Network Redux Blog

In our first review/discussion based post, I’d like to get into the nitty gritty of a customer concern related to our service offerings. This concern is not unique for our support department, and concentrates on our messages per hour limit for our shared hosting environments.Over the course of managing our network of shared and reseller servers, we have systematically reduced the amount of messages per hour allowed through our servers per user account. This is currently set at 250 messages per hour per user account.There are two significant reasons for these limitations:1) Spam.By limiting what an account (specifically a malicious account) can generate on a per hour basis, the amount of potential damage in terms of remote RBL blacklisting. This is where malicious accounts impact our innocent user-base. Accounts which slip past our fraud screening, or a reseller's due diligence are notoriously utilized for high volume email sending in a short period of time.2) Resource Usage.If every user on a shared server were to send a large volume of messages at precisely the same time threshold, it would create an overwhelming burden on system resources. By limiting what an account can generate on an hourly basis, we limit the amount of potential resources a single account may use during a one hour window.Ultimately the limitations are premised on stability and security for our shared environments.I have been working in this industry going on 7 years now, and managing a shared environment is a difficult task aside from the ongoing threat of internal malicious behaviors.With every set of rules comes a requirement for review. As our server resources have increased, our ability to meet user demand in our shared environments has increased.As a result, we will be increasing our hourly per user rate limit from 250 => 500 network wide. We feel as though this will benefit our user base, at the same time not be detrimental to system resources or network abuse policies.Users will be able to take advantage of these new rules by end of business Monday, August 26th, 2007.I wish everyone a good Monday, and a prosperous week.Regards,Thomas BrennekeNetwork Redux, LLC

A neat little fact, approximately 80% of our customers are resellers. I formed my first entrepreneurial adventure as a reseller for another company, approximately seven years ago.These seven years have brought with them lessons which continue to cross my desk on a daily basis.For our resellers (and all other customers), I open the door for your questions. Please, send me your questions, business related or otherwise (thomas at networkredux dot com). I will do my best to answer each and every question sent my way. Each question and answer will be posted on this blog, unless you specifically request for the items to remain confidential.Every business engages a starting point, often frustrating, perplexing; plagued with uncertainty. Hopefully this series of question and answers from our community can assist those pursuing the realm of running your own business.Thomas BrennekeNetwork Redux, LLC

The time has come where we owe our loyal constituents an explanation for our change in venue, change in atmosphere, change in operations.It is ever so apparent via our public site that we are no longer offering shared web hosting or standard reseller packages. Our minimum point of entry is $39/Month on an annual contract, or $49/Month on a month to month contract.  A substantial increase from our previous $7.95/$9.95 shared hosting plans.What happened?From September of 2007 to the spring of 2008 we grew from 30 servers to over 125 servers.  And not your typical pizza box 1U systems, we’re building out high performance web/database systems on an as need basis.In turn our customer focus shifted.  We found ourselves spending a majority of engineering hours on larger scale projects, with a majority of administrative hours on smaller scaler accounts.  We found close to 90% of our incoming tickets were from our lowest tier customer level.Here’s the pause.  Shared hosting is where we started.  Low cost reseller plans brought us 500 resellers in a very short period of time.  I as a business owner, am fully aware of these statistics.I made a difficult decision, one which bounced around our executive level staff for well over three months.  Eventually the cord was pulled, we moved shared and standard reseller plans from our website.  In place were our virtual private servers, and newly designed Reseller Optimized plans.Let me be the first to say that the Reseller Optimized plans offered by our company are the only in the industry with this title.  Let me also be the first to say that we are tremendously proud of what we have done to the web hosting (cpanel based) reseller platform.We as an organization, primarily reseller focused, have done an abysmal job of defining what a reseller optimized plan consists of, most importantly why a reseller should pay twice as much for the same amount of disk storage and data transfer they were previously accustom to.Reseller Optimized, also referred to as RO+ will be formally described in the next blog post.  We’re redefining how the web hosting industry handles resellers.  Say good bye to blacklists, email per hour throttling, restrictive apache/php configurations, and general annoyances with sharing resourcesWelcome to the next generation of Network Redux.  We’re in the process of showing the industry how certain aspects of hosting models should function.Cheers!Thomas Brenneke

This topic floats around the hosting world.  Rarely do you see a solution provider adequately define their levels of redundancy, including areas where they lack redundancy.  As part of our rebranding and transparent client discovery, it helps to understand how a carrier is delivering redundancy, from the network edge to the server chassis.Every carrier has a single point of failure.  A "zero downtime network" can be achieved with or without single points of failure.  In order to fully understand redundancy, we need to break it down into various categories and then analyze each category carefully.Edge NetworkThis is the point where you receive connectivity from upstream providers.  Some hosting companies rely on a single-homed (1 Carrier) connection, while other companies rely on several distinct carriers (multi-homed) and utilize a routing protocol such as BGP to handle the distribution of traffic across the various carriers.As an example, Network Redux utilizes connectivity from Time Warner Telecom Level 3 Communications and a backup link from Integra Telecom.  BGP provides redundancy between the two primary upstream providers, should one fail, traffic and routes will divert to the operational link.Distribution NetworkThis is the layer which takes traffic from the edge network and distributes it to your server farms, or customer cages.  This switching platform usually takes the form of a single, highly redundant chassis (e.g. Cisco 6509) or multiple switches utilizing a protocol such as VRRP for delivering redundant connectivity via multiple switches in a distribution layer.Network Redux utilizes a multiple switch approach, and combined with VRRP provides our access layer (server switches) with active/active uplink connections.Access NetworkIn general terms, this is what your stuff connects to.  Servers, power units, storage area networks...  utilizing VLANs traffic can be segmented as needed, and servers connect to these access layer switches for both public (to the distribution and edge) as well as private (internal traffic to other servers or backup networks).Network Redux utilizes segmented access layer environments, each with its own active/active pair of fiber uplinks to our distribution network.  We typically will pair a set of access switches and distribution uplinks with 2 42U cabinets.ServersA critical layer, often handled poorly by hosting providers.  Servers can be built in many forms, provided by many vendors.Network Redux utilizes Dell PowerEdge server, our current builds are deployed as follows:

• Dell PowerEdge 2950
• 8x 2.0Ghz Xeon Cores
• 32GB Memory
• 6x450GB SAS-15K RAID-10 Storage (Hot Swappable)
• Dual Redundant Hot Swappable Power Supplies
• 2-4x GigE Nics

Network Redux offsets disk redundancy concerns with the usage of server grade SAS disks in RAID-10 configurations.  We offset our power redundancy concerns with dual power supplies, each which connects to a separate power distribution unit (PDU) fed by independent power sources.  Yes, this means that we are paying for twice the power we actually use for failover purposes, and each server is receiving power from separate sources in the physical building.And we have also began to offset our network card redundancy concerns by using link aggregation at our access switch levels (802.3ad) where we have two gigE links working together as a pair.Several key items such as power redundancy and backups still need to be discussed.  We will save those for another post.At the end of the day we pride ourselves in the infrastructure we build for our customers.  We do pay a premium for vendor grade and certified equipment as well as exceptional redundancy levels from Edge Network to Server Chassis.Cheers!

Today we are celebrating our 5th year of business! We thank all our clients, vendors, associates and family & friends for all the continued support and business.

Network Redux is pleased to announce that we have agreed to sponsor open source project, PHP Fusion!PHP Fusion is an open source content management system written in php.  By storing users site content in a mySQL database and providing a comprehensive administrative system, PHP Fusion has quickly become the number one resource for open source CMS.  Maarten Kossen explains, "We have grown a lot over the past few years, and we currently have on average 20,000 downloads a month. We have 80 crew members, both developers and non-developers, and quite an active community."At it's core, http://php-fusion.co.uk/news.php is a development and support site for PHP Fusion. Featuring news, forums, search, photo galleries and much more, PHP Fusion has grown from a single site in 2002 to 19 support sites in 2009.  As they outgrew their resources they began to look for a new host. PHP-Fusion approached us looking for hosting that would allow their multiple sites to run smoothly and have room to grow. Because of the weight and traffic it was agreed that a cloud solution would best suit their needs.  "We're honored to have been chosen by the PHP-Fusion project for their hosting and development requirements.  It is quite humbling to help open source software developers power their hosting needs using the open source technologies which encompass the Redux Cloud," stated Network Redux founder Thomas Brenneke.The cloud solution offers root access and allows users to scale up and down at anytime by providing on demand servers and storage.  Fully managed, nightly backups, and 24/7/365 monitoring of external and internal Node health are just a few features that come baked in with the CR+ package.

We want you to join us at Ignite Portland 7 this coming Thursday Nov 19, 2009 at the Bagdad Theater.  This is a community event that is organized by the Legion of Tech.  The basic premise is that each presenter has only 5 minutes to present and must get through 20 slides, topics range from the absurd "Building Your Own Pirate Radio Station", to sure to be hilarious "Confessions of a Dating Ninja", to the practical "Becoming Bike Oriented".  Some of our very own clients will be presenting and we can't wait to see them.  If you are not in the Portland area, don't fret, you can watch it all streaming live online at IgnitePortland.com on the day of the show.We have to give special thanks to Brandissimo! for helping us with our sponsor video again.  We are soooo pleased with the latest episode of Super Network Redux Man Episode 2Mark Aguilar, Jimmy Cross, and Ajay Karat did an excellent job and on a really short time line and we can't thank them enough.  We will premier the video at the event and add it to this blog post later.  If you missed the original cartoon of Super Network Redux man, you can view it here.Donate: The great people at Small Society and the 30 Hour Day project are collecting toys for Toys for Tots and food for the Oregon Food Bank. Remember to bring some non-perishable food, or new, unwrapped toys, and drop them off in the lobby.Twitter Contest: We have depicted a well known (in the pdx community) client of ours in our sponsor video.  We will buy a pitcher of beer at the show intermission to the first person who correctly dm's us the right guess.  Be sure you are following us @networkredux so that you can participate! Update: The answer was Justin Kistner, founder of Beer & Blog.