18.95 if you want it out. It’s $249.95 to own with the “powered by” line, and $324.95 without it. If you purchase it, you can purchase support and upgrades after a year for a $44.95 renewal. It includes a support desk, a knowledge-base, as well as a fairly robust billing system that enables automation if you choose to do it.
Though it’s not a billing solution, we can’t leave the post without mentioning the Kayako Helpdesk - it’s the helpdesk “It Girl”, but doesn’t do any billing. The pricing varies, and is generally not cheap - you can spend upwards of $50 a month on your support solution. (For those curious, DrakNet’s costs just based on our systems run around $250 a month.)
Next time, we’ll talk about support pages, demos, and their cost/benefit ratio.
.
We’re going to go ahead and caveat right now that we’re not a reseller for any of the following software, so nothing that we say here is in any way motivated by us being paid for the recommendation or referral. If you buy any of these products and say that we recommended you, the company’s response will be that that’s nice, but we won’t get anything out of it. (Considering the rate that people attempt to monetize blogs, we thought we had to say that).
