rianjs.net

First of all, let me say that I did quite a bit of homework before I went with a dedicated server provider. I was looking for the best overall value. I finally narrowed it down to blacklotus and iweb.

I finally went with iweb because of one thing. With their killer deal that they were advertising webhostingtalk plus the fact that they would upgrade me to a 100Mbps port for free (BL was an extra $30 to go from 10Mbps to 100Mbps) if I needed it, I thought they seemed like a good bet. They had some other factors going in their favor:

1. They're Canadian.
2. They're plugged into peer1's network (among others)

Fast forward to last night. One of my users will be distributing a large (500MB) file to multiple simultaneous users, so I thought it was a good time to ask for that upgrade. At this point, I've been set up at iweb for about a week, and I've had very little traffic. (When I get traffic, it comes in leaps and bounds, as you will see in a few moments.)

So I put in an email to tech support shortly after midnight last night. I had a response this morning before I woke up, saying that it had been forwarded to the administrator who would be in charge of doing the upgrade.

I do my morning surfing, and I came across a nifty movie on slashdot, and as usual, all the mirrors are getting slammed. I was able to get a copy of the large version, so I through it up because I knew that there was no way slashdot was going to chew through 2TB of bandwidth from a mirror on the second page of comments.

Well the traffic poured in as it has in the past, and my MRTG graphs (which you can see below) showed that it was pegging the 10Mbps port limit. Oh well, whatever, I thought.

A few hours later, tech support responds. I'll show you the email exchange because all I could do was sit and laugh:

Hello,

in order to upgrade your network port to 100Mbits, a short 1 second
network restart had to be made.
Your server is now running on a 100Mbps port.

If you have any questions please let us know.

Regards,
–
Jean-François Chevrette, SysAdmin [iWeb / MyServerNow!]

My reply:

I love you, for I am in the midst of a thorough slashdot beating.

Many thanks!

-Rian

His reply a minute later:

Yeah I had figured that out when I saw your site this morning on
slashdot

Nice video too, hehe

Regards,
–
Jean-François Chevrette, SysAdmin [iWeb / MyServerNow!]

Haha! So he saw me on slashdot and then must have seen the tech support request. He then posted an entry on my blog (during this brief email exchange):

The server has been upgraded to a 100Mbps port

Comment by Anonymous at 7/4/2005 @ 1:01 pm

Freaking awesome. He saw me on slashdot, saw my request, upgraded me to a 100Mbps port, and posted to let everyone know (before I even could), all without any downtime that was visible to me. (I was using my site throughout the entire time.)

I'll post my MRTG graphs in a little while where you can see the 10Mbps cutoff, and then where it spiked up higher after the upgrade.

I think I made a good choice of webhosts.

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