Unfortunate Downtime (Future)
 

OK, for reasons I do not wish to go into full detain at this moment, there will be a temporary loss of service in the near future. The down time will/should be limited to roughly no more than a 4 hours and I will try to accomplish this in the early morning hours. The server will be moved (although this was not the original plans) and a new high speed pipe must be connected. This could happen as early as Wednesday (Aug 1) or anytime afterwards. When the new IP address is recieved, I will post it here with connection notes until the DNS servers around the world roll over to the new address. The name will still be the same, just the server physical location and IP address will change. Once everything is done, the move should be fairly transparrent to old times. I will know more on Monday after speaking to Qwack (Qwest) represatives. I assure you this is and will be as much if not MUCH more hassle for me as it will be for you all. I am not moving the server due to my own personal move. It is for other reasons as well as the saftey, security, and the future of the the SVX Network. I hope nothing major is needed and I will keep you all informed. The optimal goal here is to accomplish this with the least ammount of noticable down time and user grief.

Thanks,
Chris
(SVX Admin)

Go ahead with the move chris. And thanks for the warning in advance. From one sysadmin to another, I know what you mean. I hate moving servers too. Good Luck!

Lwin

Sys-admin Help
 

Chris,
This is WAY of topic, but I don't know who to ask.

My wife is creating/writing? a web site. She has most of it done and she would like to start to post/host it. She bought a name www.ourbrook.org already. We paid for five years... though I really don't understand why the yearly rate and what happens after that five years.

Where can we go to get this web hosted? Our service provider seems to want an awful lot of money to host per month. I don't think her 'site' will be huge but there will be pictures and many pages are completed.

We've never done this before and any suggestions/help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Jeff

Web host
 

Well, my suggestion would be to look at http://www.qwk.net and or call Travis at business line 208-342-4062. Tell him what you are looking for and or what you want and I am fairly sure he will undercut other offers. His servers are VERY stable and he has been doing this for over three years. Tell him that the SVX network sent ya :)

Good luck
Chris

Re: Sys-admin Help
 

Well a few questions...here are my answers....

The yearly name thing is paid for a few reasons. For example I used to be the head admin at www.kbkids.com , the biggest competition at the time was www.etoys.com. However KB eventually bought them out and now owns the name. Most people who would shop at etoys now are for brought to kb to buy toys. Now what happens is, that name has to be sent all over the world so when you go to www.kbkids.com you are sent to the website, from virutally everywhere on earth.

You pay a fee to the internic or your registrar (the place you bought the name from) to make this maintenance around the world for you. If you make changes to where your servers are etc, they will update worldwide this information for you.

Now the way names work is on a yearly basis. You bought for 5 years. This will guarantee that you own that name for the next 5 years and no one can try to register it. However at the end of 5 years you are on your own. A good registrar will send you notice or at least tell you when this is coming up. You can renew more time whenever you like so you never have to worry about losing the name. However if you forget to register, or leave it past the date then the name is available to anyone. Many people do this for profit acutally. Many companies do not realize that their name is running out and do not renew. A person watching this could buy the name first. Then they offer you the name back for a large amount of money. :)

Anyways...as for the hosting, depending on your computer knowledge...I would almost do it yourself. Or possibly hire a private computer contractor to set it up for you. You can do this fine with just about any fast internet connection (DSL is much better) for a fraction of what a service provider may charge. If you don't expect a large amount of traffic, I would suggest this route. On the other hand, if you expect a lot of people logging in (be serious here, we are talking thousands of people a month) you may want to go elsewhere for hosting.

My main website (www.ryanmacdonald.com), and 5 others that myself and my family own are running on my cable modem. This runs on a Pentium 100 machine that I had about 6 years ago. The whole machine probably costs about $80 now and it does a fine job with all the email, traffic, and downloads it handles.

Good luck, and if you need some help shoot me an email ryan@ryanmacdonald.com

Ryan

Thanks Ryan
 

Thanks for the feedback. I don't really want to deal with hosting this myself. I'll probably go the service provider's route. I hardly ever use my computer at home and then only do pay bills. I know I couldn't deal with the extra phone line and firewalls and all that stuff.