LayeredTech, Dedicated Web Hosting Provider, Suddenly Increases Price by 26%; Twice in 12 Months

August 28th, 2007 This is a news to me! I am using LayeredTech dedicated server for over a year and just today while browsing their new encompass console I found they have three nice buttons labelled Reboot, Power On & Power Off. Obviously I tried and it worked.

July 5th, 2006 I have been looking for a unmanaged dedicated web hosting provider for the last 7 days or so. I performed sucks tests (search in Google for "xyz sucks"), went to web hosting forums, asked questions to the provider, analyzed their plans with a fine tooth comb.

July 13th, 2007 I had several reports from users that the site is inaccessible from certain ISP's including but not limited to CableVision. I did everything to figure out what went wrong without much success.

September 19th, 2007 Automattic hosts WordPress.com using dedicated servers from LayeredTech. According to Todd Abrams, President & COO of Layered Technologies: "The Layered Technologies support database was a target of malicious activity on the evening of 9/17/2007 that may have involved the illegal downloading of information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and server login details for 5 to 6,000 of our clients." "Due to the significant amount of uncertainty in determining which accounts may have been impacted, Layered Technologies felt that it was in your best interest to take the precautionary steps of reaching out to you and all clients regarding this issue.

August 26th, 2006 Suddenly my Hard-disk & MySQL Server had gone read-only, thereby making this blog (because it is cached) and other sites inaccessible, including ssh access. Do you have any idea why this could have happened? A hard reboot rectified the error for now.

August 20th, 2007 My old IP addresses are presumably having some issues according to my dedicated web hosting provider LayeredTech. So on their suggestion we will change our IP addresses this weekend.

July 16th, 2007 Some of you have come to me saying WordPress recommends BlueHost and so why it isn't working well for them, their implicit expectation being that because WordPress recommends BlueHost, it must be the best for WordPress. That is far from truth.

August 2nd, 2006 Google Analytics increased the number of default profiles from 5 to 10. This increases the number of websites you can track.

August 12th, 2007 One of the main challenges of managing multiple dedicated web / database servers is the ability to centrally monitor and manage them, automate tasks which requires out-of-band access like rebooting the server or find out if the server is dying and arrange for replacement ahead of time etc. Unless you are a very big web service provider, chances are you are using dedicated servers from one or more of dedicated web hosting providers.

June 1st, 2006 The common symptom of the problem is that Apache web server suddenly fails to load as a service (on windows) or even from command line. The error message from log is as follows: FATAL: emalloc(): Unable to allocate -2103443420 bytes [Thu Jun 01 23:57:21 2006] [crit] master_main: create child process failed.

July 2nd, 2007 Twitter is down again. Initially I was getting down for maintenance messages.

August 28th, 2006 I faced serious hacking attempts from a server owned by my dedicated web hosting provider, LayeredTech. More than 23, 000 brute force attempts were made on ssh server alone.

July 9th, 2007 After we complete an outsourcing effort for a F 500 and wrap up dispatching all the upgrades for Translator 5.0, we will collectively go for a period of "working vacation" lasting about 2 months or so. What is a "working vacation"? My definition of "working vacation" is when we tie all the loose ends, upgrade infrastructure, hire new employees and train them, setup few additional dedicated servers (any recommendation?), switch web server, fix and add features to Comment Guard plugin for future release, setup 24/7 site and server backup, prototype new ideas, develop spike solutions etc.

June 3rd, 2006 I have been getting a deluge of spams in the last 7 days or so, 19434 spams so far in Akismet queue of this blog alone. However something very interesting happened.

July 27th, 2006 Andy Patrizio learned the hard way that Windows Genuine Advantage can be a disadvantage in disguise and all without any fault of his own. Such cases apparently flies in the face of Microsoft assertion that only a handful of genuine false positives have been identified.