Miles Per Gallon
You know, before the time of driving a car laden with an insane amount of electronic gadgetry and in-your-face statistics, I never realized how much the MPGs are affected by the simplest things.
Sure gusting winds of 35+ mph will obviously affect your mileage, but to the tune of +- 10mpg is really intense.
Also, I'm amazed at the drag affect water has on the road, and the extra effort of getting the wheels to actually keep doing there thing. That's good for a difference of -7mpg.
Yep, I drive a lot, probably too much! And being out of alignment will kill 4mpg easily. I won't be able to report on incorrect tire pressure because 1. not happenin 2. im not spending money on tires for this when I'm not even a motor vehicle publication. Hah hah!
Leaving your old host?
Before you leave your old web host, ask yourself one question: Is there anything they can do to keep your business? Most often, an account is closed due only to a misunderstanding that can be overcome if another person from the company is involved. An honest company will try their best to keep you
happy, and humans can and do make mistakes. Consider opening a help desk ticket to
resolve or clarify the issue, or call them directly and at the very least, expect someone to call you back by the end of the current business day.
But let's assume you've done all of that, what should you consider?
Well hopefully, your new host will already have everything for your site tested, up, and running in production. If not, you may want to consider saving your exodus plans for a few weeks, selecting a new host, and migrating over as quickly as possible.
Prevent Data Loss
Once an account is canceled, all email, database, and website data will be permanently removed from their systems. It serves them no purpose to keep your data around; it takes up space better used for existing and future customers, and it could be considered a breach of confidentiality. It would be best to assume that it will no longer be possible to retrieve any data.
Please make sure you have adequate copies of your site content, mysql databases, and email content. If you're using IMAP for email, everything you have saved on the server will soon disappear. Consider archiving to local folders.
Registered Domains
Is your web host also your domain registrar? Many people advocate against this, and there are valid reasons for both. Ultimately, go with the decision that you believe in. Ease of a single payment, or spreading your eggs around multiple baskets.
Usually, if you have domain names registered under your account, you will still be able to log in to the control panel to manage those domain names. It is important to check with your domain registrar to verify that you will be able to use the same credentials to manage your domain names.
Billing
Expect to see a confirmation email from billing once the account has been closed. It is important that your
contact information is current so that you have proof of your cancellation, should their billing system decide to continue billing you. This usually is no longer the case, since a lot of hosting companies use 3rd party billing systems that have been widely adopted (such as WHCMS).
mysqldump consumes all available memory!
There's really not a whole lot to this post. You're a system administrator, and you're dumping mysql databases as part of your backup operation.
However on one of the larger databases, you notice your system starts killing processes for out of memory, swap usage goes through the roof, and you're left dumbfounded with no backup. What's going on?
Well let's get a solution going first. Without getting into detail, come up with a fractional value of the total amount of memory you have available to your system. Now use that number (for me I'm going with 256M) here with ulimit:
ulimit -m 256000 && /usr/bin/mysqldump -e --quick --add-drop-table -Q -uuser -ppassword -r database.sql database
So you'll notice the first thing we do is limit memory usage to 256MB.
Very simple, very trivial, very captain obvious, except it's not so obvious why mysqldump is so wasteful 
But used properly this will keep you from swapping during a dump operation, and leave more memory available for the rest of your system.
Cheers!
Struggling financially? Get rich the slow and realistic way!
Every now and then, I meet someone who is struggling to scrape by, and who buries their head in the sand when it comes to one of the most important areas to handle in life- finances. The bank has eaten all of their paycheck with debit card overdraft fees, and in some severe cases, the bank is guilty of re-ordering their transactions sorting by highest amount to smallest for the day, not even chronological order.
It's a never ending hole for them, and their hard-earned 700$ paycheck ends up being 400$.
I've been there, too.
How did I get out of that mess?
First, I stopped letting the bank let me abuse my debit card. How? Very painfully, over several months, I paid everything cash only. Even the inconvenience of going inside to paying first before pumping gas. If I really needed something, but didn't have the cash, I didn't get it. Food was a luxury back then as well, and I do remember calling out sick at work because I didn't have enough gas nor money for gas to get there.
Second, I realized that I was unable to spend time with my friends during the week, because in order to hang out with them, even a simple game of mini-golf, I had to have at least a little money. But it was always gone from going absolutely uncontrollable crazy on the weekends. So I had to want to stretch it out, which caused me to spend less on Friday and Saturday.
At the core of this decision is 1. Building self-control 2. Having a plan and 3. Doing something about it now. Now sure the plan was a very short-sighted plan (mini golf in 2 days), but considering the behavior before it was very very future-sighted.
Robert Kioysaki in Rich Dad Poor Dad said it was better to be flat broke by age 30, because you have plenty of time to make it up. That was very motivational for me because it came right on time, and it gave me hope for my future well-being since I had not yet turned 30.
Before I go too much further, I want to let you know that this hasn't been the lowest point of my life. There was a time where I was borrowing ramen from friends just to eat, not even able to scrape the 30 cents together to pick some up for myself, proving that history, going unchanged, repeats itself.
So internally, I started to grow more self-disciplined, and start goal-setting.
Possibly the largest eye-opener for me came when I signed up with mint.com, which graphed my spending habits and helped me set budgets to follow. Without even paying attention to the activities first, I went in to re-tool the amounts that were mis-spent. Even as a security minded individual, who is scared of the implications of entering some of the information mint.com requires to get set up, I still use it on several accounts, and still always recommend it to whomever I think will benefit from their FREE service.
By finally facing the financial vital signs in my life, and make the appropriate adjustments, I was able to finally begin plugging money into savings. And by plugging, I'm talking $10 a month at first. Then $100. Then $1500.
And then, the government started printing money and giving it away to all of these corporate failures who have done far worse than I ever wish I could have! Totally nuking the rate at which my precious savings account was paying me back. Those of you who have also switched to ING Direct back in the day understand the pain every time the prime rate would change, and we went from 4+% return on our SAVINGS, to now less than 1~2%. And we cry "foul" when its still a higher rate than most banks gave their precious customers when things were good.
So if this is the recession we are having, and we've been in it for so long, it is bound to turn around. And so for about a year, we've been tossing our money into this crushed stock market. I remember toying with the idea of buying a share of Google, priced at just over 300$. Have you looked at the value that would have been now? At the time of this writing, it is over $500 for that same share!
And sad to admit this, but this turnaround started by playing MobWars on Facebook, and realizing that it was possible to buy an asset, something that generated money. And after awhile, enough assets would be acquired to make an insane amount of money.
Sure its not easy. Neither is quitting smoking. Neither is gaining a healthy 50 to 100 lbs in body weight.
But everything, under the right mindset is attainable.
And tomorrow is another wonderful great day that I will get to enjoy, at work, and with my wife afterwards. We are richer than imaginable because we have each other, and are doing what we need to do for our future well-being.
SQUAT Failed: Rebuilt Cyrus Squat files and ignore I/O errors
This one here is for anyone who happens to be stuck solving this problem and hasn't yet come up with the fix (skip to the bottom )
What is SQUAT?
SQUAT is an index file for your email box. The purpose of this file is so that your IMAP email client can tell the server what you are searching your mailbox for, and it will return the result much quicker than if you were to download all of your email to your computer, and then perform the search. Again the key here is that you are using IMAP to work with your Darkscape email and use this technology to search through your messages, instead ofPOP3. With POP3, you are limited to the processing and disk capacity of your local computer, versus our email infrastructure.
Now, if you're like most people, you get new email throughout the day, and you also delete some emails. Because of this fact, it is necessary to have the server rebuild the indexes from time to time. Due to the way our email is set up, we have these two lines in our cyrus.conf:
squat cmd="squatter -r *" period=60
squat cmd="squatter -r *@*" period=60
This tells the server to rebuild the indexes every 60 minutes.
Running squatter -r * from the command line as cyrus and squatter -r *@* will fail and immediately terminate if it tries to rebuild an index for a mailbox that is locked by the POP server, or if there's an IO error.
An IO error might happen if the files and directories required for a mailbox do not exist, and there is an entry in mailboxes.db. How this happens, I'm not exactly certain. But you will want to:
service cyrus-imapd stop
ctl_mboxlist -d > dump
then edit the dump file and remove the line with the offending mailbox
mv mailboxes.db mailboxes.db.old
ctl_mboxlist -u < dump
service cyrus-imapd start
Here's what I did to get through most of the squat index rebuilds. I don't think you could ever get through all the errors without shutting down the mail service, and we all know how well that would go over... shutting down email for a few hours (or longer), hah.
su - cyrus
ctl_mboxlist -d > dump
for x in `awk '{print $4}' dump | sort | uniq`;do squatter -r user/$x; done
Where can I get a toll free number?
So you're really interested in a toll-free number. The question I ask of you, is why? For me, it was the ability to select a vanity number that would spell out "Darkscape". Sure it's way more than 7 digits, but it works out just the same.
In the book Four-Hour Work Week, Timothy Ferris mentions a few different phone system based services. Some of them include really great features like Interactive Voice Response system, similar to when you call your bank's automated number to get balance and recent transaction information. But you know what, I don't think I've done that within the past 9 years or so. I honestly wouldn't even want to put the effort into setting up an automated bill payment system by phone. We have perfectly capable folks ready to take payment by phone 24x7, and I prefer dealing with a human being anyway than a headache inducing phone-prompt labyrinth.
One thing I touched on in an earlier post, is treating your toll-free number the way you treat your domain name registrar. If you want to change hosting companies, you just contact your trusty domain registrar and change your name servers. And voila, pesky host no longer irritates you and your website visitors. And just the same, by controlling where your phone number rings, you don't tie yourself down to any one phone system. Hop from Skype, to Vonage, to your cell phone, your office phone, your receptionist or a mixture, easily and painlessly.
The company that we went with back in the beginning is still who we use today, Freedom Voice Systems. I remember maybe once in the past 8 years an issue where there was a service impacting issue, and that only lasted a few hours at the very worst. They've been extremely responsive support-wise, and very helpful. In the past few years, they have added a lot of services that you might find more useful, including hosted PBX. And while you can tell that they have a few lower-notch folks running support sometimes, we can all agree that new hires do take some time to train and it's all good. They provide a large number of other services we enjoy, like fax to email, fax send (printer driver), and call record.
Of all the bonus features, call record has been my favorite in actually understanding how the customer feels on the call, what they really are calling about, versus what the small message from the answering service contains. It has led to adding functionality to our services and our support personnel to address the needs of our customers, and making sure we are doing everything we can for them. The same can be said when the callers are dealing with the tech support line.
Good luck on your adventures in finding if that toll-free service you want, is the toll-free service that is right for you, your customers, and your business!
Tech Support Enhancements
We have recently added additional staff to our Helpdesk to facilitate a decrease in overall response time, and quicker resolution on any issues you may have. As an added bonus, we've opened up our phone system to give you a direct line with our support team- when times are critical and you just need to get ahold of a human as fast as possible!
While our administrative offices are open from 9am to 5pm EST, our support team is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. They will rest when they are dead, and no sooner. You, the loyal customer, are our most valued asset, and we exist for the sole purpose of helping you succeed.
Contact us today to answer your questions! 888-DARKSCAPE (888-327-5722) option 1, or support@darkscape.net!
What if I’m just starting my new business?
This post here is unrelated to the web hosting industry, but it is something I wanted to address awhile ago, here.
You've been dreaming about your very own business for awhile, and finally you decide to take the plunge and put your plans in motion. Now, for one good reason or another, you aren't able to dedicate all of your time during the day the way you'd like, when it comes to dealing with customers. You know at the bottom of your heart that the purpose of any business is to meet a customers need, and if you can't do that, you don't have a business.
There are a couple options that I went with in the beginning, that I believe were pretty helpful. The first, was hiring a really excellent telephone answering service to redirect calls to when I was unavailable. And unavailable could mean anything from your child's birthday party, taking classes at school, to sleeping. In my case, I was full-time U.S. Army, and often I was in the middle of stand-to, or working out in the motor pool, or if I was lucky enough, running around in full chemical warfare gear launching M203 rounds downrange all day long.
Early on I began working with Image Office Services http://www.imageofficeservices.com/, and if you do give these guys a call for service, please let them know Robert from Darkscape sent you. When the customer calls, they get a live person who is courteous and respectful, the way anyone should be. I had laid out a fairly decent set of documentation for them to follow for handling customer concerns, which was tweaked as we went along.
They aren't a tech support shop, but you'd be surprised at the number of tech support related calls they solved, just by listening to the customer and allowing them to solve the issue themselves by talking it out. I myself have done that many times, especially back in Chemistry class in High School. Now I won't mention my age here, but I promise you that it's been so long ago, I drove by my old H.S. when I was up in Wisconsin this past August visiting family, and that's not a place one would normally visit on vacation!
So now, the customer could call at any time of day, know that their concern was heard, and that the message was passed along and would be handled as quickly as possible. They knew this because working together with IOS as a tightly integrated team, we were able to get back with the customers right away.
In one of my later posts, I'll cover how we handled telephone number redirects. Like a domain name, you can use a toll free service to redirect your number to wherever you find the best service. And the best service may come with additional options that really tie you in. We'll be exploring toll-free providers, and other goodies like fax send, and call recording. Remember, its all in the name of quality customer service, and improving all business processes.
Until next time, happy surfing, and happy business building to all.