Summer Review 2008

September 1, 2008

We held back on the review of July and decided that a review for both July and August would be more appropriate.    We did quite a few things over the summer and traffic is getting larger on a monthly basis both in terms of pageviews, hits and unique visitors.     Here are some of the things that we also worked with:

  1. Fine tuned our backup system adding even more redundancy.   We are making more frequent database backups with the backups rsync redundant to another server.   The entire server is on RAID now.    All files and configurations are also backed up on a daily basis to Amazon S3 making our backup solution very tight for everything.
  2. We released the first BETA of our Onvertigo Media system which is much like YouTube.   It is based off a software called phpMotion and really is great!    We even have a system in place to get your videos off YouTube over to our system very easy so you don’t have to upload your videos again!   Currently we are doing it on a “closed” basis, but if you are interested, let Trent know.
  3. Keeping up with the best functionality of WPMU, we have a complete copy of Onvertigo Bloggers working so we can test out the latest development releases and implement only the best functionality to our live site between releases.
  4. We still have a small community but have opened up the signup process to the public with only people that know me being able to answer the signup question.    We also have several filters in place to stop spam signups keeping the site clean.
  5. For those of you that want your own domain name, we have a system in place that you can point a domain name to the server and add it to your blog for FREE!     The domain registration is still there, but having a domain name on your blog on our system is 100% free.
  6. Added a Global Posts system where all blog posts will be added.   All links are back to the original blog posts and it should help with people finding your blog content and keep everyone is the best position in terms of the search engines.   It is at http://tags.onvertigo.com
  7. We have did away with the “upgrades” and “premium” services for now, but still appreciate donations to keep this service 100% free forever.
  8. We have added another 20+ “premium wordpress themes” that are not offered to my knowledge on any other blogging system.      They were payed for in an attempt to keep this service more unique.
  9. Still in the process of adding a better stats system for individual blogs and will keep working on this

We are very happy with where we are on this system and hope to keep making progress.    Thank you for your interest in Onvertigo Bloggers :)

Written by Trent · Filed Under backup, monthly reports, redundancy | Leave a Comment 

Database Redundancy

April 26, 2008

We are happy to use Media Temple as our main server as it gives the easy ability to upgrade and downgrade resources as they are needed.   With the service getting an increasing amount of pageviews and some of the process and memory intensive upgrades we are planning, it makes sense to have the system in place.   The system is currently running with dedicated 1 gig of RAM and in a position to be a real work horse.

Offloading backups is done onto another service and that is working really well.    Data integrity and backups are the cornerstone of confidence both for myself and the users of this service.   We are always trying to get better.   That is why we have another server with SliceHost that we are using to implement our next strategy with database redundancy.  This will be done with a master/slave database relationship.

Essentially, the master database server still deals with all the entries, comments and other posts that are made on the service or “writes of new data”.     The slave database server just syncs itself with the master so that it always has an up-to-date version of all data.    This allows us to load balance the database between the two servers as requests from the general public viewing sites can be setup to come from either database server.

This is the setup that we are going to implement by using a dedicated “database only” server on Slicehost.   This setup will also allow us to make backups off the slave database server without disrupting anyone on the service as all writes still will go to the master database server.   Summing up, this allows us to backup the data more frequently :)
Another thing we are considering will be creating a duel master redundancy plan so if the master (all “writes”) database server does go down, the slave server can take over as the master and when the original database server comes back online it adjusts to become the slave.     Little more complicated, but worth it.

The interesting thing to me as the system administrator and the one paying for all of this is that implementing this system will actually make the monthly costs go down!    Instead of having to have 1 large server to have the resources to cover the bottlenecks, it is cheaper to have several smaller servers working on specific tasks.    That is why we will stick with our Media Temple server (which we can downgrade) and use smaller Slicehost servers to more than pick up the slack!

Some might ask if this is a little “overboard” for such a small service that is in “beta” right now and not entirely public.    Believe me, once we release the rest of the service plans we have coming up, it is :)

Written by Trent · Filed Under performance, redundancy | Leave a Comment