Dear Auran, please stop doing business with Softlayer.

N

nicky9499

SSoTW Bot
Hi guys,

I come in peace and good intentions and mean no harm. Yes, it's probably a little inconvenient to change hosts and I know because I've done it before for a small website. I'd imagine it takes quite abit more time considering the size and scale of the DLS and all of Auran's websites. However, please seriously consider ditching Softlayer (or whatever company is doing the hosting) as the forum and DLS downtimes have become regularly recurring issues. Your good name is being pulled down by an inferior company with inferior services. People are paying to access the DLS, people rely on the forums for help and information, people are going to your website to purchase stuff. Web is serious business and you shouldn't relinquish control of it to halfwits like Softlayer.

Consider starting with a couple of small servers for the website and have the DLS moved to a local Brisbane-based company; nearer, more personal and probably loads more reliable. If all goes well maybe you guys could consider hosting the DLS on your own servers, which gives you total control and extremely fast access.
This is just my point of view as your customers and user community are centralized around the forums and rely on the DLS, which makes uptime a much higher priority than say, a grocery store or bookshop.
I've taken the liberty of researching and finding two good companies in Brisbane: http://www.smartnethosting.com.au/, http://www.rackservers.com.au/.

Cheerio,
Nicholas
 
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Agree in principle, however this is interesting, If they are really that incompetent why are IBM thinking of buying them? http://www.itpro.co.uk/cloud-hosting/19423/emc-and-ibm-size-web-hosting-company-softlayer

IBM and EMC are among the interested parties in talks to buy privately held database web hosting company SoftLayer Technologies, in a deal that could fetch over $2 billion, sources claim.
Click to expand...

Note that they appear to be the largest private hosting company, a case of being too big perhaps?
 
Downtime may be a potential issue if the transfer was done immediately. What happened when I switched hosts was the destination host offered a "pre-transfer" service whereby basically my entire site and its files were copied over but not brought online. When this was done only did I raise a termination request with the former host. The actual transfer and changes regarding name servers and registrar whatnot resulted in a downtime of just under an hour.

Cheerio,
Nicholas
 
I've only been involved in the forums for a couple months and am by far a total rookie, bit being in IT am curious what the current hardware and software setup is with N3V? Why don't they host everything themselves?
 
jeffsmiller said:
I've only been involved in the forums for a couple months and am by far a total rookie, bit being in IT am curious what the current hardware and software setup is with N3V? Why don't they host everything themselves?
Click to expand...




Its probably a resource issue. The other thing could be cost hosting in the US is probably cheaper and closer to their average customer, some years ago internet access from Aussy to other places was fairly expensive.

Cheerio John
 
shaneturner12 said:
It would be good, but it would also mean up to a month or two worth of downtime whilst data was transferred.

Shane
Click to expand...

We migrate servers all the time with ZERO downtime. Not to harp, but a REAL ENTERPRISE knows how to do a zero downtime migration - it's been happening since before Apple or Microsoft were even a gleam in someone's eye. A real hosting service can migrate a company from another host absolutely seamlessly. No need to give N3V a faux excuse to not secure some real hosting.
 
I personally have experience with Softlayer; I was going to try to use them as a site where I could park items in the cloud and post links to places like the Auran forum. It turned out that their package was not right for the purposes I wanted, at the time. Based upon what I know about Softlayer, they have multiple data centers; while most are in the US, there is are data centers in Amsterdam, and in Singapore. I expect that the DLS is not actually in any one place, and may be actively managed. Assets which are mostly downloaded in Europe may be in hosted in Amsterdam; those mostly in Asia and Australia may be hosted in Singapore. I suspect that if an asset from Asia becomes really popular in Europe or the US (e.g., Ocemy's 20 and 40 foot containers), that asset may be moved or mirrored.

Now, how much do you want to pay for Trainz, or for FCT? The DLS is currently more than a quarter million assets. I submit that hosting this on their own servers would require a substantial investment in hardware, and an increase in the number of personnel; the Trainz community seems to have a surfeit of impatience and intolerance, especially for downtime. And if they're going to match the benefits that they get from SoftLayer, they would probably need at least three installations, one in Europe, one in North America, and one in Asia. A guesstimate of the costs involved for hardware, software, and payroll to maintain three servers in house is probably on the order of $300,000 per year. I would guess that the costs of using Softlayer for the hosting is a mere fraction of that amount, and because of the number of data centers and access points, is probably much faster than we would see by bringing it all in house.

So the servers for the WIKI, or the forums, or the DLS go down once in a while? No big deal. Grow a little patience, friends, get a cup of coffee, go for a walk, or sleep on it. Before very long, things will be back up.

ns
 
250,000 assets? That's kids play. Apple has nearly 1,000,000 assets in their App Store and hosted 2 BILLION downloads this past December. Of course N3V is not even in the same universe of scale as Apple, but the concept is the same. Either you take your customer seriously or you simply dump on your customer. History is full of the carcasses of those that chose the latter path. Softlayer is a joke as a host, they have proven database execution problems. For you geniuses here that have your hollow excuses for N3V's utter failure at providing a download service, these proven database execution issues are the meat of the problem with the downloads, the forum, etc.

As for saying that N3V cannot access the servers because they are hosted, that simply proves the utter ignorance of those making such comments. How do you propose that N3V gets their content on the servers? Fedex Softlayer a DVD? Softlayer is dirt cheap because they provide NO in house technical support for the hosting that they provide - they simply refer you to "partners" that you can pay extra for the privilege of working on your server issues.

Softlayer is NOT geo co-located hosting, so please stop attributing capabilities to them that they simply do not provide.

My personal web hosting is geo co-located, I can choose which location to access at will, DNS will route users to the closest location, and in the event of a server or routing failure the fail over is automatic and accomplished within a few seconds. My servers are monitored 24/7/365, and if there is more than a 30 second loss of connectivity I am immediately emailed. N3V has such great hosting that they ADMIT that if a server goes down they may not even be aware of it until they come back into the office!

As for telling people to relax and try again later, I am 100% certain that if ANY of you wanted to take a trip in your car, you put the key in, and the engine refused to turn over, you would not "sleep on it" and try your trip again tomorrow.
 
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Quick question for you Jim - do you happen to use CloudFlare as well? My site does, and as a result if there's downtime on the main server it can offer a cached version of the site (and yes, it does exist on several servers around the world).

Shane
 
kd7eirjim said:
As for telling people to relax and try again later, I am 100% certain that if ANY of you wanted to take a trip in your car, you put the key in, and the engine refused to turn over, you would not "sleep on it" and try your trip again tomorrow.
Click to expand...

Well, if I wanted to take a trip in my car tomorrow, and it would not turn over, you are quite right that I would not
sleep on it". However, I own my car, I do not own the DLS. A more apt example, in my opinion, is if I wanted to go go on a canoe trip, and found the rental place had some issue that they were not able to supply me, then yes, I would sleep on it, and try again tomorrow.

ns
 
Since we're doing analogies now; say, you hired a limo to drive you to a party and suddenly the driver tells you he doesn't feel like driving. Sure, you don't own the car, but you're paying the guy anyway and you're not getting anywhere anytime soon.

Nicholas
 
Surely these days with tools such as Microsoft System Center Operations Manager there should be no excuse for not using automated monitoring tools. It works best on Windows platforms but surely we are looking at TCO and up time here and not religion.

Cheerio John
 
Hi Shane,

I am not currently using CloudFlare. My site is setup with dynamic DNS routing to re-route to another server if one goes down.
 
Sounds good - from what I've noticed Cloudflare does that as well as increase security by preventing known spam bots from accessing the site without being challenged by a Captcha (which they usually fail anyway).

Shane
 
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