Yeah, Matt and friends released another installment of WordPress, the script powering all my Blogs.

The latest version features full rearranging of the Admin area, lots of bug fixes, built in wordpress automatic upgrade etc. Hmm, more visible to the blogger than the user.

Check out this video for more details.

Matt have more details here.

Posted by Hemanth | Comments Off on All Blogs Upgraded to WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane”!

First of all some background info:

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I’m currently on a Servint VPS and decided to switch to a neat Softlayer dedi box ( Dual Quadcore Xenon 2 GHz & 4 GB RAM). The guys setup the server pretty fast and now it’s the time to transfer the sites.

I created a backup from WHM and FTPed it to my /home. Happily logined to my new server WHM and tried to import it. Bingo.. IT crashed at a ~2 GB MySQL DB import.

So I raised a a administrative support ticket ( $3/ticket) and those guys started working on it. Hmm.. 1 hr . 2 hr- 12 hrs.. .. No response. Atlast I went to bed and in the morning I see a note saying that we need to reboot your sever, should we proceed!!!!!!!!!!

Damn.. My forum is down for 24 hrs now. Then in that bad mood I raised a server cancellation request! A guys from the sales called me up and assured every thing will be sorted out.

To make their job easy I dumped my MySQL db alone and wgeted it to the new Softlayer server and raised another $3 support ticket to restore it. I specifically mentioned that no need of asking me to do anything on the server. Today morning another note in the new ticket, we need to run a diskcheck, should we proceed. Oh.. Man It’s been 10 hours after it and the DB is not yet restored.
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So here is my points:

1. I’m very impressed with Softlayer’s management portal, value for money and infrastructure.
2. Softlayer SHOULD treat new customers a little more fairly. My current mindset is to go back to old VPS if Softlayer issue a refund. But I’m in need of a good server so not going for now!
3. Should read the support tickets and value customers concerns over downtime. How can they simply go to bed adding a note to the call “Should we reboot your server”. Is losing 10’s of thousand visitors is a simple mistake?
4. More over why such a high spec server keep crashing on a 2 G mysql import. IS that size tooo large? If yes How can I effectively dump it?
5. What is the best way of switching host for a busy forum with 100’s of posts daily, minimizing post loss and dns prorogation downtime?

Update: After 2 days of downtime, lots of support call, mails and a telephone call the support guys over softlayer managed to restore the database. Thank god, at lasr we are back online.

Posted by Hemanth | 1 Comment »