Rev | Author | # | Line |
---|---|---|---|
6 | PeterBryant | 1 | Our guest for February is Peter Bryant from RimuHosting, a VirtualPrivateServer company based in Cambridge, [New Zealand|NewZealand]. |
1 | CraigBox | 2 | |
8 | JohnMcPherson | 3 | RimuHosting specialises in providing virtual private servers; they have 3 data centres in the USA and do about 10 terabytes of traffic per month. |
1 | CraigBox | 4 | |
8 | JohnMcPherson | 5 | Currently have 4 tech support staff (and looking for more), doing about 1300 support emails per month. |
1 | CraigBox | 6 | |
8 | JohnMcPherson | 7 | !!Brief notes of meeting |
1 | CraigBox | 8 | |
8 | JohnMcPherson | 9 | !Short History |
10 | Peter first used linux in 1999 (using RedHat 6), working for a startup in Seattle - trying to get Oracle working on their cluster of 6 dual-p3 600MHz machines. Although the "dot-com" crash hit hard, their company survived due to having a stable business model. He eventually moved to Cambridge (NewZealand), and finding it difficult to get cheap host servers/shell access, he decided to set up RimuHosting. | ||
1 | CraigBox | 11 | |
8 | JohnMcPherson | 12 | !Technology |
13 | Investigated [UML] vs the commercial Virtuoso, and decided on UML. In July 2005 they started using [Xen]. | ||
14 | UML == a linux process running inside linux. Xen = "hypervisor" running on hardware. "ring 0" - about 50% more efficient; Xen can allocate "real" memory while UML uses virtual memory inside the main linux OS. | ||
15 | |||
16 | New chipsets supporting virtualisation - Intel VT and AMD Pacifica - so-called "ring -1" will allow unmodified OSes to run; ring 0 currently needs (slightly) modified kernel for some syscalls. | ||
17 | |||
18 | Initially rented servers from co-lo; the CPU and disk were adequate but VPS needs lots of RAM; many of their VPSes only have 96MB. | ||
19 | |||
20 | 2GB of RAM allows about 15 VPSes per machine. After encountering a bad batch of HDDs they now always use RAID. They now buy machines from "rackmounts" in San Diego from a guy called "Brian" - Duel Opteron 246 with 8GB RAM, 3x 200GB HDDs for RAID1+1spare. Peter's never met Brian, nor visited any of the data centres or seen any of his servers. | ||
21 | Software raid makes it easier to move drives around, no bios access needed. | ||
22 | |||
23 | About 50% of their hard drives in New York DC died when they lost power uncleanly (in the big power outage in August 2003). | ||
24 | |||
25 | !Team/Support | ||
26 | The support team use jabber internally; they generally do free suport tasks for customers if they think it will take less than 15 minutes to complete; building up a repository of commonly requested tasks. | ||
27 | |||
28 | Most exploits that they encounter are in poorly written web-apps, and dictionary passwords. Credit-card fraud is occasionally a problem. | ||
29 | |||
30 | Marketing: | ||
31 | * tried direct approaches to web companies; not well received. | ||
32 | * google ad-words | ||
33 | * content on the web - their howtos | ||
34 | |||
35 | ---- | ||
2 | CraigBox | 36 | |
37 | * About Rimu Hosting: http://rimuhosting.com/support/aboutrh.jsp |
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