Author Archive

We will be in Southern California next week and will be presenting at a couple of User Group meetings. On Wednesday December 7th we will be in LA at the LA ColdFusion User Group (http://bit.ly/sXbi1U) meeting and on December 8th we will be in Pomona at the Inland Empire ColdFusion User Group meeting (http://bit.ly/tJ8KQn).

Setting Up Our Load Balancer

Here is the second installment of our tutorial series. Here we look at how easily you can take a single server site and create additional servers based on the first one and put them all behind the built in loadbalancer.

In this episode we’ll:
-Create a template from an existing cloud server
-Launch a new server based on the template
-Modify the “Hello World” page
-Configure the load balancer
-Test the site with a browser

Creating a Compute Instance

This is the first in a hopefully a series of tutorial screencasts. In this first tutorial we try to show you how easy it is to create a web server and configure your firewall so you can access the server on the internet.

In this episode we’ll:
-Create a new compute instance
-Install Apache web server
-Create a “Hello World” page
-Acquire an IP
-Setup port forwarding on the firewall
-Test site

Let us know what you think about this tutorial and what topics you would like to see in the future.

Over the coarse of the last year we have been running a private beta with a handful of customers. This morning we took the lids off the private beta program and opened the program to the general public. You can now signup for an Alurium aCloud™ account and spin up computing resources.

We have published a few OS templates but we welcome our everyone to publish templates for the rest of the community to use.

This morning we released our new site design. Pardon our dust while we find and squash any bugs that may still be discovered. We are proud of the site and hope you find it useful as well.

We’ve got some information on the site about the Alurium aCloud service and there will be more released in the coming days and weeks.

Drop us a comment and let us know what you think of the new site and let us know what else you want to see on the site.

We are getting very close to releasing our new Alurium Cloud hosting service. In fact last night we moved Alurium.com into a cloud server on our new environment. Anecdotally it seems much snapier than the previous none cloud server. We also apologize for some issues the move may have caused, we took down the client portal for a few hours while the files and database were being moved over. A few customers got invoices without our logo in them but that has now been corrected.

Let us know what you think about the performance of Alurium.com on the new Alurium Cloud server. If you are interested in getting on a preview list for the Alurium Cloud service let us know that as well.

We’ve modified the standard SSH port and moved the SSH service to port 2727. If you use SSH to log into the server and manage your account please note that you will have to specify the custom port number of 2727 in your SSH client. If you have any issues connecting to the server please contact support by opening a ticket.

Hi everyone, we’ve had to reduce the duration of the Free Trial accounts. The 60 day trial were attracting too many fraud accounts. A high percentage of the Trial accounts being created were being used for sending spam emails or setting up Phishing sites or clone sites. We were spending way too much time investigating these accounts, and responding to investigative requests from the rightful owners of the cloned websites.

If you signup for a trial account and are not finished with your testing by the end of the 15 days contact sales and request an extension. We’ll be pretty lenient on these extensions as long as the accounts are being used legitimately.

We have been making lost of changes to the site during the last few days. Most of the changes are on the support section of the site. This section has under gone a major remodel and we have been publishing knowledge base articles under various topics. We will continue to publish more articles in this section. If there is anything in particular you would like to see in this section let us know.

One other items that is now available in the Support area is our network monitoring statistics. As many of you know we have had some issues with one of the servers which we beleive we have now traced down to bad RAM. At any even we decided to publish our Network Monitoring Statistics we use internally to keep an eye on the network. We use the services of WebSitePulse.com to monitor our network.

The published statistics page includes realtime statistics information. Bookmark the link and you will always have the information handy.

As many of you know we have been dealing with an issue for the last couple of weeks where one of our servers (cpanel1) has been crashing. We have been investigating the issue and have not come up with any definitive issues but today I cam across a graph that may have some clews to the issue. The attached graph shows the connection times from our monitoring software to cpanel1 for the last month. As you can see on 6/16/09 the connection times increased considerably.

The one thing that corresponds to that date is a memory upgrade that was performed on 6/16/09 on cPanel1. We just pulled out the memory suspecting that it may be bad memory. We will continue to monitor the server for the next few days to see if this was the root cause of the issues.