Slicehost

We’ll be starting Xen upgrades in the next few days. You’ll be receiving an email with the date and time we plan to upgrade your server. Ideally, the downtime will be one reboot, as we shutdown and restart the box. If there’s a problem, we’ll roll back. Most importantly, if you compiled anything with our kernel, please get in touch with us, since the kernel will be upgraded in this maintenance. Check the forum discussion thread – as always, we’re open to questions and comments.

We think everyone will be quite pleased with this update, it addresses performance and scheduling on SMP machines. See this post for a benchmark comparing Slices on previous Xen versions.

When we launched Slicehost a few months ago, we knew the weakest part of our plans, when compared to similar products, was bandwidth. Since then, we’ve been working hard to remedy this and today are proud to announce increased limits across the board. The new limits are 100, 200 and 400GB for 256, 512 and 1024 slices respectively. And prices stay the same! A big thank you to our current customers for staying patient while we expanded. Enjoy ;)

Odd problem – some people are locked out of the chatroom while others are able to get in. We’ve confirmed the problem w/ 37signals and they are looking into it. Will update here when it is back up.

UPDATE – chatroom back up.

Details here, all mongrel users should update the gem immediately.

Server adriana is down at the moment, affecting about 16 Slices. If you cannot reach your Slice, this is likely the reason. We’re working hard to get it back up or onto a backup machine. We’ll keep everyone posted.

UPDATE I

Definitely a hardware failure: either CPU or RAM related. We moved all of the drives to another box and everyone is back online. We’ll keep monitoring the situation. Sorry for the outage to those on this server.

UPDATE II

It was a bad RAM module – and our run of poor memory luck continues. Replacement DIMMS on the way and the box will be worked back into production for new customers.

Ajax console access is disabled at the moment. We’re making some changes to the code for security reasons. We’ll update here when it is back online.

UPDATE 10/23 5pm

Console is back up now. Better session handling now in place. Let us know if you have any difficulties.

We had more trouble today with a circuit that blew this evening while we were at the NOC installing new hardware and investigating the previous circuit trouble. Customers on 4 servers were restarted and down approximately 5-10 minutes. The web server was also on this circuit and we didn’t restart Apache for a good half hour by mistake, so this outage may have appeared longer than it actually was.

We are terribly sorry for this happening twice in the same week and are working diligently to solve the problem. Thanks for your support. Please contact us with any questions.

Don’t forget, a bit of downtime in a couple hours while we’re rebooting and installing some network equipment. We’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE – completed around 1145 CST. Total downtime under 3 minutes.

We sold out over the weekend due to a shipping snafu. New servers are now in place and we’re taking Slices and upgrades once again.

6 servers (one being the web server) were rebooted after a rack outlet we plugged into got fried. We quickly moved everyone to another outlet. Total downtime was about 3-5 minutes depending on how quickly we restarted your Slice. Please contact us if you are having any problems and apologies for the downtime.

Apologies to anyone looking to buy a 512 or 1024 slice at the moment. We had an order of new servers coming in Friday, all scheduled for deployment this weekend. The shipping got delayed, so sadly you’ll have to wait until Monday afternoon. Email if you’d like to reserve space on the new boxes.

UPDATE: sold out of everything at the moment, we’re building the new servers as we speak and they’ll be at the NOC later today. Sorry for the delay.

UPDATE 2: open for business, servers installed and more on the way.

The ajax SSH console in SliceManager has been acting funky today, so we’ve taken it down to track squash a few bugs. Hopefully back up in the morning – please use SSH to access your Slice in the meantime.

UPDATE: back online at 2340 CST.

Brief network outage scheduled for next Wednesday, 10-11-2006. Less than 5 minutes total, please let us know if you have objections or requests for specific time windows. Post here are in the forum thread.