What to do when your server goes down

First of all: do not panic. What may appear to be an outage, may actually be an issue with your network connection or Internet congestion. Once you have eliminated the usual suspects, there are a few steps you can take to resolve the issue quickly and get your dedicated server back up and running.

1. Test an SSH connection. If you can still SSH into your server, you most likely just have a software issue. If your web server application (such as Apache) has crashed, a simple restart may fix the problem. If you notice it starting to crash routinely every day or every week, you may have a security exploit.

2. If you cannot SSH into your server, try to ping and traceroute the server. If you get network connections all the way up the traceroute but cannot connect to your server, that means the network is fine, but the physical server may have crashed or been shutdown. Follow the normal procedure for rebooting. If your server is remote, you can ask your web host to reboot it. Some hosts also have automatic reboot switches that you can activate remotely. If something is wrong with the network, check with your host. They may already be diligently trying to fix the problem.

3. If rebooting does not fix the problem, and you cannot access your server, your host may offer you a KVM connection so that you can troubleshoot your server’s network settings.

4. If your host cannot even get the server to start in order to use KVM, they will probably have to re-image your box. This will erase everything, and you will be thankful at this point that you have kept backups of all websites on your server.

Photo Source: stock.xchng

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 Beta Released

As anticipated, the Linux giant Red Hat has released the first beta of the 6th version of its long-awaited enterprise server operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The new OS offers greater server scalability by increasing the strength and performance of KVM hypervisor, its kernel-based virtualization infrastructure.

Rather than a maximum of 16 CPUs under which KVM could run, it now can handle up to 64 and a terabyte of memory. Red Hat also focussed on increasing I/O throughput of the KVM virtual machines.

RHEL will run Linux kernel version 2.6.33 and will also have backwards compatibility with previous versions of RHEL kernels. They will continue to support kernel versions for 7 years. Although RHEL is a commercial Linux distribution that requires licensing, many smaller web servers also run run free and open source versions of it, such as CentOS. Red Hat’s primary business is enterprise-level Linux servers, with an annual revenue of $652 million.

Source: InformationWeek

When Your Dedicated Server Goes Down

Question: I just ordered a remote dedicated server, and I am concerned about trusting my data with someone else. What are my options if the server goes down?

Answer:

Generally speaking, you do not have much to worry about. You most likely did your homework before selecting your web host. There is not a huge risk of you losing your data completely, but you should always keep backups just in case.

The bigger risk is downtime. You want to minimize the disruption of service, especially if you have a business and clients who depend on your website(s). Here are a few steps you can take to minimize downtime.
Read More >>