Hurricane Irene passed through Virgina on Sunday, flooding streets and buildings, and leaving many without power. Our data center experienced no problems related to the storm. Power stayed on throughout and network traffic continued without interruption.

Only the company swimming pool suffered minor damage. Repairs will be made shortly.

Admittedly, it took longer than we expected. But, in the end, it is better than we planned.

Open Hosting’s API-based Backup (or, “OAB” for short) is pretty cool. Basically, if you run a server based on one of our pre-installed Linux images, all you need to do is install a few packages, edit OAB’s config file, and you’re set. And, for those of you building servers on our new CentOS 5.6 pre-installed image, you’ll only need to edit OAB’s config file.

In addition to being useful as it is, OAB’s code is worth studying and modifying for your own projects that interact with our API.

Please email code@openhosting.com to request OAB. Eventually, OAB will make its way to Github.

Continue reading “Open Hosting’s Backup Solution is Ready” »

Starting now, Open Hosting will announce infrastructure health by Twitter:

http://twitter.com/ohicloud

We’ve added another pre-installed image to our library: CentOS 5.6. As with the other pre-install images, you need only to create a server and the OHI platform will implicitly create a drive with CentOS 5.6 already installed.

Installation takes less than a minute. And, no more than 2 gigs is required for a healthy install. But, our pre-installed CentOS 5.6 is pretty minimal and doesn’t include X, KDE, nor Gnome. So, if you expect to install a lot of packages, it is best to start with a drive of more than 2 gigs.

As with all the other pre-installed images:

1. The VNC password is platform-generated and found near your server.
2. When connecting by VNC, you can login by typing “root” without providing a password.
3. The root user is disabled for SSH and other remote access.
4. For accessing by SSH, use the toor user and enter the VNC password.

When reporting concerns about network performance to support please include traceroute output to and –if possible– from your destination. If you can provide traceroute output to and from multiple sites that is most helpful.
Continue reading “Network Troubleshooting Using Traceroute” »

While we at Open Hosting do our best to keep the network buzzing, occasionally there are speed bumps. And, you can help us diagnose and improve our network!
Continue reading “Network Performance Testing” »