Finding a new web host / game host
It’s time to find a new host. Our contract on the T1 expires in August. At the time we originally bought the T1 in 2003 the hosting situation was terrible. Mudservices had just gone under. We were at a point where standard server specs at the time struggled to keep up with the MUD so we needed to jump on every hardware upgrade at exorbitant prices.
It also seemed like a great idea to have the server right there, if anything went wrong with it there would be no waiting for a tech somewhere to decide to take a look. It was a great idea then, but now, having a 4 year old, I’m away a lot more. If you’re away for the weekend there’s no tech you can call to take a look at a server problem.
Then let’s look at the weather. In 2004 we were down for 2 full weeks after Hurricane Charley because power was out across most of Orlando. We would have been down again for 8 days then 5 days if we hadn’t temporarily moved the server to a backup provided by Dale at Wolfpaw. Anyone watching US news this year knows it has been a crazy weather season already.
For both security and performance reasons, I refuse to run anything but the MUD itself on the server itself. Because of this, we require multiple servers. This is main reason I didn’t go with hosting last time the contract came up for renewal - it gets expensive. We’ve reached a point where the machine specs you get for the price means we can get 2 more than adequate servers for not much more than the T1 cost, so that’s another reason to move ahead.
So, the server is moving. I’ve spent a lot of time researching web hosts, reading forum posts and got it narrowed down to LiquidWeb and SoftLayer. (Sidenote: if you ever have to do this, ignore the “top 10 host” type sites, they’re worthless. They’re all paid links and the highest bidder goes to #1). Players have been pinging these providers on and off and, in terms of ping times, they’re both about even. They’re also generally both much more responsive than the current link which makes sense; a fully redundant data center should beat a single T1.
As we’re going with two servers anyway, and the MUD / Website already run on different domains (Aardwolf.com and Aardmud.org) I’m going to get one server with each of these providers - one for web, builders/test ports, email and the second for the live MUD server itself. This means there should never be a time when both the website and the mud are unreachable. Moving the test ports in the next week or so and we’ll see how that goes…
It certainly sounds like you’ve done your homework, and you’ve always done right by the mud. Sounds like a pretty good plan!
Did you happen to look at Peer 1 Network while you were researching? I’m curious how they stacked up, since I’ve heard some really good things about them, but I guess that’d turn this into a Tech blog instead of an Aard blog.
Definitely seems like a good deal to me. Granted, I don’t pretend to know much about servers and the like, but the way you explain it, I would say this is all positive.
hmm although i dont know much abt these geeky stuffs, good luck in finding a new host! hope it’ll be good
I’m seeing a lot of good 2nd and 3rd party comments about Soft Layer across the internet. Sounds like a good company. Choosing a new one is always a really nervous thing for me.
You going to be running donations for this?
#2 : Technical is fine, part of the point is to be able to get into detail. Peer 1 weren’t on the list I started with. Hundreds of companies hosts out there so the starting list was somewhat arbitrary based on companies I’ve already heard of, forum posts, blogs, etc. Narrowed it down to those two who seemed to have what I wanted, or would have widened the starting list.
#5: Mirara, shouldn’t need to open them any earlier than was already planned. Costs are a little higher hosting two larges servers, but comparable. SoftLayer is significantly more expensive than Liquidweb for the same spec, but does seem to have the edge based on ping times and the peers into their Dallas data center.
Sounds good Lasher. I know all about hosting so if they do the thud factor with the MSA’s, SLA’s or SOW’s, let me know. I’m fairly good at deciphering them.
During the dot.com boom I was lured away from my UNIX Technical Director position at GE to become the eSystems Manager at HomePoint.com (buy me a bacon sammitch and I’ll tell you how we drove that $75MIL bus off the cliff). That to say this, I negotiated contracts, visited, and worked in multiple big name hosting/data centers. My selection criteria for choosing a new center was:
1. Does the site have multiple diverse routing for data ingress? In other words, I wanted to ensure that Quest (for instance) entered the building from the north, and AT&T from the south so that if one carrier’s SONET ring got backhoe’d the other seamlessly ensured uninterruped access.
2. I always visited the site and spent a day shadowing their tech staff, ensuring that I established a relationship with both the help desk manager, and NOC (Network Operations Center) people. If they weren’t organized enough to assign a real live breathing tech to me so that I could meet them, guage their competence, and buy them lunch… they weren’t organized enough.
3. Proximity is important, but not The Deciding Factor. If the data center is close enough for you to drive to it over the weekend and tinker with the hardware and/or software configuration (and their policy allows you to be “hands on” while retaining responsibility for the system), you’re going to be alot happier than if you have to fly to Denmark to try out a new NIC/driver config.
4. Ask for the last six months QOS (Quality of Service) report. If they aren’t at least four nines (99.99%) reliable, move on. Similarly, you want to talk to a minimum of five of their other customers and get their take on how good (or evil) the hoster is.
5. Environment: Fire suppression, how many emergency generators and how many days of fuel onsite, how often the generators and bus transfer mechanisms are tested (if they don’t shift the load at least monthly, move on), rated hours for the facility UPS, Air conditioning load, security, 24 hour manning, yada.
6. Don’t be afraid to negotiate. Incredibly, I found that every single data center/hosting facility had published rates and that people actually PAID the published rates. My strategy was to show up, meet everyone, make some friends, trade emails for a week, build anticipation with the salesman I was working with… then say I’d love to do business with them, but I just got a quote (and I made sure that I really did have a quote in hand) that was 20′ish% lower than theirs… what can you do for me? Now, AARD is considerably smaller than the dozens of servers I had, and your leverage may not be as convincing; but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Good luck! Fun times!! –Flat/Odd
Sounds like a good plan in the years since you switched to the T1 I’ve only ever experienced 1 major fit of lag an dthat was so bad I had to logoff for a while and play Portal. But I tend to run into an annoying half second lag occasionally with the T1 independant of the peak playing times. Hopefully moving to a high quality datacenter can alleviate that.
I have many dedicated servers at Liquidweb and the servers and their support are both fantastic. As a bit of irony, I found your site because I am considering adding a first server with Softlayer and am digging for comparisons. (I have a specific customer site that has triggered me trying to get ultra-low latency connectivity in Dallas.) The tail-end of my email address is my company name. Feel free to call the support number and ask for me if you would like some direct feedback on Liquidweb from a customer since Oct 2003.
Thanks,
Dave
Thanks for the comment Dave. It’s also great to see the blog reaching people interested on the subjects covered, even if they’re not directly interested in online RPGs.
Have been meaning to post a followup article to this, but the brief version is that we went with our test instance and website/mail server/etc at Liquidweb and the live server at Softlayer. So far (and it is early days in terms of judging long term stability) I have been very pleased with both.
Softlayer is more expensive (by around $100 per month on comparable setups) but their user tools are fantastic. The VPN in particular is excellent - I can connect to the softlayer VPN and get a direct console to the server on a 10 subnet address. The dashboards are more mature and they have full APMI monitoring. I can even mount a rescue disk remotely and boot to that then boot back into the normal server when I’m done. This may all be possible at LiquidWeb, but if so it is not very visible.
In terms of latency, around 200 users helped me by before we chose by sending in pings to both servers from all over the world and, on average, ping times to SL were lower, but both were excellent.
My (mostly anecdotal) perception at the moment is Liquidweb for “good enough” hosting / stability on an important service and Softlayer for the higher end critical stuff. We’d have probably been fine taking both servers with either, but I like the redundancy. If one of our ports are ever down the other should always be up. They both blow away LayeredTech btw, but that’s a whole different story (rant) for another day…
Thank you for both the comments. I’m pleased that you have had positive results with us and would love to hear what it would take to have us moved off of the “good enough” grouping and into the important service area group.
It’s not just about being elite it’s about providing what you guys want, and we’re always looking to improve our services to maximize your satisfaction.
Hi Brett, thanks for dropping by. As my post mentioned, both services have been perfect so far and it was merely “anecdotal perception”. I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Liquidweb to anyone based on what I have seen to date. I won’t feel like I’m really qualified to address stability until at least 6 months from now.
The perception part comes from Softlayer’s advanced admin toolset and the generally slightly lower latency to the Dallas data center. This is minor, both hosts are an improvement over our self-hosted T1 for most players.
“Good enough” may not have been the best choice of words for readers of the blog who don’t know me. Anyone who does know me (most of the readers are players of the game) already know that “good enough” is actually pretty damn good, because I’m picky like that
Did you ever think about hosting it yourself on your own home computer? And when you say host, are you refering to the website (http) or to the game itself, or to both? And how’s this coming along? Finalized?