To celebrate Singapore’s National Day, we, the citizens of Singapore, have decided to offer free hosting!

What? YOU HEARD ME! FREEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Not with 42 candles on the cake, but 42 blogs on the internet. Check it out!

No strings attached, nothing.

I’m really excited to be blogging about this because in a few hours we’d be having our very first mini roadshow. We’ll be running a little promotion while we’re at it!

Dubbed the 40-Free-Blogs Promotion, we’ll be giving away 40 free bloggers 6 months worth of free hosting complete with a domain name of their choice! No strings attached!

Can’t wait!

In the early hours of yesterday, a gunman had rampaged through the campus grounds of Virginia Tech and killed 33 innocent people, including his own.

It’s impossible to imagine why anyone would do such a thing.

My condolences and prayers go out to all those caught in this senseless tragedy.

I’m sitting here behind my desk wondering how else a web development company can differentiate itself.

The truth is, where we were unique in providing our developmental services, this territory is starting to be invaded by newcomers as the barrier of entry is getting lower each day. Honestly, this is the time when Splazz has to start innovating.

And innovate it will.

With our recent in-housing of our CRM system, we’ll not become more organised on the backend, it means that our team will be able to stay connected with the community in a much more personal way. And this really is our goal.

We want to help build ideas. We want to help small companies and individuals get a fighting chance to grow. And all along we’ve attempted to do this by taking time off to sit down with you to understand what your needs are and where you want to go in the near future.

But it’s not enough. We want to do more. We want to be more involved in supporting your dreams. Your goals. Not only that, we want you to have a say too.

I think it’s about time I gather all the directors, slap them silly with their over-seriousness figure how we can make add more action-packed fun into Splazz~

I’m thinking…community driven. Yes. Web 2.0

I have no idea what the title is supposed to mean…but I thought it was going to be a nice title.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of things that have been happening so i’ll update everyone in today’s entry.

1. Happy New Year~!
This comes a tad bit late but better late than never right? 2006 has been a great year with us seeing our operations grow as well have the size of some of you guys grow. I’m glad that your sites and companies are doing well. May 2007 be a better and more exciting year! All the best!

2. Finally…I declare the shifting done!
In general the server shift was completed on the 23rd of December without any issues but some clients who administer their own domains had yet to update the DNS for the domains until. Because that essentially means that not everyone was on the new server, I only waited till now to declare this. I’m sure the new servers will provide more reliable uptime and speeds.

3. Earthquakes are bad.
My sympathies to all those who were affected in the Taiwan quake. It’s unthinkable to me how it must feel to have lost loved ones in natural disasters such as quakes. Although the effect on Splazz was less severe, we too were not spared from the earthquake. Our servers continued to run as per normal but some emails that were directed to me, and sent out from me, did not get to the intended recipients because I’m in Asia. For that week, the internet connections were basically lost or was so slow that they just timed-out. Glad to say though that the repairs that are underway on the affected cables and the re-routing of the dataroutes are bringing things back up to speed.

So yeah…that’s it for now…We’ve got things in the pipeline to help streamline our services to bloggers as well as our corporate clients…

Stay Tuned~!

It’s been good news so far…We went through the first 3 phases without much problems. There were problems here and there but none that had any significant negative impact on anyone’s websites.

As of now, we’ve ported all the accounts onto the new servers. I’m still waiting for some clients to make the necessary DNS changes for their domains, but otherwise we’ll be spending the next one week watching to see if anyone has any problems and, of course, to help resolve any of the porting issues.

Once this is over, i’ll put up another, hopefully more light-hearted, post to tell everyone about what’s in the pipeline over the next couple of months.

Till the next one guys~!

movingthehousein -

Moving is such a hassle…but we all want bigger houses don’t we?

From the early morning of 12th December 2006, we will begin migrating accounts from the old server to the new server.Amongst the reasons for the server transfer is the following:-

1. The new fleet gives us more than 30x the present bandwidth capacity that we presently have.
2. It increases storage capacity by more than 200% allowing us more freedom to plan for more competitive package.
3. The new fleet also employs the RAID5 configuration which means that not all requests will go through a single hard drive. This also means that the downtime of your accounts will be reduced quite significantly.

The migration process will take place in 4 primary stages before it’s officially done

Phase 1 – Shifting of first 50% of all accounts(12th Dec)
Phase 2 – Troubleshooting(12th - 15th Dec)
Phase 3 – Shifting of Next 50% of all accounts(16th Dec)
Phase 4 – Troubleshooting(16th-22nd Dec)
After Phase 4, the server migration exercise will end.
If your account is being migrated, you will receive an email from me to indicate the start and end of the migration process.

Ok. But here’s the honest truth. With all migrations, there are complications. There are some possible downsides to this. And I’ll list some of them here.

1. The new servers work on a different set of nameservers. Splazz will handle the domain DNS updates of course but there will be that standard 24 hours of instability while the new DNS entries propagate internationally.
2. The file structure for both the old and new servers are the same but I’m just afraid that some of your codes might start to malfunction. This won’t affect most of you but is noteworthy so you know where to start looking if things don’t work out.
3. Any changes you make while the account is being migrated might be lost because your changes would be made to the old server. If you want to know more about why this might happen, contact me and I’ll explain it in greater detail.

One change will be that once your account is migrated and you attempt to log into the Cpanel, the browser will probably give you a certification mismatch. Simply ignore this and proceed into your cpanel because we have used a self-signed certificate to secure data between your local machine and the server.

My recommendation is that when you receive the notification from me that your account is being migrated, minimize your activity until you receive the notification that you account has been transferred successfully.

DishNetworkCommercialBig -

I’ve decided to lighten things up a little. Why do companies always have to be so serious with their announcements and all right?

Well, we’ll still have serious announcements but from time to time i’ll probably have entries like this one. More natural for me to write anyway.

So what’s up with Splazz these days?

Firstly, Ivan is busy revamping the site to make it look cleaner more sophisticated. I’m really excited to show you guys what he’s done because its such a pretty piece of work. I am definitely lacking in visual know-how.

Next, We’re re-working our packages to be more competitive and definitely more cost-effective. I can’t release the exact details of the new packages yet but they will definitely be something worth looking at when they’re released.

Lastly, and this i’m very excited to inform you is that we’ve officially procured better servers with RAID configuration. This essentially means that the system will almost never go down. This infrastructure upgrade means that our server fleet is now bigger. And in this case…definitely better. To allow our existing customers the benefit of the new server, we’ll be shifting all the accounts to the new server one account at a time. I’ll publish the account schedule later on in the week and all the necessary pointers to be looking out for…

That’s all for now…Have a great Festive Season everyone~!

Date:            10/07/2006
Start time:        22:00 ET / GMT -5
Estimated end time:    06:00 ET / GMT -5

Services/Equipment:    Fleet wide
Type of work:        Software upgrade
Purpose of work:    Upgrade to MySQL 5.0.x
Impact of work:        See below:

During the overnight hours of October 7th, 2006 we will be upgrading MySQL on the servers. We will be removing MySQL 4.1.x from our servers and replacing it with MySQL 5.0.x.  This upgrade will correct several bugs that remain unfixed in the MySQL 4.1 tree.  The upgrade to MySQL 5.0.x will also show speed improvements due to a new engine as well as increased reliability and stability.

The upgrade to MySQL 5.0.x will take approx. 10 minutes per server. Following the successful upgrade to MySQL 5.0.x we will recompile Apache and PHP on each server (required due to the change in MySQL libraries).  Both the MySQL upgrade and the Apache/PHP compile will be customer affecting.  Each server will see approx. 15 - 25 minutes of MySQL and Apache (web) downtime.  Unfortunately this is a requirement for this upgrade–all other services (POP, IMAP, SMTP, FTP, etc.) will remain online.

Please be aware that this upgrade should be seamless for all web applications currently installed within your account(s).  However, as a precaution, please check with your webmaster and script/web application developers to ensure your sites/scripts/web applications are MySQL 5 compatible.  As I mentioned above, generally, most web applications will function just fine using MySQL 5.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact support@splazz-solutions.com or open a secure ticket at: https://www.splazz-solutions.com/billing/.
Thank you for choosing Splazz Solutions.

Regards,
Ridzuan Ashim
Operations Director
Splazz Solutions

Date: 10/01/2006
Start time: 22:00 ET / GMT -5
Estimated end time: 06:00 ET / GMT -5

Services/Equipment: Fleet wide
Type of work: Software upgrade
Purpose of work: Upgrade to new mail system
Impact of work:

During the overnight hours of October 1st, 2006 we will be upgrading various mail systems on our servers. We will be removing legacy POP and IMAP daemons and replacing both of them with a new Courier install. This upgrade will increase mail system performance and make mail delivery more reliable.

For the duration of this upgrade, access to mail will be disabled. You will not be able to check mail nor will new mail be delivered. All mail sent to the server during this upgrade will be queued and delivered as soon as our maintenance is complete. During the upgrade you may see authentication errors (username/password being rejected). This behavior is expected and will correct itself as soon as the maintenance is completed. Your old messages on the server will be kept and new mail will start to appear shortly after the upgrade.

Following this upgrade you may have to make changes to your mail clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail.app, etc.). If you use IMAP via Thunderbird you may need to change your “IMAP Server Directory” to “INBOX”–this is in the advanced section of your mail account settings. The same thing may hold true for Outlook and/or Mail.app. Following this change you should be able to resubscribe to your IMAP folders. If you use POP (95% of our clients do), no changes are required.

If you have any custom mail configurations (procmail for instance), please disable your filtering prior to your server being upgraded as mail paths will change. If you aren’t sure if you’re using procmail or another custom mail setup, chances are you aren’t. Custom mail configurations require moderate to advanced knowledge of our email delivery system and more often then not require moderate to advanced knowledge to write specific filtering rules.

We anticipate that the server will experience anywhere from 60 minutes - 5 hours of mail downtime. This mail server downtime is fully dependent on the amount of mail currently stored on the server. If there’s little mail, the upgrade process will complete very quickly. Other services (HTTP, FTP, MySQL, etc.) on the server will continue to operate as expected.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact support@splazz-solutions.com or open a secure ticket at: http://www.splazz-solutions.com/billing.
Thank you for choosing Splazz Solutions.

Regards,

Ridzuan Ashim
Operations Director
Splazz Solutions