Host-A Hosting

New Servers and Downtime
Author: camzmac

We have a new FTP mirror server that isn't sponsored, popular.host-a.net, for popular files. The idea is that those files should go to a faster server, since they have been proven worthy of such a spot. ;-) Not only that, but iwannaplay.org has become a sponsored mirror, which is awesome, since there are a lot of Game Maker users that host their games on Host-A, and people downloading those games 'wannaplay' them. :D In other news, very unfortunately, on Sunday July 13th, which is my birthday, Host-A took a nosedive and went offline for 3 hours starting at around 13:00 CST (GMT -06:00). The cause was perhaps related to the gargantuan amount of requests we usually process on Sundays. However, the amount of requests on this weekend was significantly higher, so much so that I think it may have been a DDoS, and our old install of Debian Sarge, Apache2, and MySQL 4.1 couldn't handle it. The fix was to upgrade the software on the server, and then fiddle with the config files to make it work correctly before going online. I ended up restarting the server due to an upgrade to libc (Linux people would know what that's about), and before shutting down I noted that the uptime was 300 days. Awesome stuff. Well, now that we're upgraded, there should be no reason to go offline for a long time. After all, the server is located in an area with what perhaps has the most reliable electricity in North America.

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