Email is just email, until it breaks
As part of our continuing series on the “big move” at Cedar Hosting, I present to you … “why we moved the email”.
One of the big complaints I’ve always had about our original infrastructure setup was that email was on the same server as the rest of the web sites. With the recent upgrades, we decided that email was definitely important enough to warrant having it’s own servers and (in our case) it’s own service offering. So we migrated everyone’s email accounts over to the OpenSRS hosted email solution. And we have yet to find a reason why this was a bad idea. So far, this email system has been reliable, fast, and extremely easy to use and set up. All in all, this was what some would call a “no-brainer” in terms of swapping out our internally managed email solution with the hosted email option offered by OpenSRS. My only complaint was having to reset passwords for the import procedure.
Dear OpenSRS, please take your otherwise excellent hosted email product and give us the ability to manage users using some kind of User Interface.
Regards,
David Rabsch
david@cedarhosting.com
From Physical to Virtual — What’s the Big Deal?
One of the biggest changes we made at Cedar Hosting was the move from physical to virtual servers. Some of my friends asked, “Why bother going virtual? You’re running fine on dedicated (physical) hardware!”. They were correct — we were running just fine on dedicated physical hardware. So why did we move to a virtual environment? In a word, “options”…
In the fall of 2011, we decided that we had to do something to improve the performance and stability of our primary service offerings (web site hosting, email and DNS). We had reached a point where we had to improve our infrastructure or risk being left behind as the industry evolved. So, we took the bold step of migrating our clients onto a completely new platform — one that split up the responsibilities of our primary service offerings into separate domains that we could then manage and support much more efficiently and effectively. Part of that migration was moving our web hosting clients from a physical server to a new, virtual server environment. This gives us the ability to add additional resources to the web server as needed without any downtime or interruptions in service. We also gain the benefit of being able to move the virtual environment anywhere we need to. This eliminates our dependance on any one supplier for our hosting needs. We think that’s a very good thing.
Tune in next week for a description of why moving to the new email service was one of our better ideas.
Until next time,
D.
Is that an upgrade in your pocket?
It’s been a long time coming, and it’s been a long while .. doing 
, but Cedar Hosting has completed it’s upgrade to a completely new hosting infrastructure. So what did we do, specifically? I’m glad you asked …
First off, we’ve split out our key services onto different platforms — email, web hosting and DNS are all on seperate systems. This vastly improves our ability to continue running without any downtime in the event of a catastrophic failure in any of the individual systems.
Secondly, because we’ve split up our key services, we can optimize each one to deliver maximum performance, security and stability across our service offerings. This equates to improved performance and even better uptime/stability to you, our most valued clients.
We know that this upgrade has taken longer than expected, and we’ve had to contact you a few times to get all the pieces in place, but folks, we’re in a VERY good place now. I have no doubt that some of your sites could run long enough to see us all in grey hair before we encounter any issues. All in all, this has been a very worthwhile and very fun upgrade. Thanks for being a part of it.
Next week, we’ll explore some of the upgrades in detail and describe what we did, and maybe more importantly, WHY we decided to go this route. Stay tuned!
The New Cedarhosting.com is Here
Welcome to the new Cedarhosting site. We hope you enjoy the new look and features. Lots of big changes underway, completed and upcoming. We’ll be keeping you up to date as we progress.
It’s an exciting time for Cedar Hosting. Glad you’re coming along for the ride.
