We’ve ran into an interesting problem since launch and that is no one uses very much CPU. I suppose it’s a great problem to have but when we’re trying to get a decent idea on usage and if our system is well done. The misc. usage users have is very low we’re seeing maybe 0.10 per day. This includes anything that runs as the user so PHP, Perl, Ruby and anything cPanel may run as the user as well. We can live with the low numbers on that though there at least it’s showing people something granted much lower than we expected. Now MySQL usage is the more interesting one as it’s going to provide far more confusion. (more…)
We launched Frog Host over the weekend and as I said I’d talk about how things are going so going as far as revealing order numbers and things like that. Frog Host is new so I figured what exactly is the harm in giving actual numbers as it’s pretty obvious it’s new. We had no advertising planned for the weekend as we figured we’d be working on several issues over the course of the weekend plus getting used to having two company’s running under one corporate brand. We were going to rely on our word of mouth and any hype we built up about Frog Host over the course of the pre-launch blog posts.
For those of you who don’t know I’m the resident server monkey. What that means is if there is an issue with a server I’m the one who gets the gajillion SMS alerts / e-mails saying that something is awry and you better get up and fix it. As a result I’m a bit of a gadget and communications junkie. I.. like to be in touch and segregate my communications.. some people think it’s a bit much:
We were trying to meet a February 1st launch but as you can see by this post we’re not quite there as we’ve ran into some issues. I’m pretty confident this week is our launch date though with the web site all but done and more testing than anything else going on at this point. Our initial fleet as far as servers are ready which initial fleet means one machine but it sounds better when I say initial fleet of servers. Although the advantage of having Softlayer is the fact we can deploy new machines in under 4 hours and probably have them online accepting customers within 16 hours. So it’s not like we need to have all these hot spares available anyways unless we like to waste money. I’m pretty sure users will be impressed with our web site once it goes live and the attention to detail we’ve taken with it.
So for the server it’s up and configured and we’ve been testing it for the past 72 hours and making sure it’s configured 100% properly for the launch. That it has all the initial launch software and we’re not going to be making changes when customers on it. Although I say that even with Hawk Host we always forget something or something is not being replicated out and we manually add it then forget to add it to our deployment scripts for next time.
For the web site we’ve been real busy bees on January 31st we had 14 code revisions posted to it’s repository. It feels like a lot in a 24 hours span with the amount of code changes I see in the repository. Although the web site is just one part of it though there is a lot more to hosting than just the web site. For the host themselves though the web site should be a major priority it’s where you gain customers not what is on the back end typically. So we’ve had everyone running through the web site and if they find any issues post them to our project management system so that they can be resolved.
We’ve also been pushing out more and more changes with our system to track usage. You test it all you want on a non production server but seems like when you bring in what is the final version and have people look for issues you tend to find a lot more. So we ended up having 10 revisions on that front to resolve issues with tracking of usage, recording usage and usability problems discovered when we had more eyes checking out the system.
So things are looking great expect a live web site to come up soon and a launch announcement.
I hinted at us doing this but I figured it was time to actually show some screen shots of what we’re doing with this. CPU usage is the main thing today that is costing web hosting companies money. The space and bandwidth really account for very little of anything. This is why sites are always being booted for excessive CPU usage. In most cases they’re never close to allocations whether it’s 10GB of bandwidth or unlimited. We will be displaying to users their usage so they know what is using all the CPU and with MySQL the actual CPU used by specific users they made. So they could make a new MySQL user for each PHP script and know exactly which one is taking up all the CPU time. (more…)
A big part of what we’re doing involves writing our own cPanel plugins that will then be part of our cPanel skin. I though it be nice to quickly run through how exactly you make a cPanel plugin for anyone who is curious. It’s actually surprisingly easy to do if you read the documentation (who does that these days?) The first thing you want to do is generate your plugin file which you do at the cPanel site (more…)
With web hosting or any business for that matter you always need to ask yourself what makes you unique in comparison to your competitors. If you do not do this it’s difficult to compete without an astronomical marketing budget. With Frog Host that question had to be asked as well because there are lots of providers offering unlimited everything at the same price range we plan on doing. We’re not prepared to offering insane payouts for affiliates or advertise on every single web site that has anything to do with web hosting. While we can advertise some places we just are not big enough to advertise everywhere like some. So thus I’ll run down what we think makes Frog Host unique. (more…)
Even though you typically have a small amount of resources when starting a web hosting company, you want to make sure that you’re prepared for when you grow. Countless companies jump the gun and simply buy a server, set it up and put it into production with very little thought into the big picture. Every subsequent machine added starts to make the process get a little more tedious, and each server is setup just a little differently. The way to avoid this mess is to simply layout simple policies for every task that will be performed on a production server. Even though you’ll likely only have 1-3 servers initially, it’s important to understand the value of making a plan.
One of the things coming to Frog Host will be a resource management system and this will be tracking per user usage. The big problem with unlimited hosting is a user never knows when they’ve crossed that invisible limit and whether or not it’s fair. We’ve decided the best way to show users this is to actually track it but not exactly in the same sense as others. Hawk Host uses an internal system which is being updated for new features and it’s also what Frog Host will be using.
The blog wasn’t started when we first started planning out Frog Host so I figured it be logical to talk about what is done thus far. Frog Host is several months in the making already so everyone has missed out on a lot. (more…)
