Author Archives: admin

Earth Day 2012

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Today is Earth Day 22 Apr 2012. As a heavy usage of data centers which use up a lot of energy. We have our part to play in helping protect our Earth for our future generations. One thing that we are doing and we continue to be doing is the procurement of green servers in replace of those energy intensive servers. In addition, we support and urge our data centers providers on the advantages of going green and protecting the Earth. Each company can protect the Earth in their own ways. For us we can be more energy efficient, recycle more of our used servers and even maintain the office air conditioning at 25 degree celsius. We do play only a small part, but we will continue playing our part in the protection of our One and Only Earth.

Contact Details

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We normally send our invoices via post and email. A lot of times customers’ domains expired because they had not send us the payments or instructions to renew. Often their claim was they had changed their emails or addresses. Problem about this is, you do need to contact us. There is no way for us to find out that your accountant was changed and had a new email address or you changed address if we do not inform us. We are not a government agency that are privy to your change of addresses. Therefore we hope that customers do update us your email and contact.

Colocation Temperature

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The datacenter design effectively determines the colocation facilities temperature and how efficiency it is. Our colocation facility isn’t cold to human beings, the ambient temperature are actually very nice for human beings. But in the racks temperature of the servers is about 16 degree celsius, the cooling was done with the air flow circulating in each rack hence effectively saving energy while at the same time ensures that the servers are at a cold temperature and also ensure that technicians do not have to suffer the cold temperature.

Disappear Customers and Problem Servers

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We had some customers who simply disappear without paying and what was worse was that they were colocation customers. They were hosting their own customers in these servers. Now when they disappear, we will have problems trying to dispose of such servers especially when these contain our disappeared customers’ clients’ data. I feel that they should be more responsible and hand over everything properly and keep us notified if they are closing down instead of leaving their clients in a limbo.

Their clients have no where to turn to. We also will have problems helping them answer. We cannot simply hand over the data etc to their clients as this will be in breach of confidentiality and it is sad to see their clients stuck and not knowing what to do.

Is Late or Non Payment a Proud Thing to Do Nowadays?

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We recently found that the number of customers who persisted in late payment started to increase. Previously when you are late for payment, you will at least feel ashamed and promise to try to be early the next time. But the trend we noticed is that such late payers are getting to think and to sound that late payments are a norm and something to be proud of rather than embarrassed. There is even a President of the company who wrote to my staff saying he won’t not buy from us as our staff repeatedly remind him to pay and after a prolong period, shut down his services and then he paid. He wrote that these was bad practices and he will never subscribe to us again. I send him a reply specially asking him if his own customers delay payment to him, would he feel the same way?

Singapore Colocation Datacenter

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I don’t know why, maybe it is because rental is cheaper in the Western side of Singapore. A lot of datacenters are situated in the West of Singapore and we see more and more datacenter projects there. The Eastern side seems to be having far fewer datacenters than in the West. For a country the size of Singapore, I guess I can say that Singapore is filled with datacenters. If these are full, it is a good thing as the per square feet returns of a datacenter are far higher than that of normal office space.

Number of Datacenters

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More than a decade ago, I experienced first hand the over supply of datacenter space in Singapore. Datacenter pricing was depressed for a long time. New Datacenters can go out of operations in months. After that, I think investments into building of datacenters more or less dried up. Demand was building up and we had a time when datacenter space was in so tight a demand that basically some overseas customers were told that the datacenters were full and they had to choose other Asian countries for instance Hong Kong.

But at the moment, I am seeing yet another huge amount of datacenter space being released to the industry. A lot of contracts are up for renewal. Will we be seeing an oversupply of datacenter? My bet is “Yes”

Green Datacenter in Singapore

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I saw a lot of advertising of Green Datacenter in Singapore. Is it possible to provide green datacenter here in Singapore when we have a lot of electricity generated through conventional methods? Was wondering if it is possible to build a datacenter that can be run on Wind or Solar power. That would be real green and maybe with backup power supported by the local power grid.

Looking for a DIY 1U server in Singapore

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For those who are not into buying established brands or have their own requirements for their servers, what you can do is to go to Sim Lim Square. There are quite a number of shops selling 1U casing. From there on it is your pick. I would recommend you choose a shop that is willing to fix everything for you for a price. Saves you the trouble of assembling everything yourself. Shop around for all the parts and have them assembled at the shop. Best to have the OS installed too so that you can test that everything is working. Do ensure that you test carefully as the warranties are only those warranties on parts that you purchased. For those doing the DIY method, do ensure that you are sufficiently good in technical knowledge or ensure that you have someone who can fix your server if there are problems. Those buying branded ones will not have such problems if they choose the warranties that they require. Some have up to 24/7/4 warranties available.

For us, we have both DIY and branded servers because of the differing requirements of customers. We also build up very good relationships with those branded and DIY distributors so that we can be assured of good services should any problems arise. Sometimes we do pay more for the servers as we do not go shopping for the cheapest but rather the most reliable. I think it is worth it spending a few dollars more for the peace of mind.

How to Test PHP Mail()

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To test for the functionality of the mail() function of PHP , you may want to use the code below

$to = "someone@example.com";
$subject = "Test mail";
$message = "Hello! This is a simple email message.";
$from = "someonelse@example.com";
$headers = "From:" . $from;
mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers);
echo "Mail Sent.";
?>

Save it as normal text file with a php extension, download into your web site and test. Of course remember to change the “someone@example.com” to an email address you can receive.

Basic Quality of a Web Programmer in Singapore

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I remembered when the Internet was starting, the web developers and programmers really know their stuff. There weren’t many tools for them and hence they really do know about web programming and how to debug their stuff. But as prices keep going down, the number of web programmers also going down and there were more and more outsourcing of programmers. Quality of programmers vary because of this, some are still very good. Some do not even know the basic syntax of the programming language they are developing the web site in. They cannot even write a “Hello World” in the script they are using. When there is any problem, they will basically tell the owners that it is web hosting issues and we have to explain to the owners and sometimes even debug to show that it is not the server that is having issues. I feel that you get what you pay for, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Just because a web programmer promises the lowest prices and the owner takes it, the web owner may get far more problems than what he bargained for.

This particular Sunday, we had a complain from a web programmer who said his web site could not work all of a sudden and he had not changed his site for more than a year. We did all the checks for him and it ended up that he just changed the site today and had problem debugging. For us as a web hosting company, there is a limitations to helping web programmers doing programming for their customers. If they have a problem, it is often best if they give us the facts and not the lies. For this, we spend 2 hours just finding out in the end that the web programmer was lying. After we point out the information to him, he just disappear.

Buying your Products

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We had several inquiries from customers asking about some strange orders that they had on the Internet. The so call buyers really do not care for what they are buying. But they did give an address to ship to and also keep insisting to pay via credit cards. These are normally known as Product Buying scams in that there are criminals and scammers buying stolen credit card information on the Internet. They are trying their best to use the credit cards to buy some products. Arrange with someone who may not even know that he or she was involved in the scam. That person will ship the products to the scammers’ country. Your goods are gone and not just that, the credit card companies will charge back the money you deducted because of the fraud case. In the end you lose the credit card money, you still have to pay a penalty and you lose your freight money and your goods. When dealing with overseas be extremely careful. Such scammers had already tried to scam quite a few of our web hosting customers who had fortunately come to us for advice.

Web Hosting Customers from Hell

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We do have our shares of web hosting from Hell. There are those whose computer spoilt and they can look to us for repair when we sold them the most basic web and email hosting. Some even came with their spoilt notebook to our offices asking us to repair for you, knowing full well that providing web hosting does not include provide maintenance and warranty for their entire house. Most of the customers are great but it just take one of these to spoil your day. There are others who had quarreled with their partner and called us up abusing each other. I just hope to say at the end of the day that we provide web hosting but we do not provide free computer repair. If your Internet is down and you cannot reach your ISP, calling us is of no use as we won’t know your ISP and we will not be able to contact them either.

We provide web hosting and email hosting phone support, but a lot of times even customers from other hosting companies call us up for support as they can’t reach their own web hosting providers. Many times our Hotlines have to deal with nuisance call from scammers wanting to sell timeshare, futures etc. It was so bad that we installed the necessary Caller-IDs and systems to protect ourselves.

Power Servers Not the Solutions

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We had just solved a customer’s issue. She has a very popular web site that hanged repeatedly because of the traffic and load causing her massive losses on sales. Her previous host kept suggesting that she upgraded her hardware. She repeatedly upgrade and upgrade until the server was down for a while. A friend of her knows us and requested that we helped. We use a standard server that is nothing special, setup her system and tweak her server setting a bit and it works like magic. It was just a change of a line of code and it works ten times faster and much cheaper. Today she basically tripled her traffic and load and her systems are still running perfect. It is a nightmare to think of web hosts who know nothing except to suck all the money out of their customers.

VPS as a Commodity

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Just a couple of years ago, we had seen web hosting space going from megabytes to gigabytes and now to hundreds of gigabytes and to unlimited. At this moment, the web space had increased so much that customers are no longer concerned or rather indifferent towards the among of web space as nearly all are near unlimited or unlimited, that is if you believe something can be unlimited in the first place. Competition had shifted and such companies selling unlimited are now targeting at selling unlimited VPS sometimes at $1 per month or at costs on par or even cheaper than shared web hosting.

It does not make sense that VPS is cheaper than shared web hosting. But the trend is not just the pricing are going down and the web space up but that such overselling companies are nearly making VPS free or rather selling at commodity prices rather than as services. How do you provide VPS at a few dollars per month at unlimited space, CPU power and RAM? Technically it is impossible and economically it is impossible, yet we are seeing this happen.

When unlimited shared hosting or near unlimited shared hosting comes into play, there are users who subscribe to it because of the costs. But now we are not seeing the same trend with VPS. I guess it has more to do with web space fatigue. Users are tired of such nonsense and are starting to demand better services and willing to pay for more. I guess the time for unlimited penny prices shared hosting and VPS are finally coming to an end.

Singapore Colocation

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We had colocation services all over Asia. I would say that colocation in Singapore is among the best especially connection wise. Singapore is connected widely to Asia, USA and Europe. Any web servers residing in Singapore has the advantage of the best routes all over the world. Also cost wise here is also cheaper than in other Asian countries. It is however impossible to compare prices here to prices in USA as Asian traffic costs is far higher.

Western Datacenter BGP Maintenance – Emergency

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We detected errors on our Juniper’s routing engine serving the colocation network (Primary link). While it is not causing any problems now but we want to proceed with maintenance before outage occurs. The errors indicated possible hardware failure that we need to address urgently.

We would like to schedule an urgent maintenance this evening (00:00 – 00:30) Singapore Time GMT + 0800 hrs to shut down the BGP on the primary link. There should be no downtime as traffic will move to second BGP link.

At the same time, our primary link will moved to another Juniper, once it is setup – we will restore the link to primary path. All these should be completed within 30 minutes window.

Power of Data Center Racks

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Had a discussion with a vendor for colocation racks in an European country. He was giving me the power supply to each rack which was a total of 8 KVA and giving me a great price. Was asking him what was the power allowed for each rack? He told me we could use the entire 8 KVA. I had calculated that if we used up the power, the cost of the power alone far exceeded that of the rack charges. Had asked him to confirm another time. He came back to me saying no mistake. I told him I did not want to take advantage of him, please clarify clearly. He finally came back to me saying that the power allowed was 2 KVA and that he made a mistake and thank me for it. It was risky to sell something you aren’t sure of. It could be a painful lesson to him if I just order 10 racks and use up 80 KVA of power. Absolute loss for that datacenter.