Over the past few days we have been experiencing sporadic performance issues with our central storage array, which has lead to some secondary issues with services such as e-mail and hosting becoming temporarily unavailable. During these periods of degraded performance, some users may have encountered problems connecting to the mail server, the LimeDomains homepage and some free hosting accounts were temporarily offline.

At no point were any e-mail messages dropped or deleted - any inbound message that arrived while the mailserver was not accepting connections would have been temporarily queued and eventually delivered. The paid hosting server farm was also not impacted by the outage.

At this point, all services are back up and operational.

Here’s what we are doing to ensure this does not reoccur:

We have already taken delivery of several high performance SAS arrays and will be transitioning services onto this new equipment over the next few weeks. We are also taking steps to compartmentalize services so that temporary load spikes do not impact customer facing services.

Finally, we are putting a process in place to ensure that you are fully informed of the current status of any service issue and the resolution ETA. Look for a network status link on our homepage in the next few days, and more frequent updates in this forum during both planned and unplanned outages.

Thank you for your continued support and patience.

Clustered hosting has lately turned around heads of many including biggies such as YouTube, Yahoo!, MySpace, Flickr etc., which use this web hosting service. Usually, it is chosen by big companies with massive websites receiving thousands of hits every day.

It’s too easy to understand what actually clustered hosting is. In this type of hosting, the load of hosting is served across multiple physical machines (servers or nodes), which increases availability & redundancy of resources thereby enabling the website to run smoother than ever.

Similar to cloud hosting, this hosting service utilizes virtualization technology to improve security & system resources. When you use clustered hosting, you don’t find yourself grappling with the issues of bandwidth, disk space, processing speed, RAM etc. This is practically because through your hosting account, you can easily access the infinite hardware. Also, you can upgrade your website without any hassles & take the productivity threshold of your website to a different level altogether.

Now answering the question when do you actually need it, we would say that sometimes arise  situations when upgrade is very much required but the restrictions posed in other types of hosting might cause your website to be down or run sluggish. This may result in loss of your potential customers & resultant sales. The other possibility of using clustered hosting is that sometimes a single server is unable to address the demands of a website. It is then this type of hosting services emerges as a feasible option.

Also, in clustered hosting you’re not supposed to plan in advance when you should upgrade your website. As & when you website requires some additional power, it can be easily obtained from the cluster of available system resources spread across a number of servers.

Benefits of Clustered Hosting

Speaking about the advantages of clustered web hosting service, it boosts the scalability, performance & efficiency of your website. Since your website remains no longer confined to a single server, it gains unlimited potential. When set up your website on this architecture, you can rest assured that you would not receive complaints of slow-running website as it suffers no effect from abrupt traffic surges. Like most other web hosting plans, you are supposed to pay for it too on a monthly basis.

After reading this post if you wish to set up your website on clustered architecture, we are there to help you out. At LimeDomains, you can choose from either of our hosting plans—Standard or Premium—& get started with reaping the benefits of our clustered web hosting services.

Social networking applications help you create your own version of Facebook, MySpace, Orkut etc. Using Social Networking Apps, you can:

• Create a full-featured social environment.
• Customize your social networks with free widgets & plugins.
• Make a community for just you & your friends

Let us walk you through the Social Networking applications, we have on our platform:

Elgg

Elgg, professional social networking software supported with fully featured tools for blogging, news aggregation, file sharing and messaging, helps you to set up tiered user profiles and configure basic options like a community name and a directory for user uploads. Its Spotlight feature allows specific content to be displayed to users as soon as they are on the site. The Activity stream displays updates from you and your friends and contacts, as well as other activity throughout the community. LimeDomains currently supports version 1.2 of Elgg.

Some of the popular themes of Elgg are:

Purpleround: This theme has rounded boxes on the widget pages (profile and dashboard), and rounded title areas on all other pages.

Simpleblackbluetech: This theme has been created as a starting point for theming. So, you can see the elements that go into making a theme plugin.

Divexit: It’s a unique elegant theme for Elgg

E-OSX: It’s a Green Rounded Theme.

EOSX Blue Lava: Base on Green Rounded Theme. It entails skins for the following plugins namely, all core plugins (profile, groups, admin stuff etc), blog, bookmarks, file, friends, messageboard, messages, pages, status, twitter etc.

osDate

osDate, a dating & matchmaking application, can be easily integrated with all leading bulletin boards (phpBB, vBulletin etc.) and FlashChat. It also offers multiple payment modules & multiple skins to users besides multiple templates to choose from for the desired look & feel of your website. LimeDomains currently supports version 2.1.7 of osDate.

Some of the popular themes of osDate are:

edel_osdate_design: Interesting design directed or suitable partner for online agencies with demanding Singles at 30th.

esl-2.1: A red template with a simple yet attractive look.

esl-2.1-gelb: A template with yellow feel.

esl-night: A template inspired by darkness; combination of red and black.

esl-4you: A template stripped down to bare minimal without any extra features.

Now that you’re aware of the great set of features these social networking applications have, you must create a community website of your own. So get started with taking the advantage of Web 2.0 community building tools at LimeDomains!

As a part of our regular website maintenance & upgrade process, we will be involved in some unsightly inner-workings behind the curtain, which include integral changes to our software & hardware components. The routine maintenance process is scheduled for:

- Saturday, January 16th beginning 00:01 AM till 05:00 AM ET.
- Sunday, January 17th beginning 00:01 AM till 05:00 AM ET.

This probably won’t cause much trouble, but we thought it’s better to alert you about more than we required, just in case!

Some websites may be inaccessible for a short period of 4–5 minutes anytime during this maintenance window.

Domain services & other Hosting services (File Management, FTP management etc) would remain unaffected during this window and be accessible from LimeDomains control panel.

With our sincere apologies to our users for the inconvenience, we truly hope that you’d bear with us & we shall be able to provide you with a more well-behaved website than ever. So hang on tight and we will be back shortly!