Head Guru

It could be just nothing....

Could this be the beginning of another large announcement?

TotalChoice IRC We wanted to expand on our forums, I mean afterall the TCH family forums are just the greatest place. As you know we spend hours at the PC and on VOIP providing live support and help desk support to thousands of clients. We wanted to further this and allow clients, newbies and such commingle with each other. So we have created our own IRC service. irc.totalchoicehosting.com Please use port 6667 and join the channel #totalchoice Out techs, managers, vendors and heck even the owner of TCH, will be hanging out in IRC chatting away. What is IRC? It stands for Internet Relay Chat. Here is a good howto : http://www.mirc.com/irc.html

Yes, thats correct. These backups create virtually no load on the servers.

Here are some photos of the first backup server we put into production.

Announcement is here... http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forums/i...showtopic=30894

Without Further delay: January 8, 2007 NEW BACKUP POLICY: As our client base has grown over the years we have struggled with the ever growing task of keeping archival backups of our clients' data. Whilst our Terms of Service clearly states that data preservation is the ultimate responsibility of the client, we knew it was time to take this one step further. Most of you still know that TCH is a family owned business. We are still a small business run by a close knit family of truly dedicated professionals. Whilst providing budget hosting services since 1999 we have learned that the hosting client has started to demand more and more from their hosting provider. While TCH may be a small family owned company, we are not sitting back on our laurels. In the past we have maintained our backups on a weekly interval (as a balance between load on the server, and providing regular backups). This meant that our local backups would run once per week, normally on a Saturday or Sunday. This could mean days of loss of data during a catastrophic disk failure. This policy was put into place mainly to control our server loads during the disk intensive cPanel backups. This limitation presented itself to us merely based on the fact that we were using the standard cPanel backup software provided to us by cPanel. Several months ago we ran into a issue with when our level 3 staff upgraded the driver software on several of of RAID servers. This led to corrupt RAID array drivers on several servers and meant a complete restore on these servers at short notice. In some cases we were forced to use backups that were 6 or 7 days old. Many clients were understandably upset over the loss and of data and voiced their concerns through live chat, the help desk and personal phone calls to myself about the data loss. I knew something had to be done at that point. I also knew that any step forward in this area would mean a very large dollar investment into new hardware and software, but it was something I felt had to be done. I also knew that I wanted to do something that no other large budget hosting provider was doing. We started investigating several newer technologies. After reviewing several products we finally signed a deal with a major backup software company and have been progressing with implementing our new backup standards. TCH has been a strong advocate of colocating servers in our private cages in several data centers around the USA. This is a fantastic plan, unique to TotalChoice Hosting and has been the backbone of our success. Not having all our eggs in one basket so to speak. However, this advance in hosting theory has resulted in a small delay in implementing our new backup plan, as we are forced to build up several backup servers, one or two for each colo cage. We have completed the buildup and implementation of our first of five internal remote based backup servers. For you geeks out there here are the specs on our first backup server: Supermicro Hot Swap 4U Chassis SC836TQ-R800V Supermicro Motherboard X7DVL-E X7DVL-E 2X Intel Woodcrest Xeon's 6GBRAM 16X 500GB Hard Drives for a total of 6.5TB of Raid Storage. Areca Raid Controller Card ARC-1160 Our new backup's feature the following: 1. Sector based backup NOT file based backup. Sector based backups create 150% less I/O loads and complete 2000% faster. 2. High Performance Sector based backups increase throughput and reduce overhead. Servers can be fully operational with minimal performance impact during backups. Backups can usually be performed at any time, even on busy servers. 3. Small Backup Windows Only changed disk sectors are copied between backups. Incremental backups can now be completed in minutes. 4. Open File Backups A total solution including built-in support for backing up open files. NO 3rd party software is required. 5. Snapshots Technology that provides consistent point-in-time system-wide backup images. 6. Nearly Continuous Data Protection During normal host operation, the Backup Agent keeps a journal of disk changes. Incremental backups know what sectors on the disk have changed before the backup operation even starts. This eliminates the need for file-by-file or block-by-block comparisons every backup. 7. End-to-end strong encryption Data is continuously encrypted while in storage and during network transmission using RSA keys. Decryption during a restore is only possible when the encryption key holder enters their pass phrase. 8. Data Integrity During backup and restore data is verified using MD5 checksums. I am so very proud to announce the following service enhancement. I have put my heart and soul into this project and TCH has invested many dollars into this project. Effective 12/28/2006 TCH has started to roll out a new data backup system to our server farm. The following servers are now being fully backed up every 12 hours! We are keeping 7 days worth of incremental rotations for each server. This means that you will have 14 backup archives (2 backups per day) or seven days of your data at your disposal. Each new backup beyond the 14 rotations will mean the oldest rotation in that backup set is deleted. The following servers are now included in the new backup system. db server1 server117 server118 server119 server120 server121 server122 server123 Server3124 server125 server126 server127 server128 server320 server329 server345 server366 server369 server384 server386 server387 server364 server365 server374 server379 server381 server390 server301 server302 bala server335 As we roll more servers into this new backup system we will update the thread located here: http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forums/i...mp;#entry198230 Server Monitoring Upgrades Effective 1/8/2006 we have started to implement our latest enhancement to our server monitoring system. This new monitoring server is in house however we are going to allow client access to this monitoring page as we always have in the past. The monitoring software is in production and you can view the server monitoring pages by navigating to our status site located at http://www.tchstatus.com We are very pleased to announce that there will be a new page that will assist customers in determining the server their hosting account is located on. This page is located here: http://www.tchstatus.com/whatsmyserver.php Server Uptime Numbers Everyone has asked for this and finally after many delays I am very proud to announce that we have made available to all our clients the uptime statistics. New features will include. 1. Individual server uptime stats 2. Total Accumulative uptime stats for TCH Server farm. 3. Uptime by month 4. Uptime by year You can review all our servers’ uptime, including your very own server at the following location. http://www.tchstatus.com/uptime.html Site Builder Everyone has asked for it, so TCH steps up to the plate and hits a home run. Effective 1st March 2007 all hosting accounts new and existing will include a online html site builder. We have narrowed the field down to two programs and have been testing both for the past weeks. I am sure you will be pleased when we roll this new addition to our service offerings. TotalChoice IRC We wanted to expand on our forums, I mean afterall the TCH family forums are just the greatest place. As you know we spend hours at the PC and on VOIP providing live support and help desk support to thousands of clients. We wanted to further this and allow clients, newbies and such commingle with each other. So we have created our own IRC service. irc.totalchoicehosting.com Please use port 6667 and join the channel #totalchoice Out techs, managers, vendors and heck even the owner of TCH, will be hanging out in IRC chatting away. What is IRC? It stands for Internet Relay Chat. Here is a good howto : http://www.mirc.com/irc.html

LOL - I love TCH forums. Ok guys and gals. The staff and I are planning the announcement around 11pm EST. We are trying to finish up some work on one of the topics in the announcement. Talk about down to the wire eh?

booo

I actually have been a TheBat! user for several years. I have recently dumped the email client due to these type of problems. The only reason the secure cert would change on the server is if EXIM was rebuilt, and I doubt that has occured as many times as your seeing.

Announcement will be made on Monday January 8th, 2007

We do not allow proxies on our networks. Sorry.

YES 4 NO NO

and look at the TCH server, just humming along. :tchrocks!:

Very well done. Merry Christmas Dave!

I have removed the avatar from your profile, when you schedule permits you can add it back.

I see you talking click, but all I hear is blah....blah....blah...blah...blah....blah... This post has NOTHING to do with view counts or page counts or hits or whatever. This thread was taken off topic by another poster and your post continues to be off topic.

I would not post such information on the forums, as it is confidential. If I told you , then it would not be a top tch secret.

Well you have already gone , why stop now? Perhaps you were not online in late october when the forums saw 6K unique visitors? Where is the rule written that says one most post to be online? I dont recall the day in october but at one point we had 700+ users browsing the forums. Besides, what do I know, I only see the SQL usage that these forums take on Oh and by the way, since you visit here so much ; can you please fix your avatar or pm a mod to have it fixed. The little red X is driving me nuts.

Well thats not actually factual. The forums have nearly 9K members, over 70% of them are active members. The forums receive nearly 100K page views per week. I am not sure why you think all our forum members are no longer here

Almost 9,000 members of the forums and we can only gather 261 topic views?

Ruby on who?

As the topic says, we are looking for feedback on ways that we can improve our hosting services to our clients. Please feel free to opine after you have voted. Do no hold anything back, let us know your true feelings here, nothing will be censored in this post. Bill

Well I am not Santa, but I think this announcement will make many TCH clients very very happy.

Largest announcement in the history of TotalChoice will be released very soon. This is big and will effect every customer of TotalChoice. I know your going to all love this announcement!! Stay tuned