A new year has arrived yippie! 
Christmas and New Year’s are over although I spent most of it working doing server upgrades it was still a good time. Why do it then? Well for one traffic is low so scheduling major changes is not going to affect sites as much.
I can say welcome to the new year with everything now up to date and running the latest version on some shiny new hardware. The new US servers were already up to date but our original US server needed some major overhauls. In September we had a move to bigger and better hardware but were still running RedHat9 and the original versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL, while things were secure an update was way overdue.
After the upgrades the Eagle server is now running the same setup as the other servers CentOS5, Apache 2.2.8, PHP 5.2.6 and MySQL 5.0.67. As we did some extensive testing before the upgrades we only had a couple of small issues that were easily rectified.
The Australian servers were not left out of the upgrades, we had the option of setting up another VPS or moving to our own Dedicated hardware. Operationally it made more sense to consolidate things and get a decent Dedicated server to reduce management overheads so that is the path we took. As we were setting up from scratch on the new hardware it was loaded with the latest versions so the spec is the same as Eagle.
Once the new server was online and testing had been completed, it was just a matter of transfering everyone over and redirecting traffic from the old servers to the new server.
Redirection will be inplace for a couple of weeks just so nothing gets lost.
Well things have continued to grow at WEBY Systems we are now up to 6 servers with the seventh about to come online this week. Our main focus has still been on US based hardware mainly due to the cost of bandwidth in Australia is still astronomical compared to the US suppliers. The situation is getting better but still has a long ways to go.
All servers are now running with the latest version of cPanel and are finally converted over to maildir, no issues reported after the move so that went smoothly. The next stage is up upgrade all servers to php5 and MySQL5 we are currently doing testing to ensure the move can be done without any interruptions to service for existing clients.
Everyone has now been migrated across to the new hosting pans and those customers on the old legacy plans will for the most part have been upgraded as part of the process, if we have missed anyone please let us know.
Well no issues problems to report so back to work for me more news soon
We have all heard of the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ (BSoD) that afflicts all us long suffering windows users but how about the ‘Black Screen of Death’ well not Death I suppose but almost anyway. Desktop users will be unfamiliar but those of you that use a laptop will have at least seen it. Unfortunately for my long serving Toshiba it came on the weekend. Continue reading →
Well as I promised the site is undergoing a update it took a little longer than I expected to get started (customer jobs take first priority) but things are progressing quickly. All the existing content has been copied across and we are now in the process of migrating the back-end systems to the new databases.
As part of the update we have also reduced the number of hosting plan configurations from 5 to 3. When we started we had three levels but we introduced two intermediate plans to give customers some more options, while this looked good at first it added to the complexity facing customers.
The new plans are based on out three most common settings and cover 80% of our existing customer base so most users will not be affected by the changes. Of the others the majority are on the old email plan and only have a holding page and are using the plan just for personalised email addresses, these customers will remain as is for the moment. There will be some new discounted package deals as well (hosting, domain, design) which will be released next month, including a business card package that will replace the old email plan.
The main hosting website weby.com.au is about to get a major update. The existing website has grown over time and some sections are in need of a rewrite.
Now that the site builder and shopping cart have been completed we will rebuild the entire website on that platform, so in addition to the new look you will also be able to see the software on an active website.
In addition to the update there will also be a regular newsletter (I’ll be trying for Quarterly) to keep people up to date with the goings on at WEBY Systems. Of course the information will be posted here as well but if you prefer to get the update in your inbox that option will be available. Anyone will be able to sign up to the newsletter by following the link on the new site layout.
