Firstly a big thank you to a number of our clients who have been very patient and understanding of the last few days as we have had to deal with a couple of servers that over the last week have had performance issues. The problem is essentially due to a number of web applications written in .NET becoming very active. A number of .Net system settings and the setup of session management across servers was implemented to handle the extra load. All appears to be running better but we are not finished with the issues, we are currently identifying the heavy running web apps and will be moving them to newer servers. We want to be sure we have the servers properly balanced.

This is one of the challenges of shared web hosting when a new server is provisioned and new accounts start on the server most things are quiet and the metrics of the number of accounts/domains is within range. The servers in question are just over a year old. One or two sites, can over time build up in popularity or suddenly become active (as in this case, which is more sudden). With servers that build up in activity over time we are able to be more proactive in balancing servers. With sudden jolts of activity it is a lot harder. There are also times when client sites become active and the client starts playing with their code to add features or try to improve performance- effectively running development code on a production server (developing in real time) which can cause more problems for us. Please fully test your code on your local test and development servers before uploading.

Due to these compounding issues of the last few days we have had an unusually high number of support queries. A big thank you to Kunal for handling this with his usual calm manner and every one in the team especially Vijay, Ligon, Bob and Naheem for going above and beyond.

My time in the last week has been spent in overall coordination of our activities. I received a number of emails from clients. This is important as it helps me understand the situation from your perspective  better and I immediately work with Kunal and other team members to ensure that they resolve your issues. Whilst they work on resolving your issues I put my time to overall planning and shuffling of major projects and resources as well as looking at ways of improving our systems and methods to reduce and eliminate such issues. This business which is on the leading 3edge (bleeding edge) is constantly changing and why we take this approach of continual improvement.

Also this week in order to keep our new control panel roll out coming we have been shuffling our internal sites and databases to new servers which has gone relatively smooth.