So Johnny died...

[Bailey]

What was the reason behind Johnny's so called death?

[wolstech]

File system corruption kept causing the server to hang if it ran for any length of time...such corruption is a result of numerous improper shut downs (usually power outage, crashes from overloading, etc.).

 

Because of how Johnny is (ab)used (unlimited accounts and lots of load), it's reasonable to say that his life span will always be significantly shorter than Tommy or Ricky. We got ~18 months out of the third Johnny (the first one to go through a complete cycle accepting unlimited accounts, the first and second one died prematurely due to disk failure), and honestly, it should've been rebuilt months ago. The file system corruption just finally forced us to do it.

 

The next one we're about to set up will be round 4 for Johnny.

[kazambie]

I think you should rename it Kenny...

[Flaze]

I think you should rename it Kenny...

I get it. Nice one!

[ziad87]

Johnny v4.0!

Seems like Johnny needs the MOST maintenance...

[wolstech]

It does. It's a result of the thousands of accounts he creates and deletes over his life.

 

I personally wish we would just reduce the number of accounts allowed on it, but Krydos' reasoning is that he'd rather have a server that's always open and breaks a lot vs. users that get mad they can't sign up, which sort of makes sense considering all the traffic/signups generate ad revenue. The downside is that the unlimited accounts means overloading, causing Johnny to not be even remotely similar to our other offerings in terms of usefulness or performance, and while that's intended and mentioned all over the place, many people fail to read and complain anyway.

 

It can especially hard to convince complaining Johnny users to move to Tommy at times (these users see this as "it sucks now, why would I give them money/go through the hassle of trying to get a free account for it to continue sucking?")

[ziad87]

I mean, you are stretching cpanel really hard...

 

Also, how do cpmove archives handle downgrades? (RoR)

[wolstech]

It should just ignore the features that are missing during the restore. Since the RoR app's files live in your home folder, you'll see the files in there but there won't be any way to run them.

[Guest warinca]

Maybe you could change the way to sign up, instead of immediate accounts, set up instead waiting lists.

You would then have control over everything and your servers wouldn't fail so often.

Other free hosts do that, or they simply try to get more servers.

 

I have heard of a Free Hosting which negotiated with some paid hosting to get several Free unlimited Resellers in exchange for providing support for these paid hosting services. Maybe you could do the same?

[kiwiphnx]

Would it help to run Johnny (or, more appropriately, "Kenny") off a volume or filesystem that supports snapshotting, e.g. OverlayFS or LVM; the idea being to snapshot the OS daily and hosting accounts hourly, allowing most files to be kelp read-only and rolling back the snapshot upon server crash?