RollingOrder eMerchant Newsletter

For some time now we have been scouting for a new data center that can provide us with truly superior performance. For the most part, websites are not hosted on the best equipment, rather they are hosted on the cheapest equipment. That's because no one wants to pay the price. Most people want, or expect, the Internet to be free, which seriously limits the ability of service providers to offer superior service.

I saw a dramatic demonstration of this last summer when my DSL provider increased my pipe from 500 Kbps to 1.8 Kbps. With over three times the bandwidth screaming into my workstation you'd think there would be a noticeable difference when I browsed the Internet. Not so! In fact there wasn't any noticeable difference at all. That's because the limiting factor is not the fiber optic backbone that supports the Internet, the limiting factor is the data centers and equipment that serve up the web pages. It's sad but Web entrepreneurs are conditioned to select low cost service over technical performance issues they don't understand anyway. Because of this, most data centers are forced to compete by providing cheap service solutions, which are usually not the best performance solutions.

That will never do for us. We have to have absolutely reliable database operations with zero down time and blindingly fast load times. Well, this was not easy to find but we now have it.

We just brought our new Linux/Apache web server online last week. This "performance grade server" is located in a "killer" data center built on top of a main fiber optic highway in Virginia. Everyone's website will be moved there before Christmas. Not to worry; chances are you wouldn't even know you had moved if we didn't tell you—except for watching your site snap onto the screen faster.

Everything—absolutely everything—in our new facility is first cabin. Our dual Xeon server is stocked with 8 gigabytes of DDR RAM and comes with four ultra-high throughput U320 SCSI RAID-5 drives. That means if a hard drive crashes, no data will be lost because all data is redundantly stored across all the drives. Moreover, there is always a spare drive in the array waiting for such a catastrophe to happen. If a hard drive does crash, the spare drive will leap into action and auto-rebuild itself to replace the dead drive. That means zero downtime and no data lost.

How the Move Will Happen
Our dedicated server was built and tested last week. During this week we will mirror everyone's website onto the new server. On Friday we will throw the switch to change DNS over. DNS is a system of Dynamic Name Servers that convert domain names such as www.rollingdigital.net to IP addresses like 216.22.10.209. Testing shows it currently takes about two days to propagate DNS changes throughout the network. That means the actual change-over will happen sometime on Sunday. All your email addresses, passwords and control panel addresses will remain the same.

Murphy's Law notwithstanding, the move should be seamless. If you have any questions please contact Walt at walt@rollingdigital.com or call at 203.445.9975.

New Facilities Specifications

Server Specifications
Dual 2.66 GHz Xeon Linux/Apache Web Server with 8 GB ECC DDR RAM
Quad 73 GB U320 SCSI RAID-5 stripped and mirrored hard drive array
Hot spare hard drive with auto-rebuild
Doubly redundant hot swappable hard drives, fans and power supplies
Dual gigabit Network Interface Cards (NIC)
Plesk 6.0 Control Panel

Data Center
24/7 Network Operations Center (NOC)
Full daily backups
Redundant OC-48 fiber optic backbone
Redundant AC power
Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS)
Diesel backup generator
Cisco BGP4 intelligent backbone routing

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