The Planet Blog

The Planet’s Professional Services engineers are a rare breed. Send us any non-standard problem, and we’ll jump on it to find a solution. That kind of jumping is typically the only jumping you see from one of us, but last Thursday challenged that status quo: a few of us spent our day jumping … out of a perfectly good airplane … hurtling toward a small field just South of Houston.

Being the last line of support at The Planet can get a bit stressful with all the interesting problems that come our way. Sometimes it becomes necessary to cut loose and take some risks. Our group is fairly tight-knit, so we end up supporting each other through these brief periods of insanity and have a blast in the process!

On Thursday, the three of us in Houston – accompanied by our colleague Geraldine Fernando who works at our help desk – ended up taking a half day off of work to go sky diving. We were all new to the process, and needless to say, we were a bit nervous.

Skydive Spaceland would be our proving ground.

To be honest, the location didn’t assuage any of our fears … the letters on the front of the building were merely outlines of their initial glory (pictured above), and we couldn’t help but wonder if this was the result of some unfortunate sky diving accident or just a boring hurricane.

As we started to prepare for our jumps, the sign-your-life-away forms were a bit of a reality check. Each paragraph literally stressed that there is a possibility you can die from jumping out of a plane, followed by several paragraphs confirming that you actually read the paragraph prior and understand the risks. Five pages, and twenty “initial here” fields later, we were amply freaked out and excited to start training!

Our training program consisted of watching an instructional video on what to do once you were actually plummeting to your doom … err, skydiving is what they called it. As an aside: If you can get your hands on this training tape, we’d advise you to take note of the instructor’s beard: it’s epic. Seriously, he could have been wearing a tie, and we would have never known.

(Left to right: Shawn Lime, Christopher Gallo, Geraldine Fernando, James Jhurani)

After training, we met with our instructors, all of whom were surprisingly laid back. They had the luxury of knowing the feeling of a successful skydive. We were not that lucky. They helped us suit up, answered all of our nervous questions and walked through the “this is how it will really happen” version of our training.

The only thing we had left to do was actually do it. Given the most recent skydiving safety statistics, we were confident that most of us would make it back to the office on Friday, but our legs were pretty heavy as we climbed into the plane.

After takeoff, we went over some-last minute questions and reminders. We latched onto our designated instructors, and they assured us that each of the harnesses could support 2500 lbs … which strangely didn’t help with our fear about the parachute opening.

Then we hit fourteen thousand feet, and we had to scoot the longest 10 feet of our lives.

No turning back now … the only way to the ground was out the side of the plane.

Pictures don’t do justice to the rush: free falling to terminal velocity and trying to process the fact that the only thing between you and the ground is a few thousand feet of air. You don’t know whether to scream or smile or close your eyes or breathe … then you realize breathing is not optional.

At Skydive Spaceland, you are encouraged to pull your own ripcord after checking your own altimeter, so you get the full thrill of pulling the cord and waiting for the ‘chute to catch. In reality — based on the statistics — tandem skydives are very safe, and each one of us experienced a textbook jump … the last few thousand feet drifting under canopy to our landing zone.

The final phase of the tandem jump requires you raise your legs straight out in front of you and slowly pull down on the flairs as you approach the landing zone. Depending on the speed of your landing, the instructor may tell you to sit or stand as you reach the ground. Geraldine insisted that we include the fact that she was the only one in our group to land on her feet, while the rest of us slid in on our backsides.

It was blast, and we couldn’t have been more reassured by the professionalism of our instructors at Skydive Spaceland. We’ve all caught the skydiving bug, and after we got back to the office we heard that one of our coworkers is a skydiving regular, so we challenge her to give her perspective on a jump … Patricia?

- Shawn, Christopher, Geraldine and James

Hi there. It’s me again. I’m still in the trenches, trying to find a decent Reuben sandwich in the tunnels.

Daylight saving time ended last month in Texas, and as I changed my clocks, I dutifully replaced the battery in my smoke alarm, just like the public service announcements advised. As I balanced on a chair on top of my coffee table, I pondered: Why is the smoke alarm running on a battery and not, say, plugged into the wall?

Well, in a fire, power can get interrupted, so it’s best to have the smoke alarm running on an independent source of power that you can test and replace when necessary. In a way, this applies to your server, too.

Since my previous post, I’ve counted up a total of 18 incidents where a customer did not get notification of an update to a ticket or a critical message regarding a change to our services. Every one of those missed communications could be traced to an e-mail address residing on the affected server. Each one of those customers suffered downtime because they either didn’t receive an alert in a reasonable amount of time or they didn’t respond to a technician who was ready and waiting to assist them.

And those incidents were just the ones that I fielded … there’s no telling how many folks out there have their “server smoke detectors” hard-wired into the wall.

It’s critical that you keep your contact information up-to-date in Orbit and that you provide us with an external e-mail address. Same thing goes with the monitoring system: Use a contact address that will work if the server goes down.

The best solution I’ve found is to use a third-party provider like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and forward those contacts/alerts to your primary mailbox (which can be on your server). By setting your contact address to a third-party provider first, you can ensure that you will always be able to access any important notifications. If you use a mail program like Outlook or Thunderbird, you can have the program check your third-party mailbox in parallel with your primary mailbox, eliminating the need to set up an auto-forward rule.

My advice: Do both.

Yes, I know that means you’ll get two messages for every one delivered to that emergency line, but in the end, isn’t it better to be over-notified of a potential emergency than to not hear about it at all?

-Laurence

Let’s face it — we’ve all seen some bad code in our time. During my eight-plus years of using PHP, I’ve inherited several legacy systems, and when reading over the previous programmer’s code, I often sit back and say, “What the heck was this guy thinking?”

Combine a programmer’s bad code with his or her lack of understanding about how databases work, and you’ve got one inefficient, unresponsive Web site.

The best example of this that I’ve encountered was one programmer’s attempt simply to get the number of rows in a table with a particular column value. This was his solution:

$rowCount = 0;
$res = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM users_activity");
while($row = mysql_fetch_row($res))
{
  if($row[‘activity] == ‘LOGIN')
  {
    $rowCount++;
  }
}

I hope all of you are cringing as badly as I did when I came across it the first time. For those of you that don’t understand why this is horribly inefficient, I’ll EXPLAIN.

MySQL has an often overlooked but extremely powerful built-in query analyzer that allows you to take any SELECT SQL statement, preface it with the keyword EXPLAIN, and get an analysis of the query with lots of information on how to optimize it.

Let’s use the above SQL statement on a table with over 4 million rows. Here’s the schema:

CREATE TABLE `users_activity` (
  `userId` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `activity` varchar(30) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'LOGIN',
  `notes` varchar(200) DEFAULT NULL,
  `timestamp` datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT '1970-01-01 00:00:00',
  KEY `userId_2` (`userId`),
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

The first concern we have is that the query has no WHERE clause. Not having this clause requires MySQL to scan the entire table (full_table_scan), which usually involves reading the entire table from disk into memory, and if you only need to do this once, you just wasted all that memory. With EXPLAIN, MySQL can show us exactly how many rows it checks:

>EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM users_activity
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           id: 1
  select_type: SIMPLE
        table: users_activity
         type: ALL
possible_keys: NULL
          key: NULL
      key_len: NULL
          ref: NULL
         rows: 4060232
        Extra:

MySQL will have to examine 4,060,232 rows to satisfy this query. Let’s add a WHERE clause and see how that helps:

>EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM users_activity WHERE activity = 'LOGIN'
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           id: 1
  select_type: SIMPLE
        table: users_activity
         type: ALL
possible_keys: NULL
          key: NULL
      key_len: NULL
          ref: NULL
         rows: 4060232
        Extra: Using where

Hmm … Well, that didn’t change the number of rows evaluated, did it? The query optimizer still had to look at all the rows, one by one, to determine if the activity column was equal to ‘LOGIN’. Even with our WHERE clause, this query is still almost as bad as the original author’s PHP code. Why did MySQL have to do this? To answer that, take a look at the NULL value returned for possible_keys. This result shows that MySQL was unable to find an index for the column to help narrow down the search. Let’s add an index and see what happens:

>ALTER TABLE `users_activity` ADD INDEX (`activity`);

>EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM users_activity WHERE activity = 'LOGIN'
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           id: 1
  select_type: SIMPLE
        table: users_activity
         type: ref
possible_keys: activity
          key: activity
      key_len: 92
          ref: const
         rows: 422436
        Extra: Using where

Very nice. We immediately reduced the number of rows that MySQL has to examine from 4,060,232 to 422,436. An 89 percent reduction in virtually no time at all.

This is just one of many scenarios in which using EXPLAIN can help you write better SQL statements. You can turn on the log_queries_not_using_indexes option to find out which SQL statements are not using indexes. By using this log and EXPLAIN, you can enhance the performance of your MySQL server by leaps and bounds.

For further information on EXPLAIN, visit http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/using-explain.html

-Matthew

The Planet hosts more than 25,000 customers worldwide. Right now, I am looking through an abridged customer list — with about 5,000 of the thirteen million-plus Web sites we host — and I am blown away by the diversity of our customer base, both geographically and functionally. We’ve got customers from Houston to Dubai selling web hosting, running video game leagues, offering online marketing solutions, hosting high-traffic forums, and building new social media platforms.

The basics of web hosting are simple: The Planet provides knowledgeable tech support, data centers, servers, power and bandwidth. Our customers have businesses, Web sites and ideas that require quality IT infrastructure — from colo to dedicated to partially managed to fully managed solutions (check out The Power to Choose for a look at that spectrum). The most surprising dynamic is how customers build from our services. It’s not uncommon to see two customers with identical hardware configurations running completely different businesses … One might be hosting a 5,000-attendee conference call while the other is consolidating information from social networks and personal e-mail accounts to deliver regular updates to 150,000 users.

If you’ve got a few minutes, I highly recommend you read a few of our Planet Alpha customer success stories and Planet Northstar customer success stories or check out our video testimonials to get a sense of the broad spectrum of business we host every day.

Because this blog is a great avenue to share with you what is going on inside The Planet, it is also a perfect place to share what’s happening on The Planet’s servers on a day-to-day basis. Enter “The Planet Customer Spotlight” series. Every other week, we plan to feature a different customer who is using our service to change the face of the Internet. I’ve got the first few “Spotlights” planned, and I’m looking for nominations to continue the series indefinitely. If you’re interested in getting a little face time on The Planet blog (and some Page Rank link juice), drop a comment at the bottom of this post or shoot me a quick e-mail (khazard AT theplanet.com), and I’ll be in touch.

All Customer Spotlights will be approved by the featured customer prior to posting. We want to use this venue to share your message with the rest of The Planet’s community, so you can be as involved in the process of drafting as you’d like.

What do you get when you combine a shark, a cow, a witch doctor, a Caterpillar, and Chuck Norris?

The 24 Hours of LeMons – Texas style.

As a mock homage to the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France, the LeMons series encourages irreverence, redneck ingenuity, and dumb luck in a two-day endurance car race that gentleman racers consider a sign of the Apocalypse. The catch is that you can’t spend more than $500 on your vehicle before adding safety gear, and the grand prize is $1,500 — all in nickels.

To succeed in LeMons, you need to have driving skills, mechanical skills, people skills, and a good gimmick (like turning your car into a tank, complete with a turret). If the crowd is against you for cheating or bad driving, they can name you “The People’s Curse,” and your vehicle is summarily destroyed on the second day by a very affectionate front-end loader.

Of course The Planet fielded a team: Team Chuck Norris.

Beginning at the Beginning

Chuck Norris doesn’t race cars. Cars race Chuck Norris.

In March, Nadja Pollard told me about the race in Angleton, Texas, and sent a link that changed my life … or at least the past few months of my life: http://www.24hoursoflemons.com/. I knew We Must Do This. I asked around the office if anyone else would be interested in playing along, and within a day, we had our core team, comprised of Nadja, Erin Schoenhals, Michael Menefee, Nathan Newton, Tim Schuh and me - Team Chuck Norris was born. We found the preparation to be a straightforward three-step process.

Step One: Find a car. We picked up a Toyota MR2 and a Nissan 200SX as a backup, both solid contenders in their own rights. The MR2 would be a more suitable race car if we could get it running. The 200SX was cheap ($275) and needed VERY little work.
Step Two: Find sponsorship. Doug agreed to have The Planet sponsor our team after we promised that we wouldn’t get hurt, and when he heard that one of our competitors competed in a similar race, he was completely on board. At this point, we welcomed Andrew Siverly, who just happened to have worked for our largest customer, to the team as a driver. The MR2’s engine had yet to turn over, so we kept tinkering.
Step Three: Get it going. Team Chuck Norris was accepted by the LeMons powers that be! The pressure was on to actually build the racer. The MR2’s reluctance to become a fully functioning automobile forced us to resort to Plan B and bring the 200SX into the spotlight. I started feeling the car out by using it as a daily driver at this point …. She wasn’t winning any beauty contests, but she could get you from point A to point B pretty reliably. We ordered a safety cage, seat, tires, and brakes, and we started the transformation from car to “The Fist of Chuck Norris.” (In LeMons, this safety equipment does not count against your car’s value, so we ensured that the car was as safe as it could be). We needed to round out our team with a sixth and final driver, so we initiated Drew Cleaver to the team.

On The Track

“Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a crash helmet. Crash helmets are modeled to replicate Chuck Norris’s skull structure.

Friday morning of race weekend, we unloaded, set up camp, and prepped for practice – the first time our car had been on a track. The car performed quite nicely: it was predictable and stable with no bad habits. Everyone except Erin (who was held up at work) got to turn a few laps to get familiar with the car, the track, and how the two interacted.

It’s said that there are 2 kinds of racers – losers and cheaters. LeMons has a tech inspection plus the “BS Inspection” – a screening process used to catch the most egregious cheaters. Luckily, Justice is NOT blind and can be bought with tequila, steaks, or pastries. We had to convince them that our 1980s-rear-drive-Japanese-sporty coupe was NOT a drift car worth a couple grand. Some cupcakes, hidden money, and having our story straight got us through. The AWESOMENESS of our Chuck Norris hood graphic helped too. The judges either dug it, or feared it.

Start Your Engines

Chuck Norris = Mass x Acceleration

Saturday morning we sent our ringer Drew to start the race. Minutes before green, the car stopped on the front straight. The ignition still cranked over with the key and the accessories worked, but the car just wouldn’t budge. Luckily, our day didn’t end prematurely … one of the wires went loose on our emergency cutoff switch, so we were back in the race after a little tightening, and Drew made up time by driving like mad.

I was in the driver’s seat next, and after getting comfortable with the race conditions, I became braver and more aggressive. Unfortunately, I made an error and passed another car under a yellow (caution) flag. The officials black-flagged me and I went to receive my punishment, which is one of the most entertaining features of LeMons … The judges had a special penalty for us because we were from Texas. I had to swear on a Bible to the following “facts” in addition to sitting out for 30 minutes:

1. Texas isn’t the biggest state in the US … Alaska is.
2. If you cut Alaska in half and made 2 states, Texas would be the 3rd largest state.
3. Quebec is bigger than Texas, they speak French in Quebec, and everything is bigger in Quebec.
4. Paul Newman was from Ohio. Not Texas.
5. James Dean was from Indiana. Not Texas.
6. David Koresh was from Texas.

They spray painted the car with “Alaska #1″ and “Quebec #2,” which still gives us chills. Our next driver was Andrew. Shortly into his stint, he was boxed in on a turn and the back end of the car slid out. Another black flag. The Bible was back out and Andrew swore one of the most awful things I have ever heard: that you could get a better steak in Kansas City than in Texas. This is blasphemy, of course, and Andrew has been in touch with his clergyman to clear his soul of that statement.

Next out was Erin, who drove clean the entire weekend. No drama whatsoever. Nadja followed Erin and as she was out turning laps. A car she was behind blew its engine, and she slid off the track thanks to the oil spewing from the disabled car. Luckily the Bible stayed in the drawer, and we only spent the 30 minutes in impound.

Tim went out last on Saturday and brought the car back with no incidents.

Our first day of racing was over, and the car had performed nicely. We did a full inspection and simply rotated the tires for Sunday. Compared with several teams, that was nothing. The car that blew in front of Nadja was already involved in a full engine swap. Another team had boiled their brake fluid, and hadn’t brought any replacement. We gave them what we had, helped out other teams where we could and called it a night.

On the Road Again …

Land Speed Records Are Set By Those trying To Flee From Chuck Norris.

On Sunday morning we got called to a special “you’ve been very naughty” meeting as our 3 flags the day before had not put us in the good graces of the judges. Luckily there were a bunch of teams in the same boat, and the judges took mercy by resetting the penalty count.

Tim was first and made up some time, but then passed under yellow. The judges weren’t happy, but they went easy on us. They stuck donuts under our wipers and the glaze melted to the glass as we waited in impound. Drew went out next, followed by Erin, Nadja and Andrew.

The black flag waved again when Andrew was forced off by the eventual race winner. By this time the judges didn’t care anymore, and I went back out with about an hour’s work to get to the checkers.

At this point in an endurance race the goal is to finish. I took it easy for a few laps, but the adrenaline kicked in and the spirit of Chuck came to me and ramped up my driving. A couple laps later as I was making a trip down the start/finish straight, I looked in my mirror to see the race leader get the checkered flag just behind me, so I had only one lap of racing left. I put the hammer down and flew under the flag with a well-respected finish!

The Checkered Flag

Chuck Norris IS the “I” in “Team”

The car made it in relative style and comfort – no mechanical problems at all. Our drivers turned laps both days, and we finished the race. Our final result was 26th out of 76 entrants, with 330 laps complete. Everyone was in good spirits and had a lot of fun. The best part is, even after our $275 car went full tilt on a track for two days, I drove it back to our hotel with the A/C on with no problems, and I am still driving it to work!

If the 24 Hours of LeMons comes back to Texas next year, I don’t think we’ll have any problems fielding another team. The race organizers gave our car a residual value of $250, which means we’ve got $250 to spend making the car faster before next year! If you’ve got a running motor out of an 84-89 Nissan 300zx that you don’t need, don’t hesitate to contact me.

I challenge you to have a go at this yourself. You’ll put in some long weekends getting an impossibly crummy car ready to race, but if you like cars and racing at all, you will have a blast. This is about the least expensive motor racing you can do, and it’s worth every penny – all 50,000 of them.

See you at the track,

-Dave
(Chuck Norris)

P.S. If you want to know what the roar of the engine sounded like from inside the cockpit, check out the footage from our in-car camera (note the donuts on the windshield):

P.P.S. If you were curious about what happened to “The People’s Curse” …

Courtesy of Peasant Racing (check out their excellent race coverage)

Technology permeates our lives. We rely on GPS to take us to Grandma’s house; we stay up-to-date on friends we haven’t seen since high school via Facebook; and we are far more connected to the world around us than we ever thought possible. The fact that you are reading this blog, in one form or another, means you’re a part of this technology revolution. But it begs the question: Do you know how you are interacting with the world through the Internet?

I’m utterly unqualified to discuss an answer to that question metaphysically or philosophically, but I can take a crack at a crash course in hosting that will begin to answer the question literally. It’s the elephant in the room: In the simplest terms, how does the Internet work?

I’ve seen that there is steep learning curve for people outside the hosting industry when it comes to a general understanding of the technical answer to that question. The answer is not overly complicated or obscure … The sentiment is that by the time someone needs hosting, they’ll know how hosting works. The fact that you are reading this entry on The Planet’s blog would suggest you already know a fair amount about what hosting is and how the Internet works. So please bookmark this blog post as a resource to reference when your less-technically-savvy friends ask you to explain what you mean when you say you work online and host your own website.

I’m suggesting all of my friends read this post, so when anyone happens to mention Web sites, e-mail or computers, they can amaze their associates with their stellar understanding of the infrastructure and the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the Internet. Trust me: When you pass along this explanation as your own in the “real world,” everyone in earshot will be in awe.

If, as a rule, you don’t associate with non-technically-savvy people, please feel free to stop reading this post here.

The Internet: Under the Hood

1. You access a device connected in some way to the Internet. This device can be a cell phone, a computer or even a refrigerator. You are connected to the Internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) which recognizes that you will be accessing various sites and services hosted remotely. Your ISP is a network connected to the other networks on the planet (which is where we get the term “Internet” or “inter” “network”: Activity travels across multiple networks).
2. You enter a domain name or click a URL (for this example, we’ll use http://www.google.com).

3. Your ISP will see that you want to access “www.google.com” and will immediately try to find someone/something that knows what “www.google.com” means … this search is known as an NS (name server) lookup. In this case, it will find that “www.google.com” is associated with several name servers.

4. The first of these four name servers to respond with additional information about “google.com” will be used. Domains are typically required to be associated with two or three name servers to ensure if one is unreachable, requests for that domain name can be processed by another.
5. The name server has Domain Name System (DNS) information that essentially maps “www.google.com” to an Internet Protocol (IP) address. When a domain name is purchased and provisioned, the owner will associate that domain name with a specific IP address by creating DNS records. Think of DNS as a phone book that translates a name into a phone number for you.

6. When the IP address you reach sees that you requested “www.google.com,” it will find the files/content associated with that request. Multiple domains can be hosted on the same IP address, just as multiple people can live at the same street address and answer the phone. Each IP address only exists in a single place. (There are some complex network tricks that can negate that statement, but in the interest of simplicity, we’ll ignore them.)
7. Depending on what content you are accessing, the response from the server can be very simple or very complex. In some cases, the request will return a single HTML document. In other cases, the content you access may require additional information from other servers (database servers, storage servers, etc.) before the request can be completely fulfilled. This process is typically transparent to you as the end user, but it’s important to note when you are trying to understand the complexity of what seems like such a simple request.
8. When the requested content is located (and generated by other servers if necessary), it is returned to your browser in HTML code.

9. Your browser takes that code and translates the formatting and content to be displayed on your screen. Often, formatting and styling of pages will be generated from a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) referenced in the HTML code. The purpose of the style sheet is to streamline a given page’s code and consolidate the formatting to be used and referenced by multiple pages of a given website.

10. The HTML code will reference sources for media that may be hosted on other servers, so the browser will perform the necessary additional requests to get all of the media the website is trying to show. In this case, it needs to pull in the Google logo from this location: http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif

When the HTML is rendered and the media is loaded, your browser will probably note that it is “Done,” and you will have successfully navigated to “www.google.com” in 10 easy steps! I know it seems like a daunting and complex process, but it happens in a matter of milliseconds each time you use the Internet.

Pretty crazy, huh?

-Kevin

Hi there. Laurence Simon here. I work in The Planet’s call center. I do triage on weekday mornings, sweeping the ticket queues and picking off calls. Nice to meet ya.

You know, all things considered, it’s rather nice in here. Good ambient light, and there’s a great view of Buffalo Bayou and the Ferris wheel at the Downtown Aquarium. The chairs are pretty comfortable. And, I. Love. The Tunnels. (I highly recommend Treebeards‘ red beans and rice.)

However, there’s one thing that irks me: While we work 24/7, 365 days a year (or 366 this year!), come hurricane or hot air from the folks on television getting us all worked up over named storms, we can still make your experience even better.

I talked with my fellow trench-mates (pictured below), cobbled together a few notes, and jotted down a few suggestions, tips and thoughts that can give you a better, faster and more efficient experience with Technical Support:

1. Reboots

It takes just as long to set up a Manual Reboot Request (MRR) as it does to submit a trouble ticket or call in a reboot request when you’re at a computer. If you need a reboot for a server, use the ROD/Remote Reboot functions. If that fails, then use the Manual Reboot Request. You’ll see much quicker results this way.

Submitting a normal ticket with “Please reboot my server” requires that a technician go into Orbit, submit a reboot request for you, and then close out the original ticket. It takes much longer to get a server rebooted this way than by using ROD or Manual.

2. Initial Setup

The first thing you should do with your server is set the hostname, get that hostname resolving in DNS, and then request it as the Reverse DNS. This will prevent a lot of common network issues from the get-go.

The hostname should be a fully qualified domain name that points to the server. For example: server.exampledomain.com.

To get a Reverse DNS entry set up, just submit a trouble ticket with Reverse DNS as the subject line or a DNS Change Ticket. Make sure to include the IP address and the hostname you want to point it at.

3. Escalation Procedures

Prepare and post a set of escalation procedures for common situations so that we don’t need to ask you to perform basic recovery tasks.

Let us know in advance what to do if an alert comes up and the server requires a reboot, if it is OK to run an FSCK on the drive when it’s needed, or to replace failed drives the moment they lock up.

4. Readily Accessible Information

Keep a card with your account number and password — with bogus characters — handy in case you’re away from your desk.

For instance, if your password is:

1L0v3Kev1nH4z4rd

Besides the fact that you’ve got some serious issues to work through (or the fact that you are actually Kevin Hazard), you can bogus this up with some XJQP magic…

x1L0jv3Keqv1nH4zp4rd

If someone steals your wallet, they won’t have the actual password. Just remember to remove the X, J, Q and P characters and you have your password.

For additional security, you can require that we ask a security question, like your mother’s maiden name. That’ll also throw off anyone who gets a hold of the account.

5. Keep a Calendar

Keep a wall calendar handy with reminders when SSLs and domains are up for renewal. Also, program them as appointment reminders in your cell phone.

A multimillion-dollar operation can be brought to its knees for a day when its domain expires. Renew it for as long in advance as you can afford, and be sure to keep the account information for logging into your registrar handy. (Or, if you want to make sure it’s all in one place, make The Planet your domain registrar.)

(NOTE: According to Whois, ilovekevinhazard.com is available)

6. Notification Address

Do not set your notification address to one on your server. When you use an external contact address, you can get updates when the server’s down or if there is an abuse or legal issue.

If you lost your cell phone, you wouldn’t want people calling your cell phone to tell you they’ve found your cell phone, right?

Be sure to check that mailbox frequently, or have it alert you.

7. Up to Date

Keep all your contact information up to date. This tip is a continuation of No. 6, but it’s important enough to reiterate on its own.

8. Plan Ahead

If I were to tell you, “Your server is down and we cannot recover any data off of it,” what would you do?

Disaster planning and testing your recovery procedure on a regular basis is critical to any online business. Spending some time and money with our sales department exploring backup and redundancy will prevent you from losing clients, money and sleep.

As I like to say, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day was just a big advertisement for offsite backups.”

9. Cut out the Middle Man

Simple changes to the A Records of DNS entries can be done in Orbit instead of via a ticket.

Just go to DNS Administration, bring up the domain, make the changes, and save them.

This is actually easier to do than submitting a ticket requesting the change, and it’s a lot quicker.

10. Help Us Help You

Keep your passwords updated in Orbit and let us know what port SSH is listening to. Include any wheel users or special instructions for login.

This will save us time in addressing your issue because it will let us get into your server the moment we get the ticket.

It’s like keeping a key in a fake rock in the garden so the neighbor can feed your cat (or James Caan if you’ve got a Kathy Bates Misery thing going on).

11. Firewalled

If you have a firewall, please allow the Technical Support group access to your server.

It’s important to have a firewall on your server for security purposes, whether it’s one of our dedicated external firewall products or just a set of iptables or Windows Defender. But it’s also important that we are able to access your server quickly should you raise the alarm.

12. Be Specific

Please make the ticket summaries descriptive and unambiguous. “Help!” and “Urgent!” and “I am losing my business!” make it difficult to quickly assign issues. After the issue is resolved, they also don’t help us track down previous issues with a server to establish patterns of problematic hardware, software or networking.

We understand that it’s an emergency, but please don’t let your panic prevent us from being able to resolve the problem quickly or learn from that incident in to assist you in the future.

13. Include as Much Information as Possible

Always include error messages, exactly what you did before getting those errors and any relevant sections of log files to demonstrate what problems you are running into. If it’s with a specific domain or account, provide those, too. A ticket with “This doesn’t work!” doesn’t tell us much, since we need to know more about “this” and how it’s not working.

The more information we have about the problem, the better. Otherwise, there may be some back-and-forth on the ticket that ends up taking hours instead of minutes.

Here’s the biggest one that folks have told me about:

14. Trust Us, We’re Here for You

After a ticket is submitted, a lot of customers will speed-dial Technical Support, asking them to read the ticket and address it immediately.

We’re here to assist, but jumping the queue by calling in isn’t necessarily effective in escalating your ticket. We triage issues based on the severity of the incident, which technicians are best equipped to handle a given problem, and if the ticket needs to be handled by any of our other teams (Networking, Data Centers, Professional Services, Advanced Services, Abuse, etc.).

And, unlike those pesky elevators which actually do show up quicker when you press the button multiple times, calling in to check if a reboot has been completed will not get a server rebooted faster. Our call center is downtown while the Houston data centers are at least 30 miles away. (Dallas is even farther than that!) Data center technicians work through the queues as quickly as possible, and they are generally able to respond to tickets within minutes of submission.

We understand that you’re frustrated when your business depends on your server, and sometimes that materializes in blowing off some steam and passing along some of the heat that your own clients are dumping on you.

One odd thing I’ve noticed in my time here is that I’ve actually become a lot nicer and more patient with service representatives on the telephone. I’ve been reading the FAQs and submitting trouble tickets when possible. I know what it’s like on the other end of the line. I know what it’s like to be them.

OK, so that’s all I’ve got for this time around. I’ll have more next time.

Until then, save me the last flagon of iced tea in the break room, and thank you for choosing The Planet!

-Laurence