Via Hacker News — Updated YC Company Hosting Stats. A Ruby script was used to extract out all the startups that Y Combinator invested in, get their IP addresses, and then do a WHOIS to find out who owns the IP block. Interesting result:

• SliceHost: 14
• SoftLayer: 14
• Amazon (on EC2): 13
• Rackspace: 4
• ThePlanet: 3
• GoDaddy: 3
• ServerBeach: 2
• Pair Networks: 2
• …

Then the whole HN discussion turns into SliceHost vs. Linode, as there is only 1 YC funded startup on the list that’s hosted on Linode. I am more surprised that there are more start ups using GoDaddy than Linode.

A lot of news surrounding LxLabs and HyperVM after last week’s FsckVPS fiasco. Via this discussion thread on WebHostingTalk, where an LxLabs employee talks about the future of company and its software:

lxbhargava said
Today I had discussion with Ligesh’s family. From the discussion it is appears that Lxlabs will not continue to run the business.

They are considering, releasing the software Kloxo and Hypervm under an Opensource license.

Here is probably one of the biggest/fasting growing outage thread on WebHostingTalk — started by someone reporting FsckVPS connectivity issue yesterday morning. When I went to bed last night there was around 50+ pages of discussions, and now it has grown to 80+ pages. FsckVPS, one of the VAServ companies, was offering low-cost full-automated OpenVZ VPS with instant activation. And it turns out that HyperVM, a virtualization control panel for both OpenVZ and Xen developed by LxLabs, has some serious vulnerabilities. Someone could exploit it and gain super user privilege on the physical node, including performing highly malicious operations. It appears to be the case with FsckVPS and someone managed to exploit HyperVM and wiped out data for 100,000 websites (according to The Register).

“We were hit by a zero-day exploit” in version 2.0.7992 of the application, he (Rus Foster of VAServ) said. “I’ve heard from other people they’ve been hit by the same thing.”

Because of unmanaged nature of FsckVPS, they do not actually carry any backup of their clients’ VPS (which is a fair call from a providers’ point of view). Many might not actually have offsite backup anywhere — and now that’s pretty bad.

Just to share another script that I hacked together to monitor my sites. Nginx is a great web server software and since I last wrote about it more than 2 years ago, I have since pretty much converted all my sites to Nginx (sorry Lighttpd).

Nginx came with this HTTP stub status module that you can get the current server status in a HTML page. However it’s not pretty comparing to Lighttpd’s and Apache’s. Moreover, the information it provides is a bit cryptic.

A few days ago I spotted this forum post on Linode Forum — someone’s Nginx to PHP FastCGI set up kept on throwing 502 Gateway Error after a few days.

I have a mystery and I’m not sure how to solve it. My 360 Linode is running several Wordpress-based sites using nginx. Everything is great, except I find that, every few days, fastcgi fails and I start getting 502 gateway errors when I try to post a comment or upload an image, etc. Restarting fastcgi fixes the problem.

It looks like a very similar issue I had with Ubuntu 8.04 (and PHP 5.2.4), which was fixed when I migrated to Debian 5 Lenny. It appears that the OP is indeed running the problematic Ubuntu 8.04. Well. I still have no idea what the real issue was (thus do not know how to report a bug), except my PHP FastCGI process will crash multiple times during busy time of the day (but it’s only 2-3 requests/second average).

Spotted this discussion thread yesterday at OCAU, one of the biggest community forums in Australia. Agg posted about OCAU’s hosting changes:

As you may be aware we’ve been very kindly hosted by AusGamers for a few years now. Unfortunately due to changes beyond their control they can no longer host us, so we have to relocate the site by early next month…

If you read through the discussion thread, for the last couple of years OCAU has been hosted at the now-defunct Comindico content network for free through the courtesy of AusGamers. It’s mostly vBulletin + other scripts providing wiki, image sharing, etc. It is also doing around 2,000GB of data transfer per month, which is not surprising for a community forum of that size and nature. Now they are forced to move out from their current rack and need to find a new home. 90% of visitors are from various ISPs in Australia, and as of this Saturday OCAU will move to… The Planet!

Via Stackoverflow blog — Server Fault Public Beta Launches, Server Fault, a wiki/Q&A site for the sysadmins and IT professionals is going live today. From its about page:

Server Fault is collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow system administrators and IT professionals. Once the system learns to trust you, you’ll be able to edit anything, much like Wikipedia. With your help, we can build good answers to every question a system administrator or IT professional might have. No matter what types of servers or desktops you administer, or what operating systems you happen to call home — getting better at what we do, together, is our goal.

Had a quick glance on the front page questions and they seem to be Windows biased (although there are some related to open source OS or applications). If it’s as successful as Stack Overflow, it’ll be a pretty good resource for the sysadmins (or those of us who are sysadmin-wannabe’s).

Came to the office this afternoon (have to go to a primary school’s open day this morning), and found out that my VPS at VPSLink has been rebooted. The outage started at around 10:05 AEST (on 19 May 2009 here in Australia), and the server rebooted twice — and came back online at 10:43 AM (so only 40 minutes of downtime). However network feels a bit slow at the moment — could be my end, but it could be something wrong with the routers in VPSLink/Spry’s Seattle DC.

Their website and the forums are apparently down right now. VPS control panel is up — but a bit useless as it kept on throwning me error messages. @NeosurgeHosting said that there’s a power outage, but someone suggested that there’s an DDoS attack. Waiting for the official statement when it comes back online…

Started work at 9:30am this morning and saw Ross’ Twitter status:

I went to load one of my sites, and the proxy came back with DNS resolution error. The DNS was hosted on EveryDNS so I tried to browse there, and the site would not respond. Is it my own connection, or is EveryDNS offline? Did a search on Twitter, which reveals that it’s the later. Not only has everyone complaining about the down time (all the way up to an hour ago), we also have someone from EveryDNS keeping us updated about the progress.

Very cool stuff. Twitter will definitely be the first to check when I am hitting some connectivity problem.