Category: Hosting

Went for it last night, and Birdhouse Hosting is now in its new home. Four hours to securely transfer 65 accounts totaling ~20GBs of data between two cPanel servers. Considering that there’s a lot more to transferring an account than copying a home dir around*, the cPanel-to-cPanel transfer mechanisms are pretty good at getting it right. DNS propagated overnight, and we’re live with a VPS in a quad-CPU, 8GB, hot-swap setup.

Only two small glitches to mop up this morning – the alternate SMTP port wasn’t open, and apache was configured to choose index.html before index.php when both present. Other than that, the migration was flawless and I can start thinking about making a Christmas shopping list. Let’s see, shouldn’t be too hard to come up with a tally of naughty and nice Birdhouse users…

* Users databases are off in /var/lib/mysql, mail forwarders and aliases are in /etc/valiases/*, mailing list archives are kept deep in the bowels, crontabs are here, quota settings are there, service plan features and packages somewhere else entirely, foobar is behind my left ear, and it all has to be packaged up neatly and restored on the other end inside an accompanying account with all passwords intact — not a fun job to do manually (I’ve been down that road) but pretty much effortless with the cPanel transfer mechanisms.

Birdhouse is moving! We’re about to undertake a migration of customers from our current dedicated server setup into a managed reseller environment, where we’ll be setting up shop on a beefy quad-CPU box under the watchful eye of a dedicated management team. As some of our sites get more and more popular, we’re seeing increasingly frequent load issues on the current single-CPU server that we can’t manage effectively. The goal is to free myself up from server performance considerations, so I can focus more on development and implementation.

To celebrate the move, we’ve just raised virtually all of the limits on all of our hosting plans — more email accounts, more databases, more add-on domains, more everything. It’s nearly impossible to stay competitive in an industry that puts the airline biz to shame when it comes to overselling, but we think these new plans bring us quite a bit closer.

The actual move may not happen for another day or two, but we’ve got nearly all our ducks in a row now. We’re not anticipating any downtime, crossing fingers. See you on the other side!

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Playing the News, a web site supporting a (not yet released) documentary film on the convergence of video games and real war.

In a thought-provoking 20-minutes, Playing the News explores these issues and challenges us to imagine a not-too-distant future when we might read an article about the war on the New York Times’s website, and then link to an interactive game to replay that same event. Sound scary? It’s only a matter of time.

We’ve installed the Magpie RSS parser on Birdhouse Hosting for web developers interested in including other sites’ RSS feeds on their own sites. Usage instructions are in the Magpie FAQ.

We’ve also installed the PHP GD library for developers wanting to generate graphics at the server level, or to install imaging applications that require it for manipulation of existing images. Usage instructions are in the GD FAQ.

PHP itself has been upgraded to version 4.4.1

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes cityvoices.org, aka the San Francisco Community Journalism Project:

The San Francisco Community Journalism Project is a civic project operating under the Journalism Department of San Francisco State University. It is designed to engage San Francisco communities around issues that affect living and social conditions in various neighborhoods.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes brookemaury.org, the personal web site of Brooke Maury: “Masters student at the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the University of California, Berkeley. My research and coursework have focused predominantly on multimedia metadata management, the intersection of technology & law and more recently, text-based music information retrieval.”

Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome realdramadocs.com, a site promoting “Nine short documentaries about nine different things” for a public screening event Oct. 8-9 in Berkeley, CA. All documentaries produced by J-School students.

While Birdhouse’s datacenter is in Texas, far from the reach of any West-coast earthquake disaster, it’s now sitting in the direct path of Hurricane Rita. Fortunately, EV1 sounds very well prepared:

As an extra precaution, we have even sourced an additional rental generator. While this unit would not be needed for a brief outage, if we were to experience a loss of power lasting several days, we would need to perform normal maintenance on our generators, and this would give us a generator to run while that maintenance is taking place. All total, we have in excess of 10,000 gallons of fuel on site. We have guaranteed contracts for fuel delivery and two fuel depots are located within 2 miles of our facility.

Of course, all of that fuel won’t help much if the whole facility is ripped from its foundations… Many EV1 employees are heading out to be with families, but core staff is planning to weather the storm in the datacenter. Now that’s dedication.

The cPanel account management system used by Birdhouse Hosting has proved to be very complete (though not without its glitches and surprises), and its tools have saved me a ton of work. It’s been nice to not have to write a script for every new piece of functionality needed. But was shocked recently to discover that cPanel doesn’t send alert messages to POP account holders when mailboxes are nearing quota. Started looking for something to fit the bill, didn’t find anything that did the job neatly, so wrote a shell script for cPanel systems.

checkmailquota loops through the home dirs and, for each home, loops through hosted domains. For each domain, loops through mailboxes, recording byte sizes. Compares these sizes to what’s listed in the quota file for that mailbox. If usage is within xx% of quota, sends a warning message to that mailbox. Also sends a summary of accounts near quota to postmaster.

It seems bizarre to me that a script like this, or equivalent functionality, isn’t built into cPanel (at version 10 no less!)

Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome minimediaguy.org, the weblog of SF Chronicle journalist Tom Abate.

I started this blog in January to learn more about the new publishing technologies. I have a strong background in print publishing, and some experience in radio and television. I have owned a business and started a newspaper. I am now a newspaper reporter. In addition to figuring out how all this web stuff works, I am particularly interested in how to make it into a profitable undertaking.

This is the first blog I’ve had the “pleasure” of porting from Blogger to Movable Type. Found a decent recipe for the process (Blogger has no export function!), but wrestled far too long with the fact that its output generated spaces after each “BODY: ” string. Of course I neither saw nor suspected the spaces, nor would have I expected MT’s importer to be so sensitive to them. Hate wasting hours on stupid problems like that. Anyway, using StyleCatcher for minimediaguy’s templating system, and Tom will be experimenting with one-click styles until he finds something he digs. An even more comprehensive Birdhouse project is on deck from Abate — look for that down the road.