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View Full Version : New Control Panel and Clustered Hosting Solution - Beta Testers Wanted


TomK
01-25-2006, 06:26 PM
We are looking for a number of customers (50-100) that would be interested in beta testing a new product offering we are getting ready to launch!

While the technology has been around for a bit, we are calling it beta because we need to work out any internal issues that may arise from support, provisioning, etc. The risk is minimal for customers to run production traffic on it, as we've been running a mirror on it pushing roughly 50-70MB/s all day, without any major issues, so we feel ready to open up the beta to customers and get feedback from all those that are interested!

Enough already, so what is it? It is a new concept in scalable hosting, including a pretty cool new control panel from Interworx (http://www.interworx.com/). Actually, it is a lot more then just a fresh new control panel, here is a summary taken directly from their site:

"The InterWorx Cluster Panel (InterWorx-CP) is a dedicated server and load balanced cluster control panel. InterWorx-CP allows you to easily manage your dedicated server and gives you the ability to incrementally expand your single server into a full blown load balanced clustering solution.

InterWorx-CP is the only panel which allows this simple incremental expansion from single server to load balanced cluster. There’s no need for any complicated setup, InterWorx-CP takes care of the details for you so you can focus on your business."

It allows us to scale easily by simply adding more servers to the cluster to handle the load, or provision and build a new cluster, a truly scalable hosting solution! Our initial cluster is running a combination of AMD X2 and Opteron nodes, with between 2G and 4G of RAM, with raid protected head-end.

The beta will consist of one free hosting account for a period of 6 months, that will include 300GB of monthly transfer, and 10GB of disk space. Support will primairly be done via our forums. We will not be doing reseller accounts during the beta process, and dedicated IP's will only be handed out to those that require them to run an SSL certificate on.

The beta will most likely not last for 6 months, but as a "Thank You!" for your help, you would be able to keep the free account for a minimum of 6 months, if not longer, we'll see.

You will be required to be an active participant during the beta process, by providing feedback on bugs, feature requests, etc. We would also like to have beta testers with sites that are "busy" rather then just static pages. That being said, we are not looking for anyone with a 500 concurrent session vbulletin forum site. :rolleyes:

So, how do you get started? Send an email to beta (at) powervps.com with brief description of your site or existing URL that you would want to test with. If you have the site on a cPanel account now, we can even try using the CPanel account copy feature to have the site moved over. We should be able to get your new account setup within 24 to 48 hours from signup.

You do NOT have to be an existing Defender or PowerVPS customer to participate in the beta. I know we have many visitors to our forums that are not our end customers, you are invited to participate as well!

Let the testing commence! :)

vps-vince
01-25-2006, 07:46 PM
Very interesting.
PM sent.

Can you give more info on how frequent you need feedback, and reliability of this solution please?

Thanks,

- Vince

TomK
01-26-2006, 10:03 AM
Very interesting.
PM sent.

Can you give more info on how frequent you need feedback, and reliability of this solution please?

Thanks,

- Vince

Vince,

The feedback we would be looking for would depend on the amount of problems or suggestions you would have, if any. Certainly if everything was running fine and you loved it, then we wouldn't want bug you with feedback questions, and would ask instead for community postings about the panel, features, performance, etc.

However if you ran into problems (either bugs or lack of a feature), we would want to know about it immediately. Also, we would like feedback around features missing, things you like/don't like, as well as hopefully some tips and tricks to share with the others to make them more comfortable with the panel and new way of doing ceratin things.

As for reliability, at this point we are pretty confident with the stability of the cluster, that may change as we load customers on it, but I don't expect it to. Basically, we'll find out as it loads up! There are some big clusters running without any issues from other companies, I can say that, so it does work.

That help?

elix
01-26-2006, 05:36 PM
Awesome offer, I may take you up on this . . .

TomK
01-26-2006, 06:20 PM
Awesome offer, I may take you up on this . . .

Please do!

elix
01-26-2006, 09:38 PM
just wondering - does Interworx allow you to do load balancing where there are 2 Web servers, 2 DB servers, etc. all housing the same data?

StingRay
01-26-2006, 10:33 PM
Interesting, I might just try it myself. I have one customer who has a vBulletin forum with an average of 40 users at a time. Not 500 ;) But busy enough to be dynamic.

TomK
01-27-2006, 02:07 AM
just wondering - does Interworx allow you to do load balancing where there are 2 Web servers, 2 DB servers, etc. all housing the same data?

Hey Elix,

Sort of. Check here (http://www.interworx.com/products/iworx-cp/clustering/index) for more info. It is based on LVS which has been around for a long time.

It basically uses NFS to share the data from the head node to the clustered nodes, the head node also acts as the balancer and passes the requests to the rest of the cluster node(s) which then process it, and direct route (DR) back to the end user. Each clustered node keeps some metadata on it, but the primary data is read from NFS.

It can load balance http, https, pop, imap, smtp. SQL is run from the head node as of right now but they are working on having distributed SQL at some point too.

We can put up specific groups of servers and say these are only http, and have a different set say for https, etc. You also have the ability to control what IP's are load balanced and which are not, and control how you load balance (round robin, connection based, etc).

Pls let me know if you have any other questions!

TomK
01-27-2006, 03:08 AM
Interesting, I might just try it myself. I have one customer who has a vBulletin forum with an average of 40 users at a time. Not 500 ;) But busy enough to be dynamic.

We'd love to have you move that site over and give it a go!

SlAiD
01-27-2006, 08:04 AM
Hello.

Well, i'm think on moving my forum, it is a phpBB board and lave 2/20 users logged in every day, every hour.

So, i have some questions:
- Do you guarantee that cPanel/WHM account moving is full operational? I will lost any data?
- I can host only one site, right? Can i have multiple accounts?
- I have my domain with tne ns1 and ns2 nameservers (but i've another too). So my question is: how can i transfer ONLY the http server and mail, and mantain the nameservers and other configuration?


A finel comment: any IRC connections on that host? probably not, but i'm just asking! :P


Rui

TomK
01-27-2006, 02:06 PM
Hello.

Well, i'm think on moving my forum, it is a phpBB board and lave 2/20 users logged in every day, every hour.

So, i have some questions:
- Do you guarantee that cPanel/WHM account moving is full operational? I will lost any data?
- I can host only one site, right? Can i have multiple accounts?
- I have my domain with tne ns1 and ns2 nameservers (but i've another too). So my question is: how can i transfer ONLY the http server and mail, and mantain the nameservers and other configuration?


A finel comment: any IRC connections on that host? probably not, but i'm just asking! :P


Rui


No guarantee, but we've tested cpanel imports without any major problems.

One site, that is correct. You can signup for 2 accounts, sure.

You can keep your DNS as it is and when you load the data change your A record and MX record to point to your new IP on our cluster.

EDIT: IRC is not allowed.

SlAiD
01-27-2006, 03:13 PM
Thank you.

Mail send. ;)


Rui

elix
01-27-2006, 04:49 PM
Tom,

I would really like to take you up on this offer but I don't have a busy site to stick on it. However, I would like to test the performance of a wide selection of scripts, etc so I'm sure that will help somewhat. Would I still be eligible for an account?

Thanks!

TomK
01-27-2006, 04:50 PM
Tom,

I would really like to take you up on this offer but I don't have a busy site to stick on it. However, I would like to test the performance of a wide selection of scripts, etc so I'm sure that will help somewhat. Would I still be eligible for an account?

Thanks!

Certainly! Your feedback is important to us on the features, layout, usability as well, so please signup and test away when you can.

vps-vince
01-27-2006, 05:28 PM
Hi Tom,
I've received all the order confirmation emails, thanks.

I was about to ask "When are you likely to start transfering any sites?" but an email from you just popped in while I was typing! :)

Speak soon.

- Vince

kensplace2
01-30-2006, 04:24 PM
What would it cost per month after the beta test period expires?

TomK
01-30-2006, 04:36 PM
What would it cost per month after the beta test period expires?
Don't have an answer yet. We plan to intorduce some reseller plans here in the coming weeks, based on IWX, cPanel (already do), and a Windows platform TBA.

kensplace2
01-30-2006, 05:53 PM
Would lsblogs.com be suitable for a test site?

(its a blog directory / search engine. PR 7, approx half a million backlinks, reasonable visitor numbers, but not extreme numbers)

Its on one of your servers apparently (?) but Its been down for hours today, and the hosts ipowerhost.co.uk is not responding to any emails to several of its email accounts.

If its suitable, would it be possible for you to transfer the data from the existing server onto the test one asap so it is back up and running?

That way, I would have site that isnt dead, and you would have a busy test site for feedback ;)

Let me know either way, as Im stuck at the moment....

normandanna
01-30-2006, 06:14 PM
Quick question - if we sent in a request to betatest and have heard nothing does that mean we dont qualify?

Cheers!

TomK
01-30-2006, 06:15 PM
Quick question - if we sent in a request to betatest and have heard nothing does that mean we dont qualify?

Cheers!
No, not at all, we have not turned away anyone yet. What was the ticket # you received on your submission email?

Robert
01-30-2006, 06:37 PM
Ken, the site should be fine. Just include it when e-mailing beta. :)

kensplace2
01-30-2006, 06:41 PM
Great :) phew!

I emailed the beta at powervps.com address a short while ago (and included the url, and basically what I said in the forum posting).

Many thanks!

normandanna
01-30-2006, 08:57 PM
I didnt get a reply email or a ticket number - I emailed beta (at) powervps.com.. should I just fire off another email ?

TomK
01-30-2006, 09:00 PM
I didnt get a reply email or a ticket number - I emailed beta (at) powervps.com.. should I just fire off another email ?
Yes please.

normandanna
01-31-2006, 10:01 AM
New email sent, thanks :)

albatroz
02-13-2006, 01:03 PM
mmm.. what advantages would it provide other than
clustering compared to a VPS based in DirectAdmin?

albatroz
02-13-2006, 01:27 PM
I found this feature list at Interworx site
http://www.interworx.com/products/iworx-cp/switch

However I am worrried about the fact of having everything integrated.
That was the reason I left Cpanel/WHM, as it was slow :)

This is a question to the people currently using Interworx, how easy is
to install Apache or php modules on your own?