August 2013 archive

Coincidence

I’m typically not one to believe in co-incidence, but I’m also a fan of correlation not necessarily proving causation, while also not disproving it. We run a large number of Tripplite PDU (power distribution unit) devices in customer cabinets in our facility, they are largely how we determine power usage and billing for overages in …

Continue reading

Communication and It’s Relation to Customer Satisfaction

As systems administrators we work in an environment where everything we do provides a service of some kind. Whether it’s providing a shared hosting server to multiple users at a low cost, managing racks of servers for a client for thousands of dollars a month, or maintaining an Active Directory infrastructure for a small business …

Continue reading

“If It Isn’t Documented, Then It Isn’t Done”

Wise words from a Senior Sysadmin that I heard today, fortunately not directed at me. We hear this often: comment your code, document your processes. How many of us actually do it, and do it in a way that someone else can follow? Documentation is important for many many reasons. Primarily ensuring that someone else …

Continue reading

Handling Outages – A Lesson from Hostgator

Yesterday Hostgator had a major outage in one of it’s Utah datacenters which caused a number of customers to be offline for several hours. The outage actually impacted Hostgator, Hostmonster, Justhost, Bluehost, and possibly more, but this post regards the Hostgator response specifically. These companies all provide shared webhosting services. I am neither a client …

Continue reading