The official Simpli Hosting blog

Hi all,

I’m off to Burning Man and will not be accessible via phone or email until Tuesday, 9/4. Not to worry, however, as our support team is available and happy to assist you with any concerns or questions you may have until next Tuesday.

This is my third year straight at Burning Man. If you’re curious about Burning Man, you can check out the official Burning Man website. My boyfriend, Richard, and I are driving my awesome RV, Retrograde, to Burning Man. (I’m typing this from the front passenger seat of Retrograde in a parking lot in Reno, NV!)

See you all Tuesday! Have a great week.

-Erica

Hi all,

For those of you still left on AboveNet, we’re happy to migrate you any time you would like. Email support@simpli.biz and we’ll set you up with a time to migrate to our new IP addresses. In the meantime, please keep in mind these two AboveNet scheduled maintenance notices:

This notices affect the old 208.185.x.x AboveNet IP addresses ONLY. Our new multi-homed network, which is 208.69.x.x and 208.78.x.x, is not affected.

AboveNet is planning a scheduled hardware maintenance on switch2.colo7.sjc2.above.net. The details of this maintenance are below:

Date & Time: Monday, August 27th 2007, 02:00am through 04:00am PDT
Location(s): San Jose, CA / Device switch2.colo7.sjc2.above.net
Description: We will be performing hardware maintenance on this device.
Customer Impact: We do not expect this maintenance to be service impacting.

NOTE: AboveNet says this will not be service impacting, but it may be…similar maintenances in the past have caused service issues.

Date & Time: Aug 31st, Sept 1st, 4th, and 5th 2am to 5am local time for the device.

Location(s): Network wide.

Description: We will be making a backbone bgp configuration change to several routers per night over the 4 nights listed. This change requires our internal bgp sessions on each router to be restarted.

Customer Impact: Routing on each router will be disrupted for approximately 5 minutes; similar to a reboot. Graceful re-routing will be performed as much as possible.

NOTE: This may not affect us, but please keep it in mind anyway.

Thank you,
-Erica

Hi all,

We have installed a new merchant account to run our credit card transactions. We tested successfully with both a Mastercard and an American Express card today. Nothing will change from your perspective — you should still pay your bills at https://clients.simpli.biz/billing/ — but if you experience any problems paying your bill by credit card, please let us know by emailing support@simpli.biz.

Thank you,
-Erica

Hi all,

We just received an “emergency maintenance notification” from AboveNet that they are planning switch hardware maintenance on 8/4/2007 from 2AM-4AM PST. While they say that it will not be service impacting, our experience with AboveNet indicates that there may be a period of intermittent or no connectivity during this time.

This maintenance WILL affect all servers on 208.185.x.x IPs.
This maintenance WILL NOT affect any servers on our new network (208.69.x.x or 208.78.x.x), where we no longer use AboveNet as an upstream provider, and we can quickly route around any provider outages.

We are scheduling more migrations from AboveNet to our new network next week. If you’d like to migrate to our new network next week, please email us at support@simpli.biz with times that work for you, and we’ll migrate you over so you will no longer have to deal with AboveNet.

Thank you,
-Erica

Hi all,

We have been extended special pricing through August 27th on SSL certificates from Geotrust. These are top-of-the-line SSL certificates that secure your sites and put a lock icon in your customers’ browser windows. This special pricing won’t be valid for very long, so renew or buy your SSL certificate ASAP to take advantage of this offer!

Please note that if you have an existing certificate that hasn’t expired yet, we can add up to 3 months on that certificate, so go ahead and take advantage of this deal even if your certificates haven’t expired!

Geotrust RapidSSL certificates
The exact same certificate that is sold for $69/year here:

Special pricing valid through August 27th or until we sell out, whichever comes first: $39/year · $65/2 years · $89/3 years
Additional discounts available for 4 and 5-year certificates!

These certificates are valid for one subdomain (e.g. www.yourdomain.com or secure.yourdomain.com).

RapidSSL wildcard certificates
Exact same certificate that is sold for $199/year here:
Like the certificates above, but valid for any subdomain under your domain. Valid for unlimited subdomains on a single server (you will have to buy 1 wildcard certificate for each server that you have.)

Special pricing valid through August 27th or until we sell out, whichever comes first: $179/year · $309/2 years · $439/3 years
Additional discounts available for 4 and 5-year certificates!

DO NOT WAIT! We have very limited availability on this pricing plan, with both a time limit and a low limit on the number of certificates we can buy. This is the lowest pricing you will see on these top-quality certificates. RapidSSL has already doubled their price starting August 28th, so stock up now for multiple years. You will not regret it!

To purchase certificates for your domain name, please email us at support@simpli.biz. We will need a CSR (certificate signing request) from you in order to get the certificate up and running. If you’re not sure how to generate a CSR, we can do that for you at no additional charge…just let us know.

Thank you!

Hi all,

We’ve upgraded our firewall to a beautiful Cisco Pix 525, which is Gigabit-capable and works with our new network (our new network is VLAN-based, and our old Netscreen firewall did not support VLANs.) Due to the cost difference between this firewall and our old one, we are raising our firewall price to $35/month per server.

This is quite a worthy upgrade, and the monthly price does include your own VLAN with 3 or 11 usable IPs (up to 11 usable IPs are included in the price, but if you only need 1-3 IPs, we will put you on a smaller VLAN.) It’s a great deal. If you would like to upgrade to this service, please let us know. Those of you who are behind the firewall will receive emails this week letting you know about the new pricing structure.

Many more updates coming soon!

Thank you,
-Erica

Hi all,

For ALL customers: If you’re using 69.90.210.8 as a DNS resolver (in /etc/resolv.conf on Linux/UNIX or in your IP address settings on Windows), please change this to 208.69.176.250 right now to ensure that your server(s) are still able to properly resolve DNS. This is of the utmost importance!

For 69.90.x.x customers: Our 69.90.x.x IP addresses will be permanently removed on Monday, May 7 at noon PST. That means that the sites you had running on these IP addresses will stop working. In order to avoid downtime for any server on the 69.90 network, please make sure all services on your server have been migrated to our new 208.69.x.x network.

If, for some reason, you have any 69.90.x.x IP addresses on your server(s) and you have not been contacted by us, or you have not either already been migrated or are scheduled to be migrated Friday, please contact us immediately or your server(s) will go down on Monday!

At this point, we’ve migrated nearly half of our hosting customers (more than half by server numbers) to our new network. We’ll be migrating our AboveNet (208.185.x.x) customers through the end of May and into June. This is part of a massive cleanup of our network and will result in better performance and even higher uptimes for your servers. We’ve been working long hours and often far into the night to migrate everyone to our new IP addresses as quickly as possible. If you have posted a normal support request in the past two weeks and it has taken us longer to get back to you than normal, I do apologize for that. We are somewhat backlogged on regular support due to spending so many hours migrating customers, but this should settle down next week.

Also, several customers have asked for new bandwidth graphs. We’ll have these for you soon — hopefully as soon as next week. That’s a project at the top of our priority list as well. Right now, our new bandwidth usage server IS recording your usage data — we just don’t have a good interface for you set up right now.

Thank you for your patience and continued support as we strive to make our network the best one out there!

-Erica

Hi all,

AboveNet (208.185 IP addresses) crashed earlier today for approximately 40 minutes. All Peer1 IP addresses (69.90) and Simpli IP addresses (208.69) remained online.

The official cause was on AboveNet’s end — a loose fiber cable on their switch port.

We are migrating approximately 8 customers per night to our new network, which will not fail if a single upstream provider goes down. We have been pulling long hours at the office to try to get all customers pulled over to our new network. The customers remaining on AboveNet will be migrated in the May-early June timeframe. I assure you that we are working as fast as we can to migrate everyone, while ensuring that all customers who are being migrated are migrated successfully with as little downtime as possible.

I do apologize for the inconvenience. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, however, when all customers are migrated properly to our new network and we no longer have problems like this stemming from upstream provider outages. This isn’t very far away — I expect to have all customers migrated by July 1 at the latest.

Thank you,
-Erica

Hi all,

First of all, we are migrating ns2.simpli.biz from its current IP of 69.90.210.8 to its new IP of 208.69.176.250 today. Until May 1st, ns2 will work on both 69.90.210.8 AND 208.69.176.250. As of May 1st, it will only work on 208.69.176.250. That means, if you have a server using this IP address for name resolution (if this IP address is in your /etc/resolv.conf file for Linux, or in your DNS server IP addresses for Windows), you will need to change this IP address in your server settings to 208.69.176.250 by May 1st. Please go ahead and make this change immediately.

If you are using ns1.simpli.biz/ns2.simpli.biz or ns1.simplihosting.com/ns2.simplihosting.com as DNS servers for your domain name, you will NOT need to make any changes. We will take care of all changes that need to be made on that end. It’s only if you have the IP address hard-coded somewhere on your server, like in /etc/resolv.conf, that you will need to make the change.

Finally, here is a further explanation of how the IP migration works. During your scheduled migration time, we will be working closely with you to migrate your server(s) over. We will need your root/Administrator password or an account with full sudo privileges to complete this migration for you. After the migration, BOTH your old and new IP addresses will work! You will then have until May 1 (in the case of the 69.90 addresses) until the old 69.90 addresses stop working. During the next few weeks, then, you should flip over all of your domain names to your new IP addresses. May 1st is the HARD CUTOFF DATE for Peer1 (69.90.x.x) IP addresses. I cannot stress this enough — on May 1st, the 69.90 IP addresses will stop working, so please make sure everything is migrated!

By now, if you are on the Peer1 (69.90.x.x) network, you should have received your new IP addresses and a scheduled date and time for your migration. If for some reason you have NOT received this, please email us immediately at support@simpli.biz and we will resend it to you.

Migrations start tonight and go through the end of the month. With your help, this will be successful and your network connectivity will be vastly improved!

By the way, for those of you on AboveNet (208.185.x.x) IP addresses, your migration starts in May, so watch for emails from us in the beginning of May.

Hi all,

We’re ready to start a large-scale migration to our new IP subnet. We’ve decided to migrate all 69.90.x.x IP addresses first. This is a significant upgrade in terms of speed and reliability from the bandwidth you have now. 69.90.x.x customers are currently on Peer1 bandwidth only. This migration will add Global Crossing to the mix for better international speeds to and from your servers, and multiple-provider redundancy so that if one provider goes down, we will automatically route you to a second provider.

This week, if you have server(s) with IPs in the 69.90.x.x range, you will receive a series of emails. The first email will ask you to confirm how many and which IP addresses you are utilizing, based on the records we have in our internal database. Once you reply with a confirmation, you will receive a second email. The second email will contain your new IP addresses and complete documentation on how to migrate your server(s). You will have approximately 2-3 weeks from receipt of the second email to migrate your IP addresses.

There will be two different ways to switch over your IP addresses, which we will detail in the second email we send you. One of them involves no downtime, so if a no-downtime migration is important to you, rest assured that we will work with you to achieve this goal.

Within the next month, all customers with servers on the 69.90.x.x range will be migrated to our new 208.69.x.x IP space. Please ensure that you reply to our emails quickly. Time is of the essence, as all 69.90.x.x IPs must be migrated by May 1.

If you have additional questions, please wait to ask them until you receive the first email from us. This will allow us to finish sending out all customer emails quickly. Most questions you have should be answered in the emails you will receive.

Thank you,
-Erica