Forum Is So Sleepy - What About The Xmas Wishlist?

[mromero]

Seeing that forum activity is down to almost zilch why don't we start posting our wishlist suggestions for the traditional FutureQuest Xmas Presents?

We hardly want anything except a few so we will post these:

1. Seeing as hard drive, memory and bandwidth, CPU etc. are so economical, and competition so stiff in the current recession offer double up disk space and double up bandwidth for 2010.

2. Offer Roll-Over-Bandwidth. Whatever bandwidth you do not use in a month automatically rolls over to the next month. Reset annually. Especially useful for unexpected bursts of traffic.

3. New! FQuest One Click Backup and Restore BETA. Most everyone offers it so why not Fquest? Will help restore sites that have crashed or been taken offline by FQuest Staff and lower operating costs and labour for staff.

4. PHPMYADMIN installed by default on all accounts - no need for users to be fiddling around with installing various versions and pestering FQUest staff etc.

5. Telephone and SMS prices are so cheap, so we now send Voice Mail / SMS alerts to customers whose accounts have been taken offline by Fquest Staf for whatever reason - I mean if your account and email is disabled your business crashes and you will not find out for some time.

O.K. Other site owners please post your Xmas Wish List :clapper:

[manfred]

I have only one "important wish" :D

* A smaler package (250MB, 1 POP, 1 FTP, 1 MySQL,...) for low budget clients :winky:

Finally, I look forward to every gift by FutureQuest. This fabulous support from the whole team is a big gift. Some things are unusual but understandable, when Terra (and Team) explain the things why they are doing so.

Thank you FutureQuest! :yeah: :QTAUT:

[Terra]

1. Seeing as hard drive, memory and bandwidth, CPU etc. are so economical, and competition so stiff in the current recession offer double up disk space and double up bandwidth for 2010.
1a) Actually, hard drives are economical if you are going for the cheap desktop/consumer drives... They aren't so economical when you get into the high end SCSI 15K drives... Even then, the storage capacity of these drives are limited... When we got ours, ~74GB was the max, but recently they have gone up in capacity to around ~160GB...

In the grand scheme of server performance, disk I/O has got to be ***fast*** and ***reliable*** which in turn knocks 'cheap' out of the running...

1b) On CPU and memory, yes - prices have come down, but the server class CPUs still fetch a hefty premium... It seems that CPUs have hit a clockspeed plateau and they are now shifting to multi-core CPUs to overcome that... That is all well and good, but you must have a highly optimized disk I/O to keep feeding all those cores...

Adding more CPU/memory to our existing servers is currently a fruitless endeavor because the cost vs. return ratio is not very good... In short, I would rather continue saving up money to replace the older servers with new high end ones in 2010... We have had pretty good success so far with the new servers "BENDER, NIBBLER, LEELA", however even with new high end servers, they can still be a bit temperamental as the number of cores increase...

1c) Transit bandwidth is *not* economical and is still our largest expense by far (so much so that it hurts)... This is true when you own your lines 100% and not share them with other web hosts as many of the colos do... Overall, we will adjust the package bandwidth allocations as more capacity is brought online but bear in mind that we will always be cautious with allocations to ensure we don't paint ourselves into a corner like so many 'unlimited' proclaiming hosts do... FutureQuest, Inc. will always design its packages based on *technical reality*, and not based on marketing or sales influences...

2. Offer Roll-Over-Bandwidth. Whatever bandwidth you do not use in a month automatically rolls over to the next month. Reset annually. Especially useful for unexpected bursts of traffic.
2) This is put on the table from time to time and it is something we'd like to do... From the technical side, the system has to be written as well as the policies that defines it... Even more important is to ensure that we have the bandwidth capacity to support such a concept... Back in the day when Cingular introduced this, they had capacity problems with it, which is pretty much why other cellular providers wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole... AT&T is certainly not happy that they had to grandfather in those accounts for which my cell phone still has the rollover minutes... I will put this back on the table for 2010, but the policies have to be reasonable and fits correctly within our transit capacities...

3. New! FQuest One Click Backup and Restore BETA. Most everyone offers it so why not Fquest? Will help restore sites that have crashed or been taken offline by FQuest Staff and lower operating costs and labour for staff.
3) We haven't done this yet because with the current state of filesystem technology, it is a server performance killer... Even trying to nice the backup processes still has a nasty tendency to pin the disk I/O which in turn starves the Apache engines... With everyone wanting 'more - more - more', there is only so much a server can do with the larger packages before it begins to impact the primary function of *delivering* your web site's contents to your visitors... I cannot in good conscious starve the Apache engine's performance just to be like everyone else (and suffer just like them)... With that said, some technology bits that I've been waiting on has matured to enterprise levels and this will become (internally) a hot topic in the near future... Part of the puzzle pieces are already in place, I'm just waiting on the rest... The end goal is to not impact the Community Servers' performance...

4. PHPMYADMIN installed by default on all accounts - no need for users to be fiddling around with installing various versions and pestering FQUest staff etc.
4) Agreed - this one is high on my implementation priority list... Unfortunately this is being blocked by other dependencies that need to be done first and work is already in progress to satisfy them...

5. Telephone and SMS prices are so cheap, so we now send Voice Mail / SMS alerts to customers whose accounts have been taken offline by Fquest Staf for whatever reason - I mean if your account and email is disabled your business crashes and you will not find out for some time.
5) This was implemented back in 2006:
http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?t=21231

[Terra]

A smaler package (250MB, 1 POP, 1 FTP, 1 MySQL,...) for low budget clients
We tried to do something like that awhile back with the SUSOGI project, but what we found was that it almost killed us financially along with the erosion of time resulting in lost design/development time for the bigger packages... The issue was that the SUSOGI packages were very low cost and minimal and they sold like hot cakes, however the 'Support Requests' eroded all profit and drove it deep into the red... You would be surprised how many complicated "How do I" service requests can be generated from the smallest of packages... I'm sure you can appreciate the amount of work required along with the attention to detail our service responses contain... We take pride in always trying to be at the top of our game when it comes to service and support...

You could say that we just don't provide support for those packages, but how well would that work in reality? This would turn into a black eye for us as we have to turn away support requests which *would* ultimately anger those package owners...

With that said, I will add it to the wishlist for more brain storming... :)

[mromero]

Terra we have never used pagers and these appear to have fallen by the wayside at least in our neck of the woods. Will a cell phone number work? It works fine with Facebook etc. internationally. Should we send the number to any particular address or cell phone at Fquest?

Multi core processors are so cheap most no one is using single core. Everything appears to be at least dual or quad core. We have one single core box running a firewall/cache server.

[Kevin]

Terra we have never used pagers and these appear to have fallen by the wayside at least in our neck of the woods. Will a cell phone number work? It works fine with Facebook etc. internationally. Should we send the number to any particular address or cell phone at Fquest?
The "pager" address isn't a number it is an email address. Cell phones have these too. It is the easy way to send a text message from a computer. The only difference between us using your regular email address and your pager address is that we would know to keep to a short message on the pager address. The format is usually number@phonecompany. If you don't know the domain or the formatting of the number ask your phone provider.

Mine was 407xxxxxxx@mobile.mycingular.com the last time I tried it but not sure if they changed it since Cingular became AT&T.

[Buck]

[q]2. Offer Roll-Over-Bandwidth. Whatever bandwidth you do not use in a month automatically rolls over to the next month. Reset annually. Especially useful for unexpected bursts of traffic.
2) This is put on the table from time to time and it is something we'd like to do... From the technical side, the system has to be written as well as the policies that defines it... Even more important is to ensure that we have the bandwidth capacity to support such a concept... Back in the day when Cingular introduced this, they had capacity problems with it, which is pretty much why other cellular providers wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole... AT&T is certainly not happy that they had to grandfather in those accounts for which my cell phone still has the rollover minutes... I will put this back on the table for 2010, but the policies have to be reasonable and fits correctly within our transit capacities...

(I wasn't going to chime in, but I thought I'd add my 2 cents here.) As a seasonal business, this is one thing that would make me happy! Our Halloween site went way over its allocation in October, of course, but now will sit there almost untouched for 10 months. The same goes for the winter business, although I think we've stabilized that one pretty well and are on a bigger hosting package anyway.

[Terra]

Multi core processors are so cheap most no one is using single core. Everything appears to be at least dual or quad core. We have one single core box running a firewall/cache server.
The server multi core enterprise level Intel Xeon's cost ***a lot more*** than the desktop versions, and they need the right motherboard and memory which is also enterprise level ($$$$$)... My point is that the servers need to be replaced to bring them up to this level... Take the cost of one of those high end servers and multiply it by 100+... The current economy isn't being very nice to this desire yet and I really wanted to do this in 2009, but I remain optimistic that this depr^H^H^H^Hrecession won't last forever...

In a nutshell, many of our clients expect high end server and infrastructure equipment (as well as high end technical support) for the price they pay and we do everything in our financial capability to provide that...

[johnfl68]

5) This was implemented back in 2006:
http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?t=21231

Yes, but is under utilized. I believe I have received only one or two messages in all that time.

I would like to get a SMS message whenever there is a issue with any of the servers (Notices & Alerts) that I am on (or my clients are on), without having to check the forums every time something seems amiss, but it seems that this is not likely to happen.

Same with the FQ twitter account. I was hopping this would be better utilized than the Pager or SMS notification option, as I could set up messages from that account to go to my phone as SMS. But none of the server issues have been posted to that account since June.

John

[DogAndPony]

I would like to get a SMS message whenever there is a issue with any of the servers (Notices & Alerts) that I am on (or my clients are on), without having to check the forums every time something seems amiss, but it seems that this is not likely to happen.

Same with the FQ twitter account. I was hopping this would be better utilized than the Pager or SMS notification option, as I could set up messages from that account to go to my phone as SMS. But none of the server issues have been posted to that account since June.I'm with John on this one. Being able to subscribe on a per-account (EDIT: I mean "per package") or per-machine basis would be great.

[mromero]

The "pager" address isn't a number it is an email address. Cell phones have these too. It is the easy way to send a text message from a computer. The only difference between us using your regular email address and your pager address is that we would know to keep to a short message on the pager address. The format is usually number@phonecompany. If you don't know the domain or the formatting of the number ask your phone provider.

Mine was 407xxxxxxx@mobile.mycingular.com the last time I tried it but not sure if they changed it since Cingular became AT&T.

Well, I still do not get it. Let us put aside pagers since these are no longer available here anyways.

How does a cell phone have an email address? To me a cell phone has a TELEPHONE number and ours is permanent and listed in the telephone directory along with our POTS lines. We use GSM phones.

We get Facebook and others' SMS text messages direct on our cell phone. Facebook for e.g. never asked for any email address for our cellphone, it asked for the cell phone number and we get real SMS messages.

:umm:

[Kevin]

That is between you and your provider but I have used 3 different phone companies and they all gave me an email address. It wasn't really advertised up front but it was there.

In fact when I had Sprint the only way I could determine the email address was to send a text message to an email address and look at the From line.

If your provider really doesn't provide an email interface to their SMS messaging then it may be possible for us to send an SMS message directly but it would require us to start over using different tools.

[Melissa]

The following might be helpful (I can confirm that the Sprint information provided there is still valid):
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/939/sms_email_cingular_nextel_sprint_tmobile_verizon_virgin/

T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com

where phonenumber = your 10 digit phone number

[mromero]

Thanks but we use neither. All those networks are based inside the U.S.A. and most of the world does not reside or work there. Additionally it appears you have to jump through hoops to figure this out.

Why not make it as simple as providing your cell phone number like FaceBook and others do and make your reach GLOBAL?

[DogAndPony]

Thanks but we use neither. All those networks are based inside the U.S.A. and most of the world does not reside or work there. Additionally it appears you have to jump through hoops to figure this out.

Why not make it as simple as providing your cell phone number like FaceBook and others do and make your reach GLOBAL?Why not ask your mobile provider if they provide an address like one of the above? I'll bet they do.

[Kevin]

The list that Melissa posted are just examples. She is in the US so those are the providers that she knows. Other providers in other places should provide the same service. You can ask your provider how to send email to your phone or if you tell us what provider you use we may be able to find out for you.

After some quick research it looks like the cheapest way for us to send SMS messages from computer to phone without using email is to use a GSM modem with GSM phone service and a plan that covers however many SMS messages we plan to send. That expense would be a drop in the bucket for companies like Google but for us it is prohibitively expensive considering the number of site owners who have asked for it (1).

[johnfl68]

There are 3 that have expressed interest for it (myself, mromeo, and DogAndPony), and I suspect there are more that would like this that haven't chimed in yet.

I would not think that $200 for a GSM Modem and 10 cents a message on a pre-paid sim card is prohibitively expensive.

But I understand not wanting the expense for only 3 people.

John

[mromero]

Why not ask your mobile provider if they provide an address like one of the above? I'll bet they do.

Not interested.

Email can be trapped as SPAM somewhere down the line.

SMS gets through which is why many providers use a valid mobile number to send a "real" SMS and this can be pulled from the telco's records in case there is a dispute like "Oh we sent it by email and somewhere down the line a SPAM filter or something ate it." :yeah:

[DogAndPony]

Not interested.

Email can be trapped as SPAM somewhere down the line.

SMS gets through which is why many providers use a valid mobile number to send a "real" SMS and this can be pulled from the telco's records in case there is a dispute like "Oh we sent it by email and somewhere down the line a SPAM filter or something ate it." :yeah:Something can eat SMS messages as well. No transmission method is perfect. But, I understand your preferences.

For me, an out-of-network e-mail would be fine.

[Kevin]

When I said 1 person I was only referring to mromero because he was the only one who expressed a resistance to using an email>SMS gateway.

Yes, email can be blocked as spam. The fact that the providers have spam filtering on their email but not their SMS speaks volumes to how popular sending SMS from a computer is.

I should also mention that we are still only considering this kind of notification for account level problems such as an account being deactivated for a security breach. Our policy on general problems are that server outages are posted to the forums only and only network outages that prevent or disrupt access to the forums are posted out of band to blogspot and twitter. There hasn't been a tweet in a while because there hasn't been a network problem in a while.

[mromero]

When I said 1 person I was only referring to mromero because he was the only one who expressed a resistance to using an email>SMS gateway.


I believe if you email your customers and asked them what THEY would want you might get a few more interested in REAL SMS notifications of when their websites / email are taken down or a server barfs :yeah:

Still, this thread seems to have gone of course and activity on the forums is so low everyone must be happy or apathetic - preferably the former :eeww:

[Matt]

I'll chime in simply to add a voice:
1.) e-mail to SMS doesn't work for me on T-Mobile (SMS works fine). There are lots of SMS gateways with straightforward APIs.
2.) an account-specific automated backup solution (that includes database) is long overdue. To put the importance of this in perspective, I'd be willing to deal with some downtime during off-peak hours for the peace of mind account-specific backup / automated restore would bring.
3.) still no centralized phpMyAdmin?!? I bet not having this is costing FQ more time than putting a solution together would take.

As an aside, I am seeing FQ take a more proactive approach than many hosts regarding security. Perhaps this is where most of the effort is going.

-Matt

[manfred]

A smaler package (250MB, 1 POP, 1 FTP, 1 MySQL,...) for low budget clients
We tried to do something like that awhile back with the SUSOGI project, but what we found was that it almost killed us financially along with the erosion of time resulting in lost design/development time for the bigger packages... The issue was that the SUSOGI packages were very low cost and minimal and they sold like hot cakes, however the 'Support Requests' eroded all profit and drove it deep into the red... You would be surprised how many complicated "How do I" service requests can be generated from the smallest of packages... I'm sure you can appreciate the amount of work required along with the attention to detail our service responses contain... We take pride in always trying to be at the top of our game when it comes to service and support...

You could say that we just don't provide support for those packages, but how well would that work in reality? This would turn into a black eye for us as we have to turn away support requests which *would* ultimately anger those package owners...

With that said, I will add it to the wishlist for more brain storming... :)

Thank you Terra for the explanation. And when you make it only for Resellers available? :bow:

[Buck]

...I'd be willing to deal with some downtime during off-peak hours for the peace of mind account-specific backup / automated restore would bring....

Ah, but whose off-peak hours? Since FQ hosts more than just US-based websites/companies, our downtime here may be prime time for other clients. That's something I'm betting they are taking into consideration.

[mromero]

Ah, but whose off-peak hours? Since FQ hosts more than just US-based websites/companies, our downtime here may be prime time for other clients. That's something I'm betting they are taking into consideration.

Surely they have analytics to show the peak demand for the sites hosted.

I was doing some research and came across some hosts that use this service to safeguard their customers' data. I do not know if this would work with FQuest:

http://www.r1soft.com/

[mromero]

I'll chime in simply to add a voice:
1.) e-mail to SMS doesn't work for me on T-Mobile (SMS works fine). There are lots of SMS gateways with straightforward APIs.
2.) an account-specific automated backup solution (that includes database) is long overdue. To put the importance of this in perspective, I'd be willing to deal with some downtime during off-peak hours for the peace of mind account-specific backup / automated restore would bring.
3.) still no centralized phpMyAdmin?!? I bet not having this is costing FQ more time than putting a solution together would take.

As an aside, I am seeing FQ take a more proactive approach than many hosts regarding security. Perhaps this is where most of the effort is going.

-Matt

Well - where are the Xmas gifts or did I miss it?

Terra might need to take out the horse whip and urge on the elves toiling in the Fquest basement :yeah:

[Tom E.]

Patience... we've still got over 8 hours to go here on the east coast.

[Andilinks]

I can't recall having a single complaint or fright all year, maybe longer. That's the best Christmas gift I could hope for. Thank you FutureQuest and

Merry Christmas to all!

[mromero]

Patience... we've still got over 8 hours to go here on the east coast.

Maybe the elves were so sloshed out on eggnog they fumbled it this year? :confuz:

[Terra]

Maybe the elves were so sloshed out on eggnog they fumbled it this year?
Unfortunately, some of our team members have families they are doing the morning Christmas thing with... One of those team members is required to push some of the new bits in... I didn't think it would be a big deal to wait, but I'll see what I can do...

[Buck]

Yikes! My CNC looks completely different all of a sudden!

[Buck]

Seeing an error while in File Manager, though:
Template Error:

Can't find template fileman_fileselection

Please contact support...

[Bob]

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh :gift:

-Bob

[Terra]

I'm working on it... ;)

[Buck]

Oops, sorry.

(Fixed, too.)