CloudFlare agrees: Disk performance is improved when you get rid of hardware raid

I know this article is a little old, but I wanted to bring it up as it raises an interesting point. We’ve had a few articles here about hardware raid, detailing when we think it’s a good idea, and when it’s a waste of money (or worse). In general, if you’re looking for “big DD ...

Dell C6100 BMC / IPMI Mac address all zeros after update? 00:00:00:00:00:00 — Script fix solution

Some of you may have noticed the Dell C6100 on ebay for a pretty cheap price. 4 servers in a single 2u chassis for as little as $800. Great deal right? I had a lot of trouble getting the IPMI / BMC firmware updated on these in the first place. After getting it upgraded, the ...

IOFLOOD.com — Phoenix, AZ dedicated server BGP network improvements

IOFLOOD.com is proud to announce that we’ve completed a series of upgrades to our network to maximize performance and reliability for our dedicated server customers. Our new network topology now contains a blend of 4 carriers: Tinet — 1x 10gbps Telia Sonera — 1x 10gbps -New- Cogent — 1x 10gbps HE.net — 2x 1gbps Tinet ...

e1000e NIC link failure / x9scm / x9scl / patch fix for Centos

If you’ve had problems with the nic driver failing on x9 / x10 supermicro motherboards with the intel e1000e NIC, we have a fix for you. Centos 6 on X9 motherboards (x9scl / x9scm) seems to have the most problems, but other motherboards and OS’s are potentially affected as well. There are a lot of ...

Honesty starts with yourself

I wanted to share something that I feel is important to me. I feel that if you want to accomplish anything in life, you need to be honest more than most people are, and most of all, honest to yourself. If you can’t even be honest with yourself about what you’re good at, not good ...

How video games taught me to run a business

Many of you enjoy video games, which are seen by some as a kind of guilty pleasure, good as entertainment, but not worthwhile aside from that. I’m the first to admit that spending hundreds of hours playing games will often get in the way of more productive pursuits. Nevertheless, there can be a positive side ...

Destroy “Small business disease”

I’d like to talk to you today about an insidious problem that afflicts most self employed and entrepreneurial people. I call it “small business disease”. Let’s say you start a business, and you end up with a working business model. You have a repeatable marketing and production process, and people are buying what you have ...

Update: Hardware vs Software RAID: The great debate.

Hi Everyone, If you recall our previous article Hardware raid or software raid? Our take on the great religious debate, we made the case that hardware raid served virtually no purpose, and software raid was better in all important ways. Although we still find most of the information in that article to be true, we are ...

How to Edit Ram Allocation on a Xen VPS under Solusvm When SolusVM Won’t Update Configuration File

Hi Everyone, If you’re like me, you’ve had problems in the past with SolusVM running Xen, and some of them can be a little irritating and difficult to track down. There’s one particularly confusing problem whose solution I would like to share with you today. Who is affected? Anyone who wants to change the amount ...

Hosting Best Practices Part 1: Server Cancellations

It’s 3am, and you get woken up by a flood of calls from angry customers. You stumble over to the computer to see what’s going on, and sure enough, you can’t reach your server. You send your hosting company a trouble ticket, thinking the server must have crashed again, a nuisance, but no big deal, ...