Planned Website Maintenance

We would like to announce a short maintenance window tomorrow; Sunday, September 1, 2013, between 12:00 - 01:00 PM EDT while we prepare the launch of our new Magento hosting packages. The main website www.properhost.com may be partially or completely unavailable during this timeframe.

No client sites or services will be affected by this maintenance.

We at ProperHost are excited to announce a brand new technological platform for our Magento optimized hosting, which will be rolled out in the coming weeks. The new platform is completely redesigned from the ground up to significantly improve the performance and reliability of our hosting services. In this announcement we will describe the major upgrades and improvements that have been implemented.

Bigger Hardware

Powered by dual Intel® Xeon® E5 processors, featuring 12 cores of raw processing power; we have definitely not taken the cheap road when building the servers for our new platform. Each server is equipped with at least 32 GB of DDR3 RAM, allowing database savvy applications such as Magento to benefit from extensive MySQL query caching and more.

RAID10 SSD Storage: Faster Speeds, Added Redundancy

One of the largest bottlenecks in today’s web servers are IO processing, such as reading from a database or writing to the file system. That’s why we have replaced the older SATA disks with ultrafast Solid State Disks (SSD) in our servers, configured in a RAID 10 setup for additional performance gain and redundancy. Tests reveal that this upgrade alone improves page loading times considerably. Furthermore, by mirroring each disk in a RAID 10 array your data is protected by an additional layer of redundancy. Basically, this means that if one disk goes bad, no downtime will occur while we hot-swap a new disk and rebuild the RAID array.

Introducing CloudLinux and CageFS

With traditional shared hosting, if one customer is using an unfair amount of resources (e.g. due to being under a DDoS attack, poorly written script, etc.), the server would become painfully slow or go down, affecting all other customers on the server. With CloudLinux, we are able to isolate the impact to the offending tenant only, while all other sites remain unaffected.

CloudLinux improves the general stability of the server by imposing limits on the amount of resources each customer gets. As a result, if one of the sites is hogging resources, that site will reach a hard limit in resources preventing all other sites on the same server from going down.

It is important to understand that these limits are put in place to protect against abusers, and not in any way restrict normal usage of the server. Customers’ should not expect a degrade in performance because of this, but rather see the reliability and stability improve over time.

In addition, CloudLinux includes CageFS – a virtualized per-user file system that encapsulates each customer, preventing users from seeing each other and viewing sensitive information. CageFS offers complete isolation and prevents a large number of attacks, such as privilege escalation and information disclosure attacks.

Exceptional Database Performance with Percona Server

Percona Server is an enhanced, drop-in MySQL replacement which offers breakthrough performance, scalability, features, and instrumentation. With Percona , queries run faster and more consistently.

We have run extensive tests on Percona Server compared to MySQL over the last couple of months, and we are really amazed by the results, especially in combination with our ultrafast SSD RAID10 storage setup. We are looking forward to passing these improvements onto our customers.

LiteSpeed Page Cache

We are now deploying LiteSpeed Page Cache on our Magento hosting servers, an efficient output cache for dynamic contents, similar to Varnish cache. LiteSpeed Cache can reduce page loading times in order of magnitudes by eliminating the need to query the database or read from the file system, as frequently accessed data can be cached and retrieved directly from RAM. The cache can be configured independently for different web sites, making it possible to turn it off for certain applications for backwards compatibility.

APC PHP Cache

APC is an opcode cache which optimizes and improves the performance of PHP. It is also compatible with Magento’s fast backend cache. APC will be available on our new servers.

Memcached

We are pleased to offer the popular Memcached in-memory object cache on our new server platform. Memcached is a free and open-source, high-performance, distributed memory caching system intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications. Memcached can be used in conjunction with Magento’s slow backend cache to alleviate database load and speed up page loads.

More information coming soon

We are really excited about these changes, which mark the start of a new era in our Magento optimized hosting offerings. All existing clients on our Magento hosting plans will be moved to the new platform in the coming weeks. Further information and details regarding the transfer will be released shortly.

If you have any questions regarding this announcement or other questions, please do not hesitate to contact our support department.

With compliments,

ProperHost Management

Update: the problem has been fixed and all services should be back online. If you experience any problems please contact our support.

We have a problem with our main dns server this morning which is affecting a number of our services, including www and email. We hope to have it fixed shortly.

We are sorry for the inconvenience caused by this.

The previously announced upgrade to our support center software has now been completed.

If you notice any errors or strange behavior, please open a support ticket or email support [AT] properhost.net.

Thank you for your understanding.

Update: the problems have been resolved and the server is now back online.

The server is currently down while we perform maintenance on a failed disk drive.

The server is showing signs of a failing hard drive, so we need to replace it and rescue the data onto a new disk drive. This will take a few hours depending on how much data and how damaged the disk is. We understand the problems this is causing for you, but unfortunately we cannot plan for unexpected hardware failures.

We are sorry for the inconvenience.