Ashkir [dot] com

Back in June, BigWetFish offered to move us to the cloud. I’ve done a lot of research, and even posted information out about it and asked for votes from others I host that are the major players, found here. We have gotten a 5/6 majority at the time.

However, since Mo has left our hosting (closed his service) the vote is now 5/5 of the major players. The largest resource user besides myself, is Kate, she had asked for her vote to copy mine to do what I think is best. Cassie agreed as well. James is my father and I host his company website so, his vote was to what I think is best. SK looked into it and decided to vote yay. So, hence, we now have a majority in favor, a perfect hundred percent in favor.

We’re starting the move shortly. Within the next 48 hours. It’ll be down sometime through the night, GMT time when BigWetFish has the time to move us. We’re going to the cloud. I strongly believe the benefits of it outweigh the cons.

Also, I’d like to welcome the latest hostee, Chronicles of Thedas to the group of websites. I’ve given them the link to the previous page from June to look over. Chronicles of Thedas uses a fraction of the resources, less than 2% of what the others use. So, really, they’re no problem to have tag along with us to the cloud. .

All others persons whom is hosted by me, please feel free to contact me with any concerns. I anticipate no problems and minimal downtime. I however was asked if you’d need to update your nameservers if you have a domain name. No, you don’t. I’ve asked you all to use ns1.ashkir.com and ns2.ashkir.com, I’ll update those. . It can take up to 72 hours before you notice the new website change, which can be frustrating, but, I highly recommend doing a DNS flush after the move. I don’t foresee any issues however.

We’re moving away from our server in Orlando to our beautiful new home in Maidenhead, England! So, you European folks should be celebrating! To the fellow Americans, I don’t anticipate any problems with load times to this move.

Today at 10:30ish am, there was about 5 minutes of unscheduled downtime. Services are live once again.

As of late I’ve been helping a group of post-by-post role players on a role play game prepare to move their forum away from their free host that has had a lot of stability issues. I’ve spent a great amount of time helping them get their database converted and ready to migrate to MyBB.

This move happens in twelve hours. If all goes well, the Ashkir Network will have it’s first stable forum. Yup, we haven’t really had any forums of this size before! We’re used to more websites or blogs, not community based panels. The forum’s traffic is far lower then our previous experience, but, it’ll be an interesting challenge nonetheless.

Wish us luck. To the next frontier we go.

I will soon be contacting everyone hosted with the Ashkir [dot] com network about this topic to get their opinions. Hence, the reason I am making this post to explain what is going on.

Yes. There is an issue on the board now, and no, I’m not closing this site! don’t worry! I hope I didn’t scare you all! I feel it is time to move on up to the cloud. Yes. I said that dreaded word, the cloud.

A while ago Amazon destroyed the reputation for the cloud and pushed cloud computing back a few years in the minds of people whom are hosted. But, the cloud is a huge advantage compared to shared hosting.

I am strongly considering moving us to the cloud by the early week. Okay here’s what you need to know:

Traditional data center server (our current):
- Extremely secure
- Very limited capacity for growth.
- Can be dedicated
- We are stuck with several others on a single server, within a single rack, within a single range.
- If one part of the rack fails, all of the rack may go down in a domino effect.

Cloud center (our proposed move):
- Ecosystem of computers.
- Good control.
- Very, very, very low downtime. If one part feels, it is still accessible thanks to other parts.
- Shared, like us.
- Unlimited capacity for growth.

A cloud computing area also drastically reduces ping tests for several locations around the world which makes cloud very ideal for an international website, like, we are becoming.

On a traditional server we do experience bottlenecks. If there is a high surge of traffic, like a large resource linked to one of our sites, our server can become bottlenecked and start to go under. Within the cloud environment bottlenecks usually don’t exist. So this is something we won’t worry about.

But, isn’t a cloud multiple servers and will cause a performance drop?
No. It won’t. Performance will NOT be effected in speed loads. What you’ll experience is an equal experience and possibly never even see a second of downtime again.

Cloud is more ideal for us because we are growing fast, and it will help us keep our resources under control.

Please research it before making a decision. I have done much reserach and talking to many experts. I want to move to the cloud.

Hi all. There was a recent server transfer. The PHP version is now 5.2.14. It was PHP 5.3.4. The PHP organization changed many variables. so much with the 5.3 version it broke many scripts, including the ever popular WordPress and PHPBB.

I apologize for the inconvenience that PHP 5.3 caused.