Announcements

Even though our Basic Plan was already one of the most affordable CFML hosting plans on the market, for some of our clients it was still too much plan. As we added more capacity to the Basic plan we realized that the plan may be getting too big for some customers just starting out with their first website. So today we are introducing the Mini Plan which starts at the low price of $3.75 per month.The Mini comes with 10 GB of disk space and Unlimited bandwidth usage.

We have significantly increased the disk space allocations on all our plans and have removed the bandwidth limitations altogether. The hosting landscape is always in a state of flux while at the same time hardware prices and bandwidth prices continue to decline. We thought it was a good time to pass along some of these savings onto our customers.

The Basic Plan’s disk space allocations were increased from 200 MB to 100 GB and the Advanced Plan’s disk space was increased from 1 GB to 500 GB. These are significate increases in disk space and should easily accommodate todays more complex dynamic websites with room to spare.

All plans now come with Unlimited bandwidth usage. How can we do this? Well, we have great relationships with our upstream providers and have been given some massive deals which allow us to turn around and raise the stakes once again for CFML hosting at affordable prices.

CFWheels is a ColdFusion framework modeled after Ruby on Rails. The project is a few years old now but has been gaining some momentum in recent months. Quite a number of our customers ask us to help them install CFWheels into their account so we have made the decision to preinstall the latest version of CFWheels into all shared hosting accounts during the provisioning process.

We’ve modified the standard SSH port and moved the SSH service to port 2727. If you use SSH to log into the server and manage your account please note that you will have to specify the custom port number of 2727 in your SSH client. If you have any issues connecting to the server please contact support by opening a ticket.

Hi everyone, we’ve had to reduce the duration of the Free Trial accounts. The 60 day trial were attracting too many fraud accounts. A high percentage of the Trial accounts being created were being used for sending spam emails or setting up Phishing sites or clone sites. We were spending way too much time investigating these accounts, and responding to investigative requests from the rightful owners of the cloned websites.

If you signup for a trial account and are not finished with your testing by the end of the 15 days contact sales and request an extension. We’ll be pretty lenient on these extensions as long as the accounts are being used legitimately.

We have been making lost of changes to the site during the last few days. Most of the changes are on the support section of the site. This section has under gone a major remodel and we have been publishing knowledge base articles under various topics. We will continue to publish more articles in this section. If there is anything in particular you would like to see in this section let us know.

One other items that is now available in the Support area is our network monitoring statistics. As many of you know we have had some issues with one of the servers which we beleive we have now traced down to bad RAM. At any even we decided to publish our Network Monitoring Statistics we use internally to keep an eye on the network. We use the services of WebSitePulse.com to monitor our network.

The published statistics page includes realtime statistics information. Bookmark the link and you will always have the information handy.

As many of you know we have been dealing with an issue for the last couple of weeks where one of our servers (cpanel1) has been crashing. We have been investigating the issue and have not come up with any definitive issues but today I cam across a graph that may have some clews to the issue. The attached graph shows the connection times from our monitoring software to cpanel1 for the last month. As you can see on 6/16/09 the connection times increased considerably.

The one thing that corresponds to that date is a memory upgrade that was performed on 6/16/09 on cPanel1. We just pulled out the memory suspecting that it may be bad memory. We will continue to monitor the server for the next few days to see if this was the root cause of the issues.

This message is an outage report for server cpanel1.alurium.com.

The server went offline at 8:31PM PST on June 17, 2009 and came back online at 9:52PM PST on June 17, 2009.

Downtime: 1h 21min

This outage effected all accounts provisioned on cpanel1. If your account is provisioned on a different server your were not effected by this outage.

Cause: We are still investigating the root cause of the outage. The underlying cluster was operational, all host members of the cluster were operational, but the virtual machine (cpanel1) on the host member (AL03) was stuck in an unstable state. The virtual server could not be stopped, rebooted, or suspended. The guest OS was unresponsive and all attempts to gracefully shutdown the system complained of a running task. Eventually we had to force the host member of the cluster to reboot. We are investigating the root cause of this issue.

Well a new update was just released for Railo and we wanted to upgrade right away. There was a lot of buzz on the various lists of how long it took people to apply the update using the built in features in the Server Administrator, so we decided to time it.

It took only 39.5 seconds to apply the update. That is just incredible. I’ve been using ColdFusion since version 1.5, in fact back then we called it Cold Fusion, and have used various CFML engines during the past decade. But this built it upgrade process is the smoothest I have experience from any vendor.