It means the DNS change for this domain has propogated to your ISP. The move of all my sites from two servers at NAC and one at LayeredTech to two brand-new servers at SoftLayer is under way. As is the process of putting all 40+ websites under version control at a third location. Read on for my experience with SoftLayer and the move.

So far, SoftLayer has done everything right. That’s not something I can say about any of the companies I’ve bought hosting services from before. NAC has treated me well, but their websites and control panel are a mess. LayeredTech runs two or three separate customer areas cobbled together to provide only half of what you’d expect from a company renting servers.

Tuesday afternoon I placed the first order for the server that will host the majority of my sites. It’s replacing a Celeron 2.0 system with 1GB of memory and an 80GB hard drive, and an Intel P4 3.0 HT system with 1GB and a 160GB hard drive. The new box sports a dual-core AMD Opteron 1216 (2.4GHz, 2×1MB cache, 1000MHz HT) with 2GB registered DDR2 and a 250GB SATA II drive. Neither of the servers it will replace is under much load, so this should provide ample resources and room for growth.

Within 15 minutes of placing the order, I was called by a SoftLayer sales rep (not coincidentally one of the two I talked to through Live Chat several times the day before with a few questions). Immediately after confirming the order and my payment information, two new mails showed up in my inbox welcoming me to SoftLayer. The first confirmed my order was approved and that I’d be informed when the server had been provisioned. The second welcomed me to SoftLayer, provided me with access to the customer area, and included a PDF guide “Welcome to SoftLayer - The First 48 Hours Guide”. The document introduced me to the extremely powerful and well-thought-out customer area, the workings of SoftLayer’s private network, and the other resources SoftLayer could provide should I need assistance.

An hour and a half later, the server was built and installed, ready to go. I spent a few hours going through all the things I do when I set up a new server, then started the move. The first step in moving each site, unlike the last few times I’ve done this, was to put it under version control.

For that, I purchased a Team account at CVSDude. While I already had a subversion server running with a few repositories, using CVSDude instead doubles the benefit of putting things under version control by backing them up off-site as well. With the setup I had, I could potentially lose the sites and the repository at the same time. Now losing one would leave another copy to restore from, although I would hope CVSDude would never lose my repositories.

The full process is fairly simple and is still under way: Pick a site, create a new repository at CVSDude, import the site into the repository, create the account and domain on the new server, check out the repository into the account there, copy any databases over, and update nameservers for the domain.

After giving it a few days to make sure everything was “right” with SoftLayer, I ordered the second server which will eventually host W3Counter. Right now, that site sits alone on a dual-core AMD Opteron 280 server with 2GB of RAM and a 200GB hard drive (with a few bad sectors already that wiped out two users’ stats).

The replacement for that is a good bit beefier than the server handling the other 40 or so sites:

• SuperMicro H8DMRI-2 motherboard
• Dual AMD Opteron 2212HE dual-core processors (4 cores, 4×1MB cache)
• 4GB registered DDR2
• Western Digital Caviar 250GB SATA II disk

The total cost for the two servers and the repository hosting is about $36 more per month than what I pay now for three servers. I think the additional breathing room, the backups, and the peace of mind of leaving LayeredTech are worth the cost increase.

P.S. One of the more impressive features of SoftLayer’s modern, private data center is their dual network. Every server has two NIC cards; one faces the public network to connect to the outside internet, and one faces their private internal network, which customers get VPN access to. There are a couple of major benefits to this: you can keep servers even more secure by only allowing administrative access over the private network; server-to-server communication is faster, more secure, and at no bandwidth costs; SoftLayer provides its own OS/software updates, patches, and yum/up2date repositories for customers within the private network to help keep servers secure and up to date with ultra high-speed downloads and no bandwidth costs.

Occasionally a server could be breached through a software vulnerability or even administrator negligence. If a server starts acting maliciously (such as participating in a DOS attack) or starts sending out SPAM, most providers will cut off network access for the server until the problem can be rectified. But that cuts off access to the administrator as well, keeping the server and all the sites or services it hosts offline. At SoftLayer, only the public port needs to be disabled to remove a server from the internet, leaving the owner full access through the private network to fix the problem.