Its been a very productive 12 Months, DevonWebs has expanding in all directions and we’ve invested A LOT into the future of the company. We first of all moved one of our Locations in the EU to another (With no downtime) From Luxembourg to Amsterdam. Why the move? We had simply outgrown the location and offering the high level of uptime when we had a network issue wasn’t something we could maintain. Once that was done we then upgraded our hardware from 7900 AMD CPU’s to AMD Epyc Genoa CPU’s. Our role out for this had a few challenges of its own. Our old Nodes where only 2U in size. These are 4U we typically deployed 4 in each location. To facilitate a 0 Downtime approach we had to ensure our internal networking was operating to its be ability Our overage internal throughput was around 10/20gbps per node and only required a reboot to apply the new node limits. We have now Finished this deployment across EU and the UK. We are also happy to announce our latest location Las Vegas this location is in testing phase and will be live VERY soon keep and eye on our Web Hosting page for updates.
Some other changes:
Nameservers: These are now Geo-Redundant so if one of our nameservers is unreachable the other one is on a different network in a different location
Email Sending: We have come on leaps and bounds with this. We moved away from Mailchannels as we didn’t like not having control over the outbound network, we have deployed micro nodes in several locations that handle mail delivery in much the same way.
Email Spam: Spam Experts; We have 4 Spam Experts nodes that handle the companies in and out. Protecting you from spam whilst protecting us all from spam folders and block lists. (SE acts as the middle man between all of our servers and the sending nodes.
Smarter Mail: We have 2 Smarter Mail nodes now, 1 in Amsterdam and 1 in Las Vegas. These again link to Spam Experts and we have seen great results from this product along with the features it brings to the table. For mor einformation on this go check out the Email Hosting page
SQL Offload: Before we upgraded our hardware to the Genoas we had some spare 7900 servers in each rack so we set about creating dedicated SQL Offload servers which helped a lot with load and I was extremely impressed with the results. This was an automatic internal change across all Direct Admin Servers, However we also have a premium Offload option which has majorly helped with performance of bigger websites mainly e-commerce based ones.
Backups: Something we have always wanted to ensure are solid so you don’t have to. Our old backup solution was 2 Huge storage servers that where mirrored for redundancy and offloaded to daily. However as our servers expand in size typically our nodes have 8 to 10tb of NVMe storage now. And when they are all backing up we have seen significant slowdowns on the backup network. To combat this we have move all our backups to S3 which is replicated to another region in real time and this has bought us some extra benefits. Upload and download speed is now not a geo restriction as we have storage closed to each location and typically now get up to 4gbps upload to the server which cuts the time per backup to under 1 hour per node.
With more to come watch this space but to say we are excited to see where we go next is an understatement
Regards,
Sam Rudd