Moving To New Data Centre

Last weekend, zitseng.com and the rest of my servers were moved to a new data centre. The rental costs at the old place had sky-rocketed and it was not economical for us to stay with them anymore. This was responsible for some of the down time of this site, and partly the reason for the quietness or lack of posts recently.

Moving servers is like moving house. You have to disassemble, pack, move, unpack and reassemble. I have moved many servers before, but the complexity of this 5-server move actually surprised me. Although we marked out a maintenance window from 2pm to 10pm, we imagined that we would be done by about 5pm or 6pm at the latest. But in the end, it took us up to 9pm, and technically there was still a bunch of loose ends that we did not resolve until the next day. Probably a key difference between this move and the others I’ve done is that in the other cases, I run the network and facilities at both ends.

The days of cheap data centre co-location packages are coming to an end. Many data centres have finally realized that they’ve gotten their sums wrong. I run data centres myself in my full-time job, and I know the utility consumption costs alone (not including capital expenditure, maintenance costs, manpower costs and other operational costs) can exceed the per-month price charged by some commercial data centres. So many data centres are now re-pricing their co-location charges upwards, sometimes as much as quadruple the original charges.

This new place seems like a simple setup. Everything was running fine until the 3rd day (technically, it was not even 48 hours from the time we setup), when we were plagued with a 7+ hours network outage. Rather dissappointing that the problem took so long to get resolved, but I’m hoping that this is an one-off incident that will not repeat.

So this network outage took this site offline again. In the 4 years or so in our previous data centre, there was only one incident due to a blackout that lasted several hours too. Yah, I know, data centres are supposed to have UPS and generator backups. But accidents still happen. That incident caused us hardware damage, so it was actually more disruptive and costly to us.

While checking up things today… hey, WordPress version 2.6.2 has been released. So okay, this site is updated, particularly since it fixes some security issue (though it seems a little obscure). It’s always best to keep abreast with security updates. It may be a problem with a feature you’re not using, so perhaps it is not urgent, but what if some day you decide to use that feature.

So that’s it on the recent developments here at zitseng.com.