Upgraded for WordPress Uptime
The reliability of WordPress sites hosted at Lightning Base has been very good, well over 99.9%. But when it comes to uptime, you can always do better.
In light of this, we’ve upgraded.
What’s Improved?
In our new system, sites run off ultra-fast storage in Raid 10, just like before. But this storage is now continually replicated in a second building. If there’s a serious problem on the server, the system can be automatically booted up in the second availability zone. This should be nearly immune to hardware failures – even if the building burned down.
In addition to the better redundancy, these are upgraded servers. We’re providing access to the same number of processors per plan as before, but these are faster systems, so customers are getting a free upgrade in performance. The new servers will also provide us with more disk space at a lower cost (thank you, falling hardware prices) and I expect to pass on some of that to our customers through larger storage quantities in the coming weeks.
For the curious, our new system is located at SwitchNap in Las Vegas. This is a state-of the art datacenter with great connectivity, redundancy, and security (check our site next week for the public announcement of our new European location, using the same highly-available setup, which is already open for current customers).
Getting Started on the New Setup
Anyone who signs up for a new account, or existing customers creating a new hosting plan, will automatically be setup on the new system. If you’re an existing customer and would like be moved, open a support ticket and we’ll help get that done. It does require an IP change, but there should not be any downtime associated with getting switched over.
More to Come
I’m excited about what’s happening at Lightning Base – the above-mentioned upgrades, upcoming service in Europe, and a couple more announcements coming down the pipe. Our systems have gradually improved over the past year to the point where we can increasingly focus on new features and making the experience of managing your sites at Lightning Base easier and more enjoyable.
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As always, if you have any questions – get in touch.
