fwaggle.org

Sabrienix has been selling a few Mumble servers here and there, enough that we made our first donation to the Mumble project yesterday (I think? The days all kind of run together). So far we’ve been pretty speedy at setting them up, I don’t think anyone’s waited more than about 6 hours for their account information… but I thought hey this could be even quicker if it’s automated, right?

So I’d heard that you could write your own custom modules for WHMCS, so I start looking for it. It took me a bit to find the API kits, because for some reason they don’t seem to show up in any relevant Google search, but they’re actually pretty well in plain view on the Wiki if I’d bothered to look there first.

So I download the file, geeked with anticipation – “this is gonna be so cool.” Then I open the file. This is it? One crumby stub module littered with pseudo-code, and a one page PDF that basically says “go for it!” They even have the audacity to call the process easy?

Getting your module setup to be read by WHMCS is pretty easy, if you read the instructions. Passing information to your module is pretty trivial. How does one pass information back? I have no idea. I filed a support ticket, and got back a terribly ambiguous and short response about using “overrideable product options” which I could then access through my module. Great, I can access them – but I can’t seem to write to anything in such a manner that it shows up at all in WHMCS.

I can’t seem to figure out a way to have the module emit a templated email, so at the moment I’m calling mail() from inside the module just to get the details to the end user. I’m going to go trawling the forums tomorrow I think, to see if I can find a way – it would be nice to have the account automatically attributed to a server in WHMCS, and have the emails go through WHMCS’s system so they’re logged and whatnot.

But hey, at least it works now… a user can sign up while we’re all asleep and they get their server as soon as they pay.

So we finally got off our butts and got a bona-fide SSL certificate for Sabrienix’s client portal instead of making do with one from CACert. We’re still going to use CACerts for the https access to things like Mail administration and suchlike, but for prospective customers to click on “order” and then see “security alert!” – that just looks bad.

I’ve been doing a lot of hacking on WHMCS integration, and today I managed to get the affiliate program integrated with the main website – meaning that people can drive traffic to specific parts of our website instead like this of to a basic “affiliate” URL and it’ll still count as an affiliate link. Sabriena (who’s the only artistic person in the whole company at the moment) said she’s going to work on some button graphics pretty soon too. We’re trialing it out at 5% commissions, recurring, but I hope to raise this later – I’d rather raise it later on than have to drop it in future because we bit off more than we can chew. If you’re interested in putting this stuff on your site to maybe earn a little cash, let me know – you don’t have to be a customer to be an affiliate.

I also started working on an automation plugin so that Mumble servers will automatically provision after someone’s paid for them, but that’s proving to be easier said than done. I would like to automate most everything if I can, but I don’t want to use something dodgy and I don’t want it to be fragile.

Oh and I also spent the better half of yesterday configuring Nagios for our network monitoring, since we’re outgrowing most of the paid monitoring sites and I need to cut back on expenses and concentrate on growth. Nagios certainly is a beast to configure for the first time, but I finally have everything up and running smoothly. I had it pointed at a test Murmur for monitoring, which I stopped and started repeatedly to check the notifications system… The downside? I can’t seem to find a way to scrub that downtime from the history, so Nagios insists we’re at 99.95% availability because of that and a couple of misconfigured checks. It’ll grow over the next month, I’m pretty sure of that.

Okay so anyone who’s tried to talk to me on MSN knows I’ve spent about the last two weeks working like crazy – and I’m pleased to report that I’m finally about caught up! I’ve basically missed the entire Scout Update for Team Fortress 2, but that’s okay because generally speaking the updates introduce a big chunk of crap that pisses me off so I like to leave it until it dies down a bit and Valve makes some changes to balance things out again.

So what all did I get done? Well it started out when we began a complete rebuild of the Sabrienix website. I’m still not 100% happy with it, little things like the icons (which are just stock Photoshop shapes that remotely matched the subjects) and a few of the pages need custom headers. I was pretty happy with how quickly I got back into doing DHTML, something I haven’t done since about 2001. A quick check on Browsershots shows that it renders correctly in most browsers, and I think it’s a lot more attractive than the old version.

Next, we replaced our ticketing-only system which ran on Eventnum to WHMCS which does ticketing, sales, and a bunch of other neat stuff. We don’t run cPanel, so it can’t auto-provision yet (though I am working auto-provision-on-pay for Mumble hosting) but the amount of stuff it does is just great. We now support Paypal and Google Checkout (though GC’s API complains because our certificate sucks, which I really need to get off my butt and do something about) and it keeps track of everything, so we no longer need spend so long worrying about who owes us what. Overall I love WHMCS, it’s definitely worth spending the money on.

After we got done with that, we provisioned two new servers in San Jose, California. One is “Xatu”, an absolute monster of multi-cored goodness running FreeBSD for general web hosting. I moved some of the sites off of Zubat to alleviate some of the load he’s feeling, sites like moodoo.org and my wife’s website now run quite a bit snappier on Xatu.

The other server “Wurmple” isn’t so beefy, but he’s running CentOS and all he has to do is host Mumble servers. Which reminds me, just yesterday I got done with v0.3 of Moomur, our Mumble control panel. It doesn’t do a whole lot of new things from the client perspective, but it runs off Xatu and allows you to administrate any Murmur on our network from the same place. So it doesn’t matter if your Murmur is on our old Dallas server, or the new San Jose one, or in the UK where I’m planning on adding a server next month – the control panel is in one place and looks the same. I’m really excited to get some new features on it and make it look a bit prettier.

I just have a few things to wrap up, like automating MySQL database creation, automating password-protected folders (a feature request from a cPanel convert) and I’d like to get the auto-provision-on-pay for our Mumble services working. I should be able to get that all done by this weekend hopefully.

On Friday, Sabrienix ordered another machine to add to our network and a little while later Xatu was born. I’ve been wrestling with it ever since, trying to get FreeBSD to play nice (it’s not supported by the datacenter, so I’m on my own in installing it, see previous tweet) in an optimal way because the pipe he lives on is quite large so I want him to be able to serve a large number of clients without breaking a sweat.

I stayed up until 6am this morning after waking up at about 9am, and I finally got it to behave. I’m doing the final installation and configuration of things like PHP and whatnot, and I’m starting to flesh out the beginnings of our new automation system. We’d experimented with cPanel for automation, but I really don’t like it.

Basically, cPanel only really works well under Linux, and you simply have to do things it’s way. I’m not really comfortable with that because I have vastly more experience with FreeBSD and I have a certain way I like things set up. Add this to the fact that there’s literally thousands of cPanel/WHM hosting resellers out there and I see little reason for Sabrienix to jump into that crowded pool and potentially lower our standards.

So long story short, I finally got this machine de-penguinated and it seems to be running pretty well. When everything’s configured the way I want it I’m going to hit it with ab to ensure it’s rock-solid before I start loading clients onto it, but I’m confident it should be a performance boost from our other servers so I may move clients who want a little more “zap” to their website to it. All total I got about 4 hours of sleep last night before jumping out of bed to get right back to it, but after the weekend’s over Sabrienix should be set to host just about anything.

Right now though I have to go to the store to get dog supplies – we’ve been out of puppy pellets since yesterday, and the dogs have no rawhide or anything to keep them busy so they keep bugging me while I try to work.

I’m pretty excited about this:

I’ve personally been over the numbers and we can do this without overselling or any of the other typical scams that come along. We can host your new blog or other website for $12 a year (that’s a buck a month)!

The Plan

Okay, so here’s what we’re offering. You get 100MB storage, and 10GB monthly transfer allowance. You can host one domain on it, and we’ll happily setup up to around 10 email addresses for you. More if you ask nicely and we’re not super-duper busy.

You get a secure, stable host powered by real-live people with good communications skills who can help you out when things go bad. We’re experienced with WordPress, and if you so desire we can get you up and running and push you off with the training wheels still on. If you need help, we’re an email or phone call away.

Your blog and everything you love about it will be backed up to a remote site, so should (as experts expect any day now) Godzilla emerge from the Atlantic Ocean and trash all the data centers on the eastern sea board, our team stands by ready at a moments notice to restore your blog somewhere such as Arizona, which is much too dry for Godzilla’s liking.

So to recap: 100MB storage, 10GB monthly transfer, 1 domain, ~10 email addresses, a MySQL database for $12 a year.

OH NOES THAT’S SO TINY! NEEDS MOAR GIGARBYTES!

Is it really that tiny? We’re marketing this at people who want to start new websites but find the adding up costs prohibitive. Consider this: this very blog, database and all, including my old version which had 100+ posts, weighs in at less than 25MB disk space.

My peak months of burning up EntreCard like someone with a really weird case of OCD I did in excess of 350 average daily visitors and used less than 2GB of bandwidth in a month. Do the math, you can fit a ~1500 daily visitor website with several thousand blog posts in such an account before you start running in to trouble. If you can get a new blog to ~1500 daily visitors inside a year, you probably don’t really care about upgrading your hosting plan, right?

Or hey, you can always go to supadupahost.co.qq and get twenty terabytes of bandwidth and unlimited disk space with the freedom to host 600 domains for all your friends for 25c a month, and see how much you enjoy the experience. Let’s be realistic people, we’re not offering you the world here (and that’s a good thing) – just a fair priced account to get a new blog started for the next year for about the cost of the domain name you’re going to buy for it anyway. Add it up: $12 + ~$10.20 for a domain name (via GoDaddy) and you’re all set for an entire year. BYO content.

You convinced me, how do I get one?

Clicking the image above will take you to our Valentine’s Day sale page, where you can order via Paypal. If you want to pay using a different method (Money Order, or we can bill you via Google Checkout) just contact us. As stated on that page, we set accounts up as fast as we can but it should definitely be done within 24 hours. Then you just have to wait for DNS to propogate and you’re up and running. Feel free to email us if you have any special instructions (say, you don’t want wordpress in the root directory of your website or something of that nature).

Happy Valentine’s Day!

So I spent much of my time today devoted to promoting Sabrienix in various ways, figuring out ways to use some of our web properties to promote it (try as I might, one of my blog entries about Mumble is still much higher in searches than Sabrienix’s page on hosting!). I finally figured out why my sitemap generator for PHPBB3 wasn’t working with Google, which should help it’s search performance slightly.

Hungry Hacker Industries is doing great, back up to a PR3. I think it might have been spanked down because I did a few S9y themes and linked to it from that, and I think Google decided to penalize that because of the people doing “sponsored” themes. I’m by no means an expert in SEO (but then again I personally feel that no one is), but I’m hoping I made at least some difference today.

I also looked promotional products, but decided most of them were out of my price range right now, people are more likely to look at search results than they are a neato pen with our name on it. We’re of course using Twitter for network status notifications (so far no biters though, but it’s simple, off-site and works – I’m confident people will start following it), and I spent about 10 minutes today putting stuff up on LinkedIn.

I did play around with Lighttpd this morning, but that’s fodder for another post… tomorrow maybe.