Very Nice

[AirForceAlways]

New server is working great on my end, nice and fast. Grunt, sir, and mods as well, thank you so much for the work you've been doing on this forum, I can guaruntee you that we all deeply appreciate it here!

[Grunt]

WOW!

Haha, I have to admit that I went to sleep last night not sure what to expect in the morning; I gave the order to "propagate the DNS" around the world but they said it could take anywhere from 10 minutes to 48 hours for everyone to "see" the the site on the new server.

Please keep a watchful eye out for *any* bugs or glitches in the forum (or general site), I don't know what effect the server transfer may have on some of the features in the forum.

I'm loving the speed and reliability of the new server. It's light-years ahead of what we were using before!!

[TruBlu]

Oh yeah, the speed is fantastic! Thanks Grunt for everything you are doing. And just a quick question, as I'm learning the ropes of networking, what type of server are you using? And whats the backbone for it? I would just like to know because its pretty dang quick now!

[PaulR]

Much better!!! Thank you for the server upgrade.

[Grunt]

Originally Posted by TruBlu

Oh yeah, the speed is fantastic! Thanks Grunt for everything you are doing. And just a quick question, as I'm learning the ropes of networking, what type of server are you using? And whats the backbone for it? I would just like to know because its pretty dang quick now!

Let's just hope that it *stays* this quick!

I'm happy to talk about some of the technical details of the new server, thanks for asking!

What we migrated to last night is called a "VPS", or "Virtual Private Server". As I'm sure you know, the most common means of hosting for many smaller sites is "shared hosting" where your site could be one of 10, 100, or 1000 other sites on a single server and everyone has to basically share the resources between them. This is generally a pretty cost-effective way of hosting a site, but you start to pay for it in terms of performance when your site starts to grow.

Then on the other end of the spectrum you have "dedicated hosting" which is an entire computer devoted to you, with no other sites competing for your bandwidth or processing power.

In the midde you have a relatively new offering called VPS. With VPS, we're given our own "virtual server" which means we have dedicated RAM and storage space, and we have root access as well as full administrative control over our "server". However, the trick here is that we aren't in a standalone box; we're actually one of a handful of other virtual servers on a single very powerful machine (four separate dual-core processors and tons of RAM). And, in essence, the machine has virtualization software installed that acts as a traffic cop to direct all requests for processing power from the individual virtual servers. The key here is that because the machine is so robust and powerful, there's very little lag as long as they don't put too many virtual servers on one machine.

The advantage to us is the increased processing power, and the advantage to the web host is that they can still fit a number of virtual servers on a single piece of equipment. That translates into a "middle ground" in terms of price, so it's definitely more expensive than shared hosting but still considerably less than dedicated.

By the way, if anyone wants to chime-in and correct me for any of the above comments, please go ahead! I'm still learning a lot about this, too, but I think that covers most of the basics.

[Ben Shotalot]

Much better than the last site Grunt. Good job!

[TruBlu]

Originally Posted by Grunt

Let's just hope that it *stays* this quick!

I'm happy to talk about some of the technical details of the new server, thanks for asking!

What we migrated to last night is called a "VPS", or "Virtual Private Server". As I'm sure you know, the most common means of hosting for many smaller sites is "shared hosting" where your site could be one of 10, 100, or 1000 other sites on a single server and everyone has to basically share the resources between them. This is generally a pretty cost-effective way of hosting a site, but you start to pay for it in terms of performance when your site starts to grow.

Then on the other end of the spectrum you have "dedicated hosting" which is an entire computer devoted to you, with no other sites competing for your bandwidth or processing power.

In the midde you have a relatively new offering called VPS. With VPS, we're given our own "virtual server" which means we have dedicated RAM and storage space, and we have root access as well as full administrative control over our "server". However, the trick here is that we aren't in a standalone box; we're actually one of a handful of other virtual servers on a single very powerful machine (four separate dual-core processors and tons of RAM). And, in essence, the machine has virtualization software installed that acts as a traffic cop to direct all requests for processing power from the individual virtual servers. The key here is that because the machine is so robust and powerful, there's very little lag as long as they don't put too many virtual servers on one machine.

The advantage to us is the increased processing power, and the advantage to the web host is that they can still fit a number of virtual servers on a single piece of equipment. That translates into a "middle ground" in terms of price, so it's definitely more expensive than shared hosting but still considerably less than dedicated.

By the way, if anyone wants to chime-in and correct me for any of the above comments, please go ahead! I'm still learning a lot about this, too, but I think that covers most of the basics.

Wow, thanks for such a fast and detailed response. I've never heard of VPS, and it sounds really interesting. I'll have to study up on this and maybe talk to my networking teacher about this.

[SlightlyCatholic]

This is MUCH faster than just a few days ago. Bravo Zulu!

[armysc_25b]

My work site is actually moving to virtualize a lot of it's servers. They had put out numbers the other day, and the resource use from using virtual servers is much lower now. For example, some of our Exchange vaults (storage for the Exchange e-mail servers) are virtualized. We also use a clustered architechture (managed by some nifty software) so that should one of the physical servers go down the virtual servers on that physical server would jump to a new physical server.