Web Log Update

Meet the Tech: Tom

July 22nd, 2010

Name: Tom

Birthplace: Tucker, Georgia 1985

Tom was born in Tucker, GA in 1985. Tom’s father fostered in him an early love for computers, and his parents were soon desperately trying to keep up. Constantly tinkering and playing games, Tom was looking for an avenue to broaden his experience.

That was given to him in high-school with computer classes. Specializing in computer science and robotics, Tom was able to develop his skills using Visual Basic, and is now currently expanding his knowledge at GA Tech.

While still in high-school, Tom started working in a restaurant where he was introduced to our tech Nick who also worked there at the time. When the opportunity arose, Nick, who had since joined our team, brought Tom on at Cyberwurx. Tom started at the bottom helping with anything that needed doing, and quickly developed into a core member of our co-location team. He is currently active in deploying our unmanaged systems, as well as helping with our current data-center expansion projects.

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The Advantages of Hosting/Co-locating Websites in a Data Center

June 3rd, 2010

It’s a well-known fact that succeeding in today’s business environment is becoming increasingly competitive and difficult. Businesses small and large can succeed with the right tools, but finding the right tools can be difficult in such a flooded market. With the recent media coverage of disasters both natural and man-made, companies worldwide have been increasing their investments in an entirely new place: highly secured storage systems and data centers. Companies are finally starting to realize how much of their business assets are digital data, data that can be lost in an instant costing thousands if not millions of dollars. Websites are just as crucial as internal data, if not more so. Every year more and more companies choose Cyberwurx hosting to safeguard their digital property in a secured data-center.

What exactly is a data-center? A data-center is a facility that allows for storage and management of all the servers and other computing equipment important to your company in a precision-controlled environment. Many larger companies have entire warehouses dedicated to this purpose. Large buildings that are climate controlled with backup generators and redundant Internet backbones. Unfortunately for small and developing companies the initial high investment required to acquire an entire facility and equipment is simply non-existent. In addition to these high initial material costs, data-centers require a large staff of experienced technicians and engineers, another unavailable resource.

Fortunately these small businesses can avoid the costs of their own data-center through co-location. A co-location hosting center, often referred to as colo-hosting or just colo, is a company that builds data-centers specifically for the purpose of hosting multiple small-business’s servers and data. Co-location data-centers are specially-designed to offer all the benefits of your own facility, while saving costs by sharing the space with other companies. Instead of your data been stored all together in your building, leaving you extremely vulnerable to disaster, your equipment can be physically secured and locked away, inside a 24 hour access controlled building.

There are many different advantages to hosting or co-locating your website in a data center. The first is that it provides you with significantly more affordable hosting. These cost savings increase exponentially if your needs are met by shared hosting. Dedicated server hosting offers drastically reduced management costs. Our customers are always surprised to hear how much cheaper we are than a contractor, or hiring their own System Administrator.

If your business does not specifically deal with IT, outsourcing your storage and maintenance can be very advantageous to you as well. By doing this, your company will save time and money while still utilizing the advantages IT services can offer your business. Often, IT can be a very expensive sector for a business. Outsourcing can save valuable money that can instead be invested into something more integral to your firm.

By co-locating your company’s Internet presence in a data-center, you gain a complex security system and enhanced performance. Data-centers can provide you with very secure systems in which to store your data or even the space that you wish to rent to use your own equipment. You can rest easy at night knowing that all your important content and data is perfectly safe, both from natural disasters and people with questionable morals. Your connectivity is safe as well, as we have backup generators and UPS systems to make sure that your systems are always powered on, with multiple different connections to the Internet.

A data-center can be a fantastic option for your small business or corporation. Smaller businesses can benefit greatly from having their data stored off-site in a secure location, without the expense of building or maintaining their own data-center; while larger businesses can benefit from massive cost reduction. It’s a seldom-thought-about option for most business, but it’s a well-known fact that hosting in a data-center can be beneficial for almost every kind of business.

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Real 24/7 Support

May 6th, 2010

If you have spent much time at all looking for a hosting service, you may have noticed that just about every provider in the industry is offering 24/7 support. This might make you think, “Wow! This industry has incredible support!!!” Unfortunately, spend a few minutes reviewing hosting providers on-line, and you will find that that is not really the case. For most hosting companies, the idea of 24/7 support is one guy with a blackberry. This sounds like not too bad of an idea, but let’s try a scenario.

  1. 3:45am. Your website goes down.
  2. 3:50am. A customer of yours in a different time zone calls you, or perhaps a monitoring service.
  3. 3:55am. You create a ticket, “Hey, my website is down, could you let me know what’s up.”
  4. 4:00am. Owner of generichost.com gets alert on his blackberry.
  5. 4:05am. Owner of generichost.com sends trouble ticket to the hosting facility he is reselling space from.
  6. 4:15am. Generichost.com’s host, responds with “You have bad hardware that needs replacement.
  7. 4:30am. Generichost.com gets in his car and starts driving to his colo-space.
  8. 5:00am. Generichost.com arrives at building, starts hardware repair.
  9. 5:30am. If you are lucky, your site is back up.

Although we rarely have hardware failures on our equipment, this is how the exact same scenario would pan out if you were hosting with us on one of our managed hosting plans.

  1. 3:45am. Your website goes down.
  2. 3:46am. Our monitoring system notifies our tech of issue, tech walks to server, when it is unresponsive.
  3. 3:47am. Tech starts copying data from backups to a new drive.
  4. 3:50am. A customer of yours in a different time zone calls you, or perhaps a monitoring service.
  5. 3:50am. A tech emails you, letting you know the problem, and how long you can expect your site to stay down.
  6. 4:20am. Your site is back up, and you can go back to sleep.

When you consider situations like this, you realize how great of a difference exists in the types of 24/7 support available. At Cyberwurx, we own the entire colo space. We also have a real live human, who is AWAKE, in that colo space at all times. Yes, even on nights, weekends, and holidays. The Internet doesn’t sleep, and neither does our support. As a company that has been in the business of hosting since 1997, with our employees average 10 years of industry relevant experience. Cyberwurx can solve your unexpected problems when other hosting companies have to wake up more knowledgeable help.

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Hosting Your Blog with Cyberwurx

January 25th, 2010

A question we are often asked is, “Why don’t you have a blog hosting plan?” Our favorite answer to that question is: “We have several!”

Virtually all of our plans support blogging. The most-used blog software, Wordpress, is easily installed on any of our managed hosting plans, as well as our un-managed plans. Starting your blog here, or moving here will give you several advantages over choosing a free host:

Advertisements. With free hosting you are often prevented from advertising on your blog, but with us, you are free to do whatever you want with your hosting service. We also NEVER put advertisements on your page, or registration, or anywhere. The only way someone could even find out you host with us would be from looking at your domain’s DNS servers.

Better Control. Free blog services often restrict you to using pre-made site templates, making your site look like hundreds of others that share a host. When you host with us, you are free to change whatever you want about your site, allowing you to fully control it.

Branding. Many sites force you to use a sub-domain of their domain for your blog address, such as blognamehere.blogsite.com. When you host with us, you can choose whatever domain you like for your website!

For all of these reasons and more, you should consider hosting your blog with us!

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CyberWurx Celebrates New Game Server Hosting With LAN Party

January 8th, 2010

CyberWurx, a leader in the web hosting industry, is breaking into Game Server Hosting and kicking off the event by sponsoring a LAN party in Atlanta, Georgia.

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) January 13, 2010 — CyberWurx, a leader in the web hosting industry, recently announced their entry into the Game Server Hosting arena. To introduce their new service to gamers and industry professionals, the company is sponsoring a LAN party in Atlanta, Georgia. Participants will get a taste of what kind of game server and hosting solutions CyberWurx can provide.

CyberWurx has been offering shared hosting, dedicated servers and colocation hosting solutions to their customers since 1997. After more than a decade of offering fully supported web hosting solutions to businesses and organizations of all sizes, the company is poised to bring that same dedication to the increasingly popular field of game server hosting.

Nick Gray, Datacenter Manager at CyberWurx, explains, “It’s a natural outgrowth of what we do best – provide hosting solutions that work, backed by outstanding customer service. The online gaming industry is growing rapidly, and dedicated, efficient game servers are crucial to an exceptional gaming experience. We’re sure our LAN party will prove to participants that we are ready to provide all the support, technology and expertise that’s needed to provide a seamless gaming experience.”

In 2009, CyberWurx was the host company for the annual Atlanta LAN Fest for charity. The two day event in June drew hundreds of gamers to participate in games such as Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4 and Left 4 Dead. Proceeds went to various charities, including March of Dimes and Relay for Life.

Gray comments, “The success of our hosting duties at Atlanta’s premier gaming event in 2009 was an example of just what our company is capable of providing in terms of game hosting expertise. When we were ready to launch our newest service, we knew a local LAN party was the most appropriate way to bring it to the attention of the public. Of course, we’re also excited about the opportunity to give local gamers another chance to demonstrate their skills and network with others in the community. It’s going to be a true celebration of the joy of gaming.”

CyberWurx currently offers both managed and self-managed dedicated servers, virtual private servers, reseller hosting options, and load balancing solutions that can be tailored to the individual needs of their clients.

About CyberWurx:
Based in Atlanta, Georgia, CyberWurx is a privately owned web service provider specializing in customized hosting options, including shared hosting, dedicated servers, colocation hosting, and virtual web hosting solutions. The company currently boasts over 7,500 servers and owns two Internet Data Centers that are powered through separate substations. CyberWurx prides itself on providing affordable, fully supported and secure IP solutions for organizations and businesses of all sizes. For more information on CyberWurx, contact Nick Gray at 404-681-9888 or visit www.CyberWurx.com.

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Making the most of your colo or un-managed hosting by utilizing our Lantronix IPKVMs.

January 4th, 2010

One of the most often under used pieces of equipment we offer for use to our customers are our Lantronix Spider IPKVMs. They are frequently used for their main purpose of being a remote keyboard and mouse, but we have found that our customers never utilize 2 of the most interesting abilities of these devices, serial interface and .iso mounting.

The Spider’s ability to use a serial interface can be very useful as it will allow you to configure many different kinds of serial devices without having to use one of your other machines to interface with it! As an example, we can connect the IPKVM to a Cisco device and have you on a console to it in significantly less time than it takes to find which of your machines are close enough and find a proper-length cable. That is also assuming that you can easily access the console from your server.

ISO mounting can be extraordinarily useful. We use it for all our installations that require unique or rarely used install media (as opposed to our normal PXE installs). It allows us to change

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Hosting Provider Location

December 16th, 2009

A question people often ask themselves when choosing a hosting provider is, “Where should I host my server?” Many people feel that it is important that the host be physically located close to them, or close to their customer base. Although it can be argued that hosting locally can improve local search engine results (this is unlikely), the main reason most people think they should host locally is largely ungrounded. This is because there is very little correlation between transfer speed or load times and the physical location of a server. Much more important is the amount of hops between your server and your customers, but I’ll get into more of that in a bit.

The circumference of the earth is 24,901.463 miles. This means that theoretically speaking, you can get to any part of the earth (by traveling in a straight line along the surface) in 12,451 miles or less. Since data sent over this distance is done so via light on a fiber-optic cable, we can use the speed of light to calculate how long it takes data to make this trek:

(12450.7315Miles/1)*(1 hour/670616629 Miles)*(3600000 ms/1 hour)=(66.838 ms)

This means that in an ideal world, where you were on the north pole, and your server was on the south pole (and assuming your server can instantly process data, which it can’t) you could access a website hosted on the other side of the planet in .132 seconds(66.8 ms there and back). This is less than half the time it takes you to blink.

This means, at least in a theoretical sense, that the physical distance has virtually no effect on transmission speed. The majority of transit time is actually created when your information gets off a cable, is processed by a router, and is then sent back out through another cable. This is what is commonly referred to as a ‘hop’. Trace-routes and pings are the easiest way to determine the speed and “distance-away” of your prospective server. Although some forms of routing can in fact hide hops from such simple utilities, you can still estimate how many of these your data encounters by performing a trace-route, and get an overall feel for your total transit time by using the ping command.

So next time you are wondering where you should host, make the decision using pings and trace-routes instead of miles!

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Cyber Wurx: Meet the Tech Nick

November 30th, 2009

Name: Nick

Birthplace: Suwanee, Georgia, 1985

Georgia born and raised, Nick has had a passion for computing devices since age 6, when he received his first Apple IIe. With the addiction started, his fascination of computers bloomed into a continued insatiable desire to learn more about computer technology. Along that path, like many computer obsessed teens in the late nineties, he fell in love with computer gaming and the LAN party scene. Since then, Nick has been involved with the planning and running of several Atlanta area LAN parties. Nick states, “Everyone in the gaming scene at Brookwood High School would group up over the weekend for our weekly LAN party. We threw one heck of a party!”

Obsessed with computer networks, Nick went on to compete in the 2004 competition for Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) in network design. His team placed second in state. He went on to work several odd jobs here and there until Cyber Wurx welcomed him to the team.

Nick currently lives in Lawrenceville and can be found playing the latest games in his free time.

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Spam-reduction Tip: Catch-All Aliases

November 11th, 2009

People are always asking us, “Why am I getting so much spam?”

The answer is never the same, as each person’s spam woes are different from the next. One of the issues we see most often that is easily correctable is the unnecessary use of catch-all aliases.

A catch all alias is a email alias that takes any mail sent to anything@domainexample.com to a mailbox (or multiple mailboxes). This sounds like a great idea, as you always receive a customer’s email, even if they misspell the first half of the address. The big problem with this tactic is that spammers have been exploiting this technique for years. One of spammer’s favorite techniques is to use a list of common names, and then email every name in that list @yourdomain.com. As a user, you would never see this, but if you have a catch-all set up on your domain, you may be getting 5-6000 emails in a hour from one of these attacks. Removing your catch-all alias can drastically reduce your spam levels.

Another often overlooked evil that a catchall alias can cause is actually blocking mail through your ISP. This can happen when you forward a catch-all alias to your email address with your ISP. This results in so much spam getting forwarded to them that they block you as a spammer. Getting rid of catch-all aliases can help solve this problem as well.

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CYBERWURX: Meet the Tech Kyle

October 15th, 2009

Name: Kyle
Birthplace: New Orleans, Louisiana, 1979

Born in New Orleans but raised in the Atlanta area, Kyle was fascinated by electronics from the moment he could hold a screwdriver. Because of this, any electronic toy, appliance, or computer in the house was in imminent danger of being disassembled. The current status of the device was irrelevant, it could be plugged into an outside outlet during a thunderstorm and it would still be at risk. Due to a sharp ability to solve problems, a few minor emergencies resulted in the development of some reasonably safe electronic modification practices. This new-found ability to not die began a passion for serious hardware modifications to various electronics and developing a broader understanding of circuits.

Eventually Kyle fell in love with his family’s Commodore 64. As he grew accustomed to the welcoming brown keys, he also became its repairman. Through several hardware modifications, including thermal dissipation improvements and power regulation hacks, the beloved family friend long outlived its expected life-span. This enabled him to spend long hours improving himself by writing Basic programs and playing Karateka.

Kyle received his first IBM PC (A 486 DX/33) at the ripe young age of 13, and quickly fell in love again. After spending hours reading technical manuals, he would regale his family with in-depth explanations of the nature of the 640k DOS lower-memory limit and the methods by which the operating system’s designers worked around it. Largely uninterested in the subject but supportive of education, his parents were more than happy to encourage his new-found love of software. They also saw great benefit in software’s inability to explode or electrocute.

In 2004, Kyle finally escaped the horrors of fast-food management in favor of part-time work on the sunny shores of Linux administration with Cyber Wurx. Within a few months, he was a full-time employee, and has since become a senior technician. Kyle is currently responsible for several junior techs as well as overseeing the daytime technical support operations for Cyber Wurx.

Kyle lives in the Atlanta area with his wife, a veterinary technician. They share a house with a small army of cats and dogs. In his spare time, he plays bass guitar in a successful local band. In the event he has any additional time, he usually plays video games or in very extreme cases, does housework.

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