Harnessing the grid

An update follows at the bottom of this post.

The hyalineskies host and one of the coolest hosting companies on the web, Media Temple, is offering all shared server sites an upgrade to their new (gs) Grid Server package if us shared server folks want to migrate. After looking at the benefits, it’s hard for me to say no. Because of this, I’m scheduling off some downtime on Friday evening at about 2:00 Eastern Daylight Time on Friday, 20 October 2006 (That’s 2am on Thursday for you night owls.) While I’d rather not be bashing around with my server at 2am on the night when I usually go out with friends, it’s the earliest available time for me and the time with the least amount of traffic for hyalineskies. The downtime should be no longer than twenty minutes, but I wanted to make sure that I gave a heads-up in case something goes awry.

So what’s so cool about this grid thing, anyway?

Unlike a common shared solution, in which my site is hosted on a single server with a bunch of other sites, the grid server is actually, well, hundreds of servers. When an article is dugg, something hits del.icio.us/popular, or the like, and hyalineskies sees a massive traffic spike, instead of one server taking all the load, hundreds of them divide it up equally. The grid system will keep hyalineskies from failing miserably under most conditions, and because of this, the site will be much more reliable.

One of the reasons why I left my cheap plan at DreamHost and moved to Media Temple was because Dreamhost’s shared servers had a massive failure back in early August, leaving hyalineskies down for days at the expense of readers. Instead of being responsive and moving those that were on the crippled servers to new ones, the DreamHost team just left us there to rot, with little care for what had just happened. I called MediaTemple after I got a “sorry, we’re not doing anything” message from Dreamhost and began to migrate the entire hyalineskies system to Media Temple. I was saddened that the Media Temple control panel had less features, mySQL was stuck at a nasty version 3.23, and I’d have no Ruby on Rails support, but hey, I’d sacrifice a bit of geeky performance and capability to keep the site alive (and have a human to talk to on the phone 24×7 if something went down hard.)

While I’m glad that the server’s been super-reliable for the past few months thanks to Media Temple, it’s time for me to regain some of those geeky features. The (gs) Grid Server has mySQL 4.1.11, PHP 5, and crazy container-based memory management for Ruby on Rails. My 2GB of disk space is going to jump up to 100GB, and my bandwidth is increasing to a full terabyte from 30GB. While hyalineskies currently only pulls about 6GB of bandwidth a month, if any larger data packages get sent through the tubes of the Internet in the future, the server will be ready. Meanwhile, the redundancy of the grid system will keep hardware failures (like the one I had at DreamHost) from almost never occurring, as the whole grid would have to die to have hyalineskies go down.

So what changes?

On the frontend, you shouldn’t see a single glitch or change to hyalineskies, but I might as well let everybody in on some changes coming up soon. As part of my pitch to enter the 9rules Network, I’ll be adding some more design geekery to some neglected sections of the Aerial template, as well as bringing back some WordPress software in a newly-redesigned WordPress repository section of hyalineskies, dubbed the WordPress Hangar. You might just see a few new WordPress themes while you’re at it. While I enjoy writing the theory that graces First Class entries, it seems that most readers want more geeky tools and knowledge on how to build certain things, so I’m working on some new Pilot Training articles as well as more downloadable tools. The majority of those changes should roll out over the weekend as well; so stay tuned.


Update It turns out that Media Temple’s migration systems are taking longer than expected. You should notice no glitches for the most part, aside from a few minutes of downtime sometime in the afternoon on Friday 20 October. DNS takes twelve hours to transfer from the old shared system to the new grid; from there I will migrate the databases and the rest of the site data.

Second Update hyalineskies is now successfully on the grid. This plan is actually cheaper than my old one, so I’m saving some money, too.