BUH Blog

Attention Bloggers - Win $250!

BlogParty is a new network of sites that help leverage your blog, but we need help getting the message out there. How about some motivation? How about the chance to win $250 for writting an entry in your blog about BlogParty with a link back to www.blogparty.net?

Easy enough?

Make a post to your blog about BlogParty with a link back to www.BlogParty.net. Verbose or short - sweet or critical - wordy or terse - it makes no difference - it is your blog and you post with your normal style. Only one entry per blog! However, as many entries as you have blogs - as long as it is only one entry per blog.

Add a comment to the BlogParty Network Blog and enter your post’s PermaLink. Use the email you wish us to contact you with when submitting the comment. Also, don’t forget to opt-in to the BlogParty newsletter. Of course you are not obligated, but heck - we are here to help you and your blog, so why not?

Wait till March 15, 2006. On that date, we will select ONE blog that still has the link active and that we are able to contact via email (If you give us a bad email - how are we going to let you know you won??). The selected blog’s owner will be the winner of $250 paid via PayPal.

Goodbye RegisterFly

After many (too too many) years of suffering with RegisterFly, I am finally getting rid of them. I have almost all my domains with them and they finally blew it by erasing all my DNS information this morning at 10:00 - effectively turning off several of my live web sites.

So, I looked around and it seems that GoDaddy is doing a pretty good job. I am transfering several domains over there and will see how that works out.

Many years ago I recommened RegisterFly to everyone and anyone, but I can no longer recommend them.

Wow - even RAID 1 rocks!

One of my other sites - DeepMarket - is data intensive, as it deals with stock market data. But it was running pretty well and I had not been too concerned about performance. Actually, I was more concerned about reliability, so I purchased a STARDOM-2600 from Carday Supply. The SR2600 is a two disk RAID device (both ATA and SATA) with either RAID 0 or RAID 1. The drives are hot-swappable in case of a drive failure in the RAID 1 configuration.

This was my first RAID experience, but not overly excited because the reason I picked up this solution was for the RAID 1 mirroring. I popped my web server drive (a chunky 300 GB SATA) in the top bay of the SR2600, connected it via SATA cable to the web server and booted the machine. No problems. I added a brand new version of the same 300 GB drive into the second bay and immediately the SR2600 started duplicating the first drive to create a mirror. Three hours later I had a RAID 1 setup.

My aim had been stability, mirroring, backup and all that nice stuff - not the fun stuff - performance tuning. But, I was wondering what performance “penalty” I may be paying for a RAID 1 configuration. I pulled the second drive out out (remember - hot swap) while the web server was handling a little traffic. No problem - so we can see the mirror aspect is working nicely. I used Xenu’s Link Sleuth to crawl my site completely and time how long that took with a single drive.

One drive and about 10,000 pages took about 17 minutes to be crawled by Xenu. Interesting. Okay, so I plugged the second drive back in. Oooops! SR2600 rebuilds the second drive from scratch! Okay - good to know and I guess I should have figured that. Why do I have 300 GB drives again?

Three hours later we are back in RAID 1 mirrored configuration again. I run Xenu again. Two drives running at RAID 1 only takes 9 minutes! Coool. I mean, duh. I should have figured that RAID 1 would take advange of the fact that it can read from two independent drives - that the writing process is the one that (might?) suffer a performance hit.

Just to be certain, I re-booted the server to flush any and all caching that MySQL may have done. I re-ran Xenu. This time is was 9 minutes and 15 seconds. Not bad.

Not only do I have have the safety of a RAID 1 drive setup, but I got a nice boost in performance. I recommend the SR2600 for those who feel they need it. It runs between $250 and $300 (no drives).