It’s another day so it’s time for another rant about something that continues to bug me.

The naming conventions of fields in tables of a database!  There seems to be absolutely no consistency between applications and in some cases even within the application it self.   My biggest gripe I would have to say is the naming of the primary key’s and foreign keys of tables.  I’ve seen the following recently in applications that have say the table customers

id
cid
custid
customer_id

I personally prefer the customer_id for the primary key but even consistency of one naming would be great.  The big reason I like using tablename_id  for the primary key is when joining other tables.  For example:

SELECT * FROM customers c
JOIN orders o ON c.customer_id = o.customer_id

I like this much better than having something like:

SELECT * FROM customers c
JOIN orders o ON c.id = o.customer_id

But this I can live with.  It’s when applications have no consistency what so ever.  They name the primary key “cid” for example then the foreign key is “cust_id” in one table and “customer_id” in another.

This can also be applied to pretty much all fields across all tables.  Some maybe are “tablename_field” while others are just “field”.  Pick one or the other in an application and if there are multiple developers it might be a good idea to come up with a convention that everyone follows.  But I doubt the developers could come to an agreement anyways I know from experience with an instance where the naming of a common foreign key in an application is still not consistent through out the application.  It is in the database, however the variable name for it seems to change from page to page with some using camel case on it while others believing it should be just one word.

Anyways I’m sure there are naming conventions somewhere that everyone is suppose to follow for these sort of things but no one seems to do it.  It also does not help that programmers constantly have a change of heart part way through resulting in the continued inconsistency.

Every few months or so we end up having to block the Twiceler bot on one of our servers due to high traffic caused by it resulting in what almost could be described as a mini dos attack.  The bot is made by Cuill which supposedly has some people from Google working on it as well as quite a bit of venture capital.  It sure does not show with their Twiceler bot however.  It is supposedly experimental at this point but they’ve let it loose on the Internet and every web master out there is complaining about it.

I’ve read about people complaining about it using several GB of bandwidth in a short amount of time and visiting close to 100,000 pages with most of them being the same pages.  So it hits a site using say a gallery system and all hell breaks loose and it just causes a slew of problems.

So we’ve pretty much blocked all their IP ranges like everyone else out there in hopes that maybe they’ll fix their bot to maybe read robots.txt files and also crawl at a reasonable speed.

July is finally upon us which means summer is in full swing around here.  Since it’s also July 1st that means it is Canada day but don’t worry we’re not taking the day off. So all that really changes in July is when I drive anyways I see less buses which is great.  I get to where I am going quicker and there is less traffic.

My duties today:

Update the accounting books to reflect last months revenue and gateway expenses.  Being that we’re not just some kid in his basement we do need to keep records.  I find doing the revenue and expenses at the gateway level at the end of the month keeps me more sane.  If I wanted it to be hectic I could go and do all the books the week before October (close to our year end).  But well that be just insane.

I’ll be updating the site to reflect the VPS offering on the front page opposed to it having the dedicated servers.  We don’t sell a lot of dedicated servers so it really makes little sense to have it as one of the front page portions.

I’ll also be switching the specials portion at the bottom of the main page into a link to our weekly specials.  We now have several offerings os it only makes sense to have a page dedicated to the specials.  It’ll just be a matter of keeping them updated.

Now just a random picture to end the post:   Here’s what a computer support tech got sent to them by a customer who’s computer was overheating:

The computer was loud so apparently this was the solution too bad it causes overheating

Well I’m bored so I figured I’d throw up some random links people have sent me today.

Poking along in the left lane? Prepare to pay

Maybe this rule should be everywhere?  There’s always someone in the left lane who insists on going below the speed limit and in some cases even at the same pace as the right lane resulting in a log jam.

Birthday party snub sparks debate

Absolutely ridiculous

The Website is Down - Sales Guy vs. Web Dude

Funny stuff

The Stalled Server Room

Wow?

That’s all for now

We have a lot of things comes down the pipe line this week which are very exciting.  The first big one is we’re moving away from our own backup system onto using R1Soft CDP solution.  What this means is we’ll be moving to at least daily backups and storing them for a week or more.  With this we’ll also now allow everyone to restore files through their cPanel (it actually logs into the CDP server the cPanel machine is using).  MySQL unfortunately not being available as an option, however we are able to do it if you file a ticket and I’m sure it’ll show up as an option within cPanel at some point in the future.

Along with that we’ve also upgraded our Bosco server.  Well to be exact we have a new server and named it Bosco.  We now have a 4TB system opposed to the small 1TB system we previously had.  Take into account each of our web servers only has 500GB of space on them we have no doubt this new machine will last for quite a while.

So as I type this the seeding of our backups have begun and I have no doubt next week we’ll be announcing the new backup system in our announcement forum as well as publishing this on our website.

Now as far as the subversion integration within cPanel.  I talked about this months ago and at the time I was under the impression we’d have it up and running soon.  Well I believe it’s very close to being a feature finally.  We’re once again testing the system and there is active communication between us and the developers of the software to get all the bugs figured out.  Based on this it’s just a matter of working out a few lingering bugs and we’ll have it on all our servers.

Now the More portion we’ll it’s most miscellaneous things but I think they’re worth a small mention:

Our phone system now works 100% of the time.  We found some issues sending the majority of callers to our voice mail.  We’ve fixed up that after we took a close look and found out we did not configure everything properly.

We’re seeing excellent growth in our shared and reseller offerings.  Every month we’re adding more customers than the previous month.  We can only guess that lots of people are recommending our services we do appreciate that.

Our VPS offering is not going as well as we had planned considering we had so many asking for it before we did not have it.  We’re currently working towards making it a more appealing offer and hopefully we should have that done soon.

Every year during the summer fires break out all over, there’s news coverage and newspapers covering the fire(s), but this one is different. It’s affecting me (and all the people who live within 100~ miles..)! It all started a few days ago when a wicked thunderstorm came during a nice sunny afternoon - it started a few fires nearby (30~ miles away). It didn’t seem like a big deal until one morning I wake up coughing and swear the house is on fire. Fortunately that wasn’t the case - it was only the sourrounding forest.

Now personally I’ve never been near a large fire - but it’s killing my lungs making it hard to breathe. Theres a nice smoke screen throughout my whole area, everything is dry, and everyone is coughing and hiding indoors. It’s sort of surreal - in a nightmarish sort of way.

A picture I took outside of my window:

This is a nice sunny day - about 85 degrees outside. It’s been like this for about four days now and is only getting worse. The air quality stinks and makes you have a nasty cough. No fun!

Here is a little section in the local newspaper with coverage of the fire(s).

-Cody

First of all the title was just to catch every ones attention it’s not strictly digital point based hosts, but for the most part they are the most guilty of doing what I am going to talk about.  So it does in fact happen on other forums such as http://www.webhostingtalk.com/  but I would say at a far less frequency.

Read the rest of this entry »

At Hawk Host we use a combination of the standard cPanel system, but using the script BMU to handle doing our backups.  The system is setup to do a certain percentage of backups per day so over the course of 7 days it makes a complete set of backups.  This system is pretty good compared to backing up all accounts each day and having no script to make sure the loads do not get to high.  Sounds great right?  Well I decided to take a look at our bandwidth graphs for the last month and I was surprised by just how much private network based traffic we are producing each month.

Here is the bandwidth graph for the month of May for our Bosco server

So how much bandwidth is that exactly?  Well that is 2000GB worth of data going into our backup server every month.  But wait a second Bosco isn’t even using 1TB of space in total!

Now here’s the bandwidth graph for one of the higher days of the month which generated 90GB of data!

What’s best about this is this is suppose to be an incremental set of backups and we do not generate archives or anything of that nature.

Thankfully we do not pay for bandwidth that does not go out to the Internet so that means we’re not actually being charged any money for this.  But even so that is a lot of data going through our backup machine each month.  As a result of this we’re looking at other solutions such as R1Soft and Evault as better backup solutions that are really incremental and could allow us to do 5 minute backups if we wanted to.  These systems would also generate lower load than our current backup systems do to their integration into the actual operating system opposed to just a rsync or some other fancy but inefficient way of generating backups.

We’ve had PostgreSQL feature for over 2 months now and I estimate we have just 1 customer actually making use of it.  I’m basing this off the fact one of our newer customers made a ticket about PostgreSQL being broken on one of our newer servers and sure enough it was!  Today I just checked another machine and it’s PostgreSQL was now throwing errors and not allowing people to make databases!

The reasoning for adding it was due to all the requests for it.  I think maybe the requests most people did not have any plans on actually using it.  Maybe they had software which said PostgreSQL or MySQL and they attempted Postgres first.

So I’m wondering is there anyone out there in the shared web hosting world that actually wants or needs PostgreSQL?

I use Postgres all the time and I think it’s a pretty awesome and comparable if not better than MySQL in area’s.  I am starting to think however it’s lack of popularity is not due to the lack of web hosts supporting it but other reasons.  The one that comes to mind is there is no good way to upgrade versions.  In order to upgrade you need to dump your data then import it again in the new version.  This is just down right silly and probably means very few people want to use it even in development environments!

Anyways… Postgres is here to stay but we figure the usage will be in the range of 0.0001% of our user base.

Here at Hawk Host we’ve noticed the art of canceling a service you’re paying for is a forgotten art.  With the introduction if Paypal as a common payment method for many services such as web hosting users are not seeing a reason to official cancel their service.  With web hosting for the host it is not worth the effort to go after the few dollars the customer owed for not canceling the service.  Paypal has provided a great service, but this is the one issue with it is the users now choose when to pay and can cancel a subscription whenever they wish.

At Hawk Host every month we deal with a three types of cancellations.

1)  The user logs into the client area and selects to cancel their package.  These are the former customers we like.  They have the etiquette to cancel the service.  As a result once the account is terminated we can easily fill the void with a new customer in no time.

2) The user does not cancel and moves their site to a new provider.  In these cases we let our automated system suspend their account then within a month the account is terminated from our servers.  This is absolutely the worst case scenario we can have.  We have a non paying user using space on one of our servers with no intention of coming back as far as we know.  We do not terminate the account instantly due to the work involved in doing so.  We let our automated systems handle it and we have a close to 30 day waiting period for the 3rd cancellation scenario.

3) The user does not cancel their service, however they continue to have their websites pointed at our servers.  These ones are especially tough to deal with since the user has not move their site they have simply failed to pay their invoice.  We give them 30 days and a few will actually eventually pay, but most will have their accounts terminated and in some cases these could be reseller accounts with 30+ accounts.  These are the cases where we wished the user choose credit card or a method we can automatically charge them.

I thought this was worth sharing since I know several people visit our blog.  So remember if you are using a service that has a recurring fee remember to be polite and cancel the service!  Don’t just run away without paying.  You never know there may be a company who will go after you for the funds then you could be in big trouble.