Use the code "promo09" when checking out with Google Checkout. If you would like to pay through PayPal, we can offer the same coupon, but please contact us.
The 25% off is for the life of the account, so don't miss out on this opportunity to try out Entic.net's very fast and reliable OpenSolaris VPS servers (with a 99.99% uptime). SAS drives, dual power supplies, ZFS, DDR3 RAM, Intel Quad core.
Offer expires 12/31/2009.
Most providers won't disclose the uptime of the networks and servers. We'll do just that. With our next web site update, you'll see two links on the main page to these uptime reports:
Network and Server uptime reports (Server is our web site running on our OpenSolaris VPS server. If the links above don't work, please try again later.)
Please understand that our main goal at Entic.net isn't to make these numbers look good. So, we do not disable our monitoring (unless it is extended outage, to prevent the constant SMS text messages from bothering us) during both unplanned and planned maintenance events.
Sometimes, the OpenSolaris VPS servers are up and active but we have a catastrophic failure in the web server or database, and that also gets counted as a down time! So, these numbers are sometimes worse than they appear. You should correlate both the network and the server reports, to get a good picture.
Apache 2.2 (Apache's APR actually) has a bug in the OpenSolaris 2009.06 (including Entic.net's OpenSolaris VPS servers) release. The symptom is the web server goes unresponsive and hangs after some time.
We ran Apache in a single thread, in the foreground (httpd -f httpd.conf -X), and then used our trusty PID provider in DTrace to get a stack trace, that looks something like this:
0 80992 apr_atomic_inc32:entry
0 83055 atomic_inc_32_nv:entry
0 83401 port_getn:entry
0 85371 _portfs:entry
2 83394 ___errno:entry
2 80993 apr_atomic_dec32:entry
2 83062 atomic_dec_32_nv:entry
2 83394 ___errno:entry
2 83394 ___errno:entry
2 80853 apr_pollset_poll:entry
2 83124 __div64:entry
2 83121 UDiv:entry
2 83125 __rem64:entry
2 83120 UDivRem:entry
2 80992 apr_atomic_inc32:entry
2 83055 atomic_inc_32_nv:entry
2 83401 port_getn:entry
2 85371 _portfs:entry
Thanks to some great folks over at Sun, we've gotten a workaround that fixes this. The final fix won't be available until APR is upgraded or until build 124.
We launched our new site. With the new site, we're now officially offering OpenSolaris VPS services. More services to follow. The site was done in-house, there might be bugs but we'll fix them as soon as we find them - we don't have an extensive QA team.
Our web site was done with Pylons, a Python web framework. We make extensive use of Yahoo YUI toolkit. The toolkit's css and javascript libraries are loaded using Yahoo's CDN - this is why you might get a warning about parts of the site being in-secure, this is normal.
Enjoy, and please do let us know on Twitter or through email if you run into any issues.
We have a lot of things in the pipeline. We would still like to continue to provide Solaris zones. We like them. We believe they provide the fastest virtualization technique available (as you know, zones don't use a hypervisor unlike VMware or Xen products). Plus, we believe Solaris has a really good IP stack. Both combined, provide a super duper server that you get to benefit from.
So, how can we improve on what we are doing? Well, we want to be able to provide the zones in a cloud environment. Where, you can easily migrate the zone from one server to another using our web portal. This is not true today, because we have several servers and most of the servers are at different patch levels. This creates a problem for zone migrations (in addition, not all the servers are at a patch level where we can do zone upgrades when attached).
Another big issue is that the zones themselves don't have a full IP stack. This means that you can't have your own firewall inside your zone. This can be a really good feature, especially since VMware and Xen based products offer this.
Our next roll out of new servers and features will solve all of that. We will be going with OpenSolaris. We feel the OpenSolaris is matured and stable enough that we can proceed with that. It solves all of the above problems with the ipkg-native zone brand, and the Crossbow project that has already been integrated into OpenSolaris.
We'll also offer some new desktop "virtualization" in the near future. We hope this along with the new offerings of the zones based on OpenSolaris, we'll be in a better shape then most other competitors. Oh, and the new servers with SSD caches will help quite a bit too.