Hosting move to SoftLayer complete

On Sunday night we moved all the servers that run SlideShare to a new hosting location. It was something that we had been planning for a few months, but these kinds of operations are always high-stress and high-risk. We’re sorry about the downtime. Fortunately, the move seems to have gone pretty well (besides the planned 90 minutes of downtime). Please let us know if you notice anything wonky in the comment section below, and we’ll fix it.

The biggest glitch was that moving the hosting location from California to Texas changed the timezone that the servers operate in. Now why didn’t we think of that? Fortunately this didn’t cause any major problems though, just a few funny glitches in our code.

We’re also really happy with our new host. Softlayer has clearly invested a lot of money in automating all their processes, and in writing a high-quality web application to control the whole thing. As a result:
1) You can order a machine on the web and get access to it in under two hours
2) You can add a hardware firewall or load balancer to your setup on-the-fly with zero downtime and zero human intervention from SoftLayer.
3) You can have an OS reinstall without human intervention: it’s always ready in less than an hour, and it’s always flawless..
4) You have a clear view of all your servers (including their hardware profile) and their status (CPU and RAM use, termperature, etc)

Because getting, reimaging, and controlling machines is so fast and convenient, SoftLayer has a lot of the flexibility of a virtual solution (like Amazon EC2 or similar). But you’re not renting a virtual server, you’re renting a real one. That’s important if you need big, powerful database machines (which we did). Our new database machines have 32 Gigs of RAM each, and 8 15k RPM SCSI drives in a RAID-10 array. That’s serious power! We hope this will be enough to keep SlideShare running fast as we scale up. ;->

We’re lucky in that we already had automated the configuration of most of our servers using a tool called Puppet, so we had code for setting up copies of our existing servers. The fact that we knew we were going to move spurred us on to automate all the rest of our servers the same way. So now our operations crew will be able to spend less time doing maintenance and firefighting, and more time working on new ideas. We try to automate any maintenance and configuration tasks that we do, and we’re really happy that our new host shares this philosophy.