Security is in place, monitoring is being set up, and all sites are being tested as time permits.

Please let us know if you notice anything amiss throughout the DE Network.

We sincerely apologize for yet another long stretch of downtime. Funding is nil at the moment, and we have no redundant web server in case of emergencies. As it is, we had to wait for our old server to be shipped to a different facility so that our existing data could be made available. Unfortunately we could not make it work on the server it was moved to (OpenVZ, the technology we previously moved away from), and as a result had to find a new provider and transfer all of our data there instead.

We’re back up, we’re Xen-powered, and we’re hard at work on our server technology here at DE, two concurrent projects at Fallout Games, several open source .NET tools and libraries at SingularityShift, our debut sci-fi novel at digiPress, and some new electronic music from [broken] at Shattered Audio.

Don’t forget to bookmark Technology Kills, Ben McClure‘s blog.

Stay tuned for future updates around the DE Network, as well as a new Digital Empire site to tie them all together.

Without going into too much detail, or damning our previous providers, suffice it to say that it was taking well over a month to get two new servers stood up to replace two overseas servers–before the process was even complete they decided to go ahead and terminate one of our most important servers without prior notification and before we had a new server to move everything to. That was the final straw after a long string of problems receiving customer support, and we started moving elsewhere immediately.

As can be expected with such an emergency move, we’ve had to make some major underlying changes to our environment and some things may have gotten broken, whether it is obvious or not to us yet.

• We are on all Xen servers now, instead of OpenVZ. There should be no difference to our visitors, but on the back-end this makes administration and management much simpler, and much more akin to standard dedicated servers.
• We have decided to go with a third-party DNS service provider instead of continuing to front the cost of running our own geographically redundant nameservers. So far, this has meant cost savings and greater performance and reliability in resolution of our domains. We are on five different nameservers located at 5 different datacenters, so there should never be any single point of DNS failure.
• We’ve completely ditched Apache 2 in favor of LiteSpeed Web Server which is proving to be hugely advantageous–we’re getting much better web performance, and the environment is much simpler to administer.
• We have upgraded our WordPress and Drupal environments, collapsing the many instances of each into a single instance of both applications that hosts content for all of our WordPress and Drupal sites. This has made them easier to update and maintain, and they are performing well so far.
• As a result of the above, everyone can now finally have a single login for all of our WordPress sites, and a single login for all of our Drupal sites (and yes, you can still link both to an OpenID). I apologize, but more likely than not you will have to sign up for the site again–if you really would like your previous account to exist, let me know and I will manually migrate it over.
• Our monitoring system had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Thanks to Zabbix’s sane defaults, we’re mostly up and running, but it will take some time before we are fully monitoring our entire environment again. If you notice anything is down or not working properly that we haven’t fixed yet, please let us know!

We appreciate everyone sticking with us through this transition, and we’re in a much better place now than we were before the move.