Yesterday morning we had a client who’s got a site on a virtual server email to say:

Hi Oban –

I just had a business colleague say that he went to my site, got a malware warning, and his entire hard drive was wiped out instantly.

Just another year of practically perfect network uptime.  How many 9’s was it exactly?  I dunno.  However, this is starting to sound redundant.  Our 2010 and 2011 uptime was also somewhere around 99.9999%.

Speaking of uptime, in case you aren’t aware, our network is “fiber cut proof.”  What does that mean?  Two of our upstream connections are via large capacity fiber optic cables, while our third is via high capacity, high speed microwave radios (the exact same technology that high speed financial traders use).  So if our two fiber cables get cut we can push all of our traffic through our backup microwave connection, and your site and email don’t miss a beat.

From a recent Slashdot article:

More than 70,000 websites were compromised in a recent breach of InMotion. Thousands of websites were defaced and others had alterations made to give users a hard time accessing their accounts and fixing the damage. A similar attack hit JustHost back in June, and in a breach of Australian Web host DistributeIT just prior to that, hackers completely deleted more than 4,800 websites that the company was unable to recover. The incidents raise concern that hacker groups are bypassing single targets and hitting Web hosts directly, giving them access to tens of thousands of websites, rather than single targets. While the attacks have caused damage, they weren’t as malicious as they could have been. Rather than defacing and deleting, hackers could have quietly planted malware in the sites or stolen customer data. Web hosting companies could be one of the largest holes in non-government cybersecurity, since malicious hackers can gain access through openings left by the Web host, regardless of the security of a given site.

We’ve already closed these holes.   Are you really still hosting your sites with the volume-based hosters!

~ Oban

There is nothing more tricky and fraught with potential problems than DNS upgrades.

This week we migrated from BIND to PowerDNS.  Prior to the migration we dutifully tested PowerDNS on different servers, in different configurations, consulted other sysadmins who were running PowerDNS, and found all tests to be working flawlessly.

So we went ahead and upgraded all three of our DNS servers from BIND to PowerDNS, and watched…

Continue reading PowerDNS migration creates bug ripples →

From the warm confines of our Support FAQ, I present to you a video called: “How one sets up their Android phone to send and receive email on the Brownrice servers.”  Descriptive and catchy title, eh?

Yep.

In 2009 Brownrice provided our hosting, co-location, and virtual server customers with 100% network up-time for the entire year – soundly besting the volume-based hosting companies.

OK, full disclosure: Our network was down for a total of 3 minutes and 11 seconds for the calendar year.  I think that was when Dave rebooted one of our main switches.

How did we fair against the big boys?

Google had multiple network outages.  Amazon’s cloud went down.  Rackspace had multiple extended network outages which brought down many of the biggest sites on the internet.  Many hosting providers who co-locate in the Rackspace data centers suffered from their outages as well. And Dreamhost – who advertises a goofy 100% up-time guarantee (read the fine print, it’s funny) – seemed to have nearly daily network failures.

Why is our up-time so good?  Because our network is quadruple-redundant, impervious to fiber cuts, and because we are small.

Why is being a small provider good?  Because we run less than 100 servers – instead of hundres of thousands – most of which are in our own, on-site mini data center, where the size of our operation allows us isolate and fix problems extremely quickly.

I’ve always known that our staff is smarter, more experienced, and provide better – and friendlier – support than the volume-based hosting companies.  Now the raw data is proving that we are more reliable as well.