State Of Site5 February 1st 2010

Just like we do every month, we’re taking a moment to update everyone on the State of Site5. As usual we’ll tell you what’s been happening since our last update, and what we’ve got coming ahead this month and next.

First, we started the first migrations of our existing shared boxes to our new central mail system. We have done two live tests so far and the results are looking good, we have a few more tests and then we will slowly be rolling this out to all our servers. Our goal is to make this process as near to 100% seamless as possible, unfortuntly there are a few rare mail setups that might cause a problem. We will be giving our customer’s plenty of notice, explaining these very rare circumstances and helping you to fix them if needed. Site5 knows how important email is and we will do our best to ensure there is no disruption.

Second, Redundant Hosting is almost ready for launch and is coming this month! To learn more about this new product head on over to Defeat Downtime for a short FAQ and to sign up for a special pre-launch coupon!

Third, testing is continuing with VPS hosting and we hope to have that ready for launch in March. We are still testing a number of different configurations and will announce more info in the coming months.

Fourth, we have an update coming soon for BackStage to improve performance along with a slight update to the UI. These improvements are part of the coming update for SiteAdmin, which we are aiming to have ready in early March.

As always feel free to email me with any questions at Ben@Site5.com or post on his forum post!

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State Of Site5 For December 1st 2009

Every month we post a State of Site5 here on our blog to go over what we have been working on the last month and what we have planned for the next month. You can view all the past State of Site5 posts here. Please leave any comments here on the blog or in the official forum post.

New Help Desk
As you know we launched our new customer help desk last month and I finally have some screenshots and details for everyone!

The first is the home screen followed by an example ticket and what it looks like internally. The personal information has been removed of course.

The new system has a ton of improvements that help our staff do their jobs easily and efficiently! We have a lot more plans to improve and tweak the help desk throughout the year. Most of these changes won’t be visible to customers, but they are all aimed at making the support we provide faster, more accurate, and making us better able to recognize patterns, and problems even faster than ever.

New SiteAdmin Interface And Backend
We are working hard on upgrading SiteAdmin’s core backend to include a lot of new features and we also are working to update the user interface. We are going to start testing the new interface and features by the end of this month and we will post updates here as we get closer to launch.

The first screenshot is the interface if someone is logged into BackStage. The second shows what it will look like if they log directly into SiteAdmin. Keep in mind this is still being developed, and a lot of improvements and changes are still coming. That being said, I would welcome any feedback or suggestions in the comments or official forum post.

Redundant Hosting
We are still hard at work on this new product and are now in the final stages of testing our virtualizaing software! We are aiming for a launch date of January 15th and I will have more information on that later this month. This is the same technology we will use in our planned VPS product, so after this Redundant Hosting is released, VPS will be soon to follow!

Please comment on this blog post or on this forum post if you have any requests, comments, or want to share your thoughts. We’d love to hear from you! My email is always open as well, so feel free to email me at Ben@Site5.com.

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State Of Site5 For November 1st 2009

Every three months we post a State of Site5 blog post to outline the changes we have made over the last three months and what we have planned for the next three months. Starting this month we are going to change the frequency of these posts and start making a State of Site5 post once a month to keep everyone updated with what we are working on.

This State of Site5 marks the 1 year anniversary since Joel and I took over Site5 and I hope everyone is happy with the changes! You can view the past blog posts on what the Site5 team has been working on here, and we’re excited to tell you we have a lot more planned for the coming year!

First, here’s what we have been working on over the last three months:

1. We will be launching our new customer support desk this week! This is one of the bigger projects we have been working on this year and it allows us to improve support in a number of ways. For the launch it will improve our staff’s efficiency, allow us to track performance better, and hundreds of little tweaks that will streamline our support process to make it faster and more accurate than ever. Later this month we will post screenshots and more details so you can see the insides of this project. Over the next 12 months we will be improving the support desk even further to give our customers more details on what is going on with their tickets, how many are waiting in the queue, and a lot better tracking of repeating server issues, etc.
2. We launched our new central mail system about one month ago which is another monster project we have been working on! Currently it is live for all new clients since October 1st and we are using this time to make sure everything is running correctly and fix any issues that come up. So far we have only had a few issues with mailman which were fixed right away and everything is looking fantastic! We will continue this live testing for the coming months and, once we are satisfied that it’s ready, we will be announcing our the schedule for switching our existing user’s to this setup. I will make a dedicated post with further information on the mail migration when we are ready. Our goal is to make this migration 100% seamless for our clients.So what benefits does this central mail system give our clients? Here are some of the biggest:
   • If your web server is down due to a problem your email will still be up since it is running off separate hardware.
   • Increased spam filtering options for both incoming and outgoing mail. This makes it a lot easier to prevent any blacklisting or disruptions for our customers.
   • Email services on a separate hardware grouping means less load on web servers.
   • Very high level of hardware and software redundancy for the email system to prevent any data loss or problems for our customer’s email.
   • Increased customization of our webmail system to give our customer’s a better UI and options!
   • And a lot more!
3. We also have been working hard to improve the Site5 website so that it is easier to navigate to what you need. We also added a page on Site5’s green web hosting so you can see how we are an environmentally friendly hosting company.
4. Over the last three months we have hired 6 new staff members! We would like to welcome Jeremy, Ben, Maria, Orien, Gabi, and Charles to the Site5 team!
5. Server issues have stayed low except for a bug we found in our kernel this month that caused a lot of reboots. That is now fixed and there should be no further issues with that. You can read further information from our COO and CTO on that issue in our forum here.
6. We also have a number of odds and ends we would like to mention! For our U.S. customers we now offer Google Adwords advertising credits and as soon as Google has the same offer for our international clients we will set that up. We also now offer the WHMCS billing solution for our resellers for only $10 dollars a month. Just email sales if you are interested in that option.

For the next month we are going to be working on quite a bit, here are some details:

1. We are working on upgrading SiteAdmin to include a lot of new features including an upgrade to the file manager and a lot more! We are testing these and should have them deployed by the end of the month. After this update is out, we will be improving the UI of SiteAdmin and doing all we can to give our customers the tools they need.
2. We are testing hardware and software now for our VPS and redundant hosting solutions, and those tests will continue over the next month. We hope to have further information on this later this month as well as some concrete dates to give out.

Please comment on this blog post or on this forum post if you have any requests, comments, or want to share your thoughts. We’d love to hear from you! My email is always open as well, so feel free to email me at Ben@Site5.com.

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State Of Site5 For August 1st 2009

Every three months we post a State of Site5 blog post to outline the changes we have made over the last three months and what we have planned for the next three months.

I’m happy to report over the last three months a lot of changes have been made and I hope all our customers are seeing the positive results! Here is what we have completed over the last three months:

1. A lot of the changes we have made over the previous three months have been on the backend and you can see the results of those improvements by how rare server problems have become:

   Site5 Server Issues by Month
   

   The spike in March was from the large reseller migration we did that put some strain on the servers. We will continue to improve, and our goal is to stop all downtime that is not scheduled maintenance.

2. The reseller migration we mentioned in the last State of Site5 was finished and 100% of our servers are now on the new backup system. These were both 99% completed in May but just wanted to make sure everyone knew!
3. We will be offering all our customers a new Site Builder tool later this week. This is free of charge for shared and reseller clients.
4. Site5 has hired six new team members. I’d like to welcome Mark, Rob, Andy, Anthony, Dawn, and Tim to Site5!
5. We added the Phython Image Library to all our servers. I’d like to remind everyone that if there is something you want to please email me at Ben@Site5.com or support at Support@Site5.com. That doesn’t mean we can add everything, but we will try!

For the next three months we have a lot planned for Site5 customers:

1. Work continues on our custom support desk; it is currently being tested and tweaked. We hope to have it deployed sometime in the next three months.
2. Our central mail system for shared clients is in testing stages and, over the next three months, we will be deploying that. It is going to allow us to screen for and stop a lot more spam, increase mail redundancy, and a lot more!
3. We will be rolling out an update for SiteAdmin to bring it up to date with things like a new File Manager and a lot of other features!
4. We will be rolling out updates to Backstage to allow our clients to do a number of accounting functions much more easily. We will also be building an area where you can easily order addons like SSL certificates, etc.
5. Our Redundant Hosting product will be launched in late September. We will email all our customers when that is ready as they are going to get a sneak peak and a big discount!

Please comment on this blog post or on this forum post if you have any requests, comments, or want to share your thoughts. We’d love to hear from you! My email is always open as well, so feel free to email me at Ben@Site5.com.

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State of Site5 For May 1st 2009

This State of Site5 marks 6 months since Joel and myself became the owners of Site5. I hope you are happy with the improvements made so far and want you to know that more are coming! Below we will outline what we have been working on the last three months and our plans for the next three months.

Over the last three months we have been working to finish improvements to the hardware infrastructure at Site5, the dependability of servers, and increase the response time and quality of customer service.

1. In april we upgraded all the remaining servers with 4GB memory to 8GB memory. This, along with tweaking and system changes will help increase the performance and dependability of the server fleet.
2. All the software used on Site5 servers is now fully up to date and we have a change management plan in place to deploy any future updates after testing them thoroughly. This means that PHP, Python, Ruby, Apache, MySQL and all others will stay up to date with the latest stable releases.
3. We have hired three new employees to join the Site5 team over the last three months! Please join me in welcoming David, Meilena, and Corey! They are already doing a spectacular job helping customers!
4. The new backup system is being used on 99% of all servers and will be on 100% by the end of May. Over the next months we will be expanding backups from storing just a nightly backup to storing a weekly and a nightly backup.
5. We are almost done with the migration of 1,500 reseller accounts from old servers to brand new servers to match the rest of our resellers. This project will be finished in late May and resellers who are part of the move will find the new servers a lot quicker
6. Last month we added support for Django and Phusion Passenger. We will continue to offer the tools our webmasters need
7. A lot of improvements have been going into BackStage which powers Site5’s billing and control panels. These are invisible to users but over the next six months these changes will allow us to offer you a lot of new features
8. We improved the Site5 website to make it easier to find what you are looking for and contact support and sales. We also gave the Site5 Blog a new design. In addition, Site5 is now on Twitter. You can find all the details in this blog post.

For the next three months we have a lot of projects we are working on and I will outline those below:

1. Work is continuing on the new custom support desk we are building. We hope to have the first edition done sometime in the next two months to replace what we currently use. This new desk will allow us to do improve the speed and quality of support and do a lot more tracking to find repeat issues. We are looking forward to deploying this and will let you know when testing starts!
2. We are investigating what Website Builder tools we want to make available to our users. If you have any preferences please email your thoughts to Ben@Site5.com. We hope to have something in place in May or early June.
3. We are working on improvements to the software that powers Site5’s billing and control panel systems so that we can bring SiteAdmin and MultiAdmin up to date. As we finish these changes we will be able to improve the control panels and will update you as we get to this point.
4. We are continuing to setup and test possible central mail configurations. This change will allow us to stop more spam, catch mail abusers, stop blacklisting, and add a lot more mail features for our clients. We aiming to put the hardware together this month and launch the first version to play with. We will post more news as this proceeds.

Please comment on this blog post or on this forum post if you have any requests, comments, or to share your thoughts! We would love to hear from you!

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State of Site5 For February 1st 2009

Wow! We are already to our second State of Site5 blog post! This is the second in a series of blog posts that aim to give our customers a look at what we have been doing the past three months, what we plan on working on over the next three months, and invite you to ask us questions and give suggestions.

Over the last three months we have been very busy improving the infrastructure at Site5 and to improving customer service, here is a list of what we have accomplished so far:

1. On January 31st we finished the migration of 8,500 customers from old hardware at old data centers to brand new servers at our new data center. This move will provide a major improvement in quality of service for those customers; because of the move you will see better connectivity, better website performance, and better uptime. The migration wasn’t without it’s problems: it increased the load on support department and about 1.5% of the customers who were migrated had errors with their sites. We both apologize for any problems you encountered and please email support if you are still having any problems.
2. We have implemented a new backup system that is slowly taking over the previous method. This new backup system will backup all of Site5’s servers and allow us to restore faster and store multiple backup points. It will also allow us to one day provide users with personal access to their own backups once we can integrate that into the control panel.
3. We hired five new employees to join the Site5 Team over the last three months! Please help me in welcoming them! Janet, Jeff, Justin and Curtis who are already doing great jobs providing support to our customers! We would also like to give a special welcome to Justin Mazzi who is our new Chief of Engineering.
4. We restructured support, creating clearer levels so that we can deal with the majority of issues, i.e. those with relatively simple solutions, more quickly. This also allows us to bump the harder problems up the ladder where our system admins can give them the focus they need. This has resulted in a 3x to 4x improvement in how fast we are able to answer tickets as well as improving the quality. This improvement occurred even during migration over the last two months and we will see even more improvement without elevated ticket levels.
5. We restructured the schedule of employees so that during the times that tickets come flooding in we have more personel there to handle the load and not get behind. This has helped improve the speed of ticket responses even while dealing with the increased ticket load that came with this major migration. Over the coming weeks we will be improving this more as new personal are trained and moved into the times that are weakest, such as weekends.
6. We have worked to retrain staff to provide better communication to our customers on tickets and in the forums so that updates are quicker and more informative during any type of downtime. If you have any complaints on a ticket please email me at bwb@Site5.com and I would be happy to review it.
7. We upgraded the Linux kernel to a custom one for all our servers that will result in better performance and uptime. In addition, for boxes that were not performing to our standards, we added 4GB of extra memory. This has already resulted in a 30% decreate in server issues even when counting the downtime we have conducted for doing the upgrades and migrations. In the coming months, we will be applying further tweaks and changes to further increase stability.
8. We upgraded all our servers to use Apache 2 which will result in a performance increase. This also converted the old method we were using for domain pointers to the new method which will allow us to offer some new features later in 2009.
9. Site5 launched new reseller hosting plans that will increase stability and performance for our resellers. We will not longer be allowing overselling with these plans.

Luckily there is a lot more to do, and things are only going to keep improving. Here are our plans for the next three months (February, March, April):

1. As you can see from the Software Update Forum we will be updating our servers to the latest stable software versions in early February. On February 2nd PHP 5 will be come the default PHP handler and on February 9th MySQL 5 will be become the standard. Both Ruby on Rails and Python will be upgraded later this month as well. For futher information and to ask any questions please see the software upgrade forum. These upgrades will result in performance increases and the needed software for many of the newest web applications our customers want to use. From here on out, our servers will be kept up to date with the latest stable releases
2. After we finish the software upgrades we will be doing a lot more tweaking of the servers to get more performance out of them.
3. We have started to work on a custom support desk which will allow us to make some big improvements to the efficiency of support and our ability to track repeat problems. This will take some time to complete but when finished it will save our staff time, and will increase the speed and quality of their responses. Plus we will be able to build in the statistics gathering we need in order to find repeat problems and see patterns on each server that will help us to see when big problems are causing the little ones. As we progress on this project I will post a lot more details!
4. We will be further restructuring customer service to provide better support to our customers over the next three months. This will result in quicker response with the harder tickets being escalated in order to solve them as quickly and efficiently as possible
5. Over the next three months we will be making a number of improvements to BackStage and related systems. We are working very hard to add new features to our control panel and make it easier to use and we will post more as we tackle the bigger parts of this project.

We hope all our customers in the United States enjoy the Super Bowl later today and as always feel free to email us at bwb@Site5.com or joel@Site5.comwith any questions or complaints. We’re here to make sure Site5’s customers experience the best hosting possible and we love to hear from customers.

Thanks, Ben and Joel
Site5 CEO and President

PS, I forgot to include this but if you want to ask any questions I setup a forum thread here for any discussion.

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State Of Site5 For November 1st 2008

We hope everyone had a great Halloween and we would like to welcome you the first “State of Site5″ blog post. This is the first in a series of posts that will occur every three months and update our customers on the progress of Site5 towards it’s goals, projects, and any new product offerings.

For the next three months the Site5 team will be focused solely on improving the quality of customer support, the speed with which we respond to tickets, and the overall stability of the servers. So how are we going to do this?

The first step will be an internal restructuring of the Site5 team, as of today Vince Stratful is the Chief Technology Officer, Garret Noling is the Director of Technical Operations, and Tom Sepper is the Chief Operating Officer. These positions better describe their current duties but also give the Site5 team a clear route to escalate any high level issues directly to them.

Second, over the next three months we will be implementing changes to our internal support procedures. These will increase the quality of communication between our staff and customers. In addition, our customers will be receiving more information on servers that have any downtime, and updates will come with greater frequency. Details will be posted on the blog and forum as we implement these changes.

Third, behind the scenes we will be making changes to our support desk that will allow the Site5 team to work more efficiently and detect patterns of downtime and general server problems. These will be implemented over the next three months and will dramatically help our staff respond with speed and increased quality.

We will be making updates on migration and other big announcements over the next five weeks, so look for those here and in the forums.

Thanks, Ben and Joel
Site5 CEO and President

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