StableHost – Blog

If you’ve been a customer of ours for at least a year, you’ve most likely been a part of one (or more) of the major changes we’ve made to our network.

Due to increased growth the last 2 years, we’ve been changing things non-stop to accommodate the growth.    Any person that has an internet connection can start a web hosting company, however very few people have the technical knowledge to continue to scale it as it continues to grow.

When we had only a few hundred clients, we leased our servers directly from the datacenter.    We started like every other web hosting company out there, with a $99 server.   As we all know — a $99 server can only go so far, a few clients and it’s maxed out.    As months went on, we started to buy our own hardware directly from Dell and placed it in a cabinet in Texas.    Several months later, we continued to add servers and realized we needed them to be locally here in Arizona.    Troubleshooting hardware problems remotely is very hard not something we wanted to do.    However, how do you move all of your clients from Texas to Phoenix?

Well, we could overnight the servers and hope the customers are okay with 24 hours of downtime, not ideal but the cheapest solution by far.   We decided 24 hours of downtime was unacceptable (hey! we have to live up to our name!) so we bought new hardware and duplicated our setup that we had in Texas.    We then migrated everyone from Texas to Phoenix, not a fun task for the customer or us.

When we originally moved to Phoenix, we were still using our datacenter’s network.    When you have your own servers, you have two options on how you configure your network.    You can take the easy and cheap approach which involves buying a switch and having a uplink to your datacenter’s network, they give you IPs, and you’re set!   We did that for a while and realized while we love our servers locally in Phoenix, we needed more control over the network.     We hate relying on other people if we can help it and the more things we have control over, the better.

Months later, we decided that we needed to build out an actual “network” in Phoenix.   By this, it involves buying routers, transit providers, our own IPs,  etc.   This has been a “work in progress” for the past year, constantly upgrading it and adding additional redundancy to it.

If you signed up with us in the past year in our US location, you’re “on our network”, while if you came from our Texas network, or signed up prior to the whole build out, you’re still on the “old network (datacenters network)”.   While there’s nothing wrong with the old network — it doesn’t mean your website is slow, etc — it does mean that we don’t have the control we want when it comes to DOS attacks, routing issues, outages, redundancy, etc.

Therefore, our last (hopefully!) network migration is to move all of the people who are on the old network to our own network.     So, how do you know what network you’re on?  You can determine it based on your IP address.    If your IP address starts with 199.x.x.x, you are on our network.    If you are on a 64.38.x.x IP, or a 184.x.x.x IP, you are on our older network.     We started this IP migration project as of today and starting with the server ‘cp20′.    We will be updating this post with our update to keep everyone informed on the progress of it as it’s a very slow and time consuming process.

Lastly, we greatly appreciate everyone’s patience as we continue to make our network better.    We are very happy with how our US network turned out after several changes and learning what works (and what doesn’t work) and hope you can understand and appreciate why we do it.

IP MIGRATION STATUS

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cp20: As of 08/01/11 – All accounts have been moved over successfully.

cp22: As of 08/21/11 – All accounts have been moved over successfully.

cp23: As of 08/22/11 – All accounts have been moved over successfully.

cp24: As of 08/04/11 – All accounts have been moved over successfully.