Thaivisa Server Environment And Accessibility - Brief Description

[george]

Some members are experiencing Thaivisa Forum is slow and hard to access. I have pinned this thread and wanted to give you a short description of our hard- and software and our available bandwidth at the NOC in Singapore we use for the colocation:

Thaivisa have during the last year invested around 1 Million Baht in the best state-of-the art components you can buy for money.

HARDWARE:

- Two monster servers, Dell Poweredge 1950 III Servers with 16GB RAM each with very fast hard disks in RAID II. Dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors 5400 at 3.33GHz.

- We have a separate, super fast, dedicated server for the forum database.

SOFTWARE:

- Operating System: Linux 64-bits

- We use PHP accelerator and caching software that caches the forum software and parts of the database tables in RAM for faster access.

- The forum database (MySQL) is optimized nightly based on years of experience with database performance.

UTILIZATION:

- At high traffic we use approx 20% of our capacity (RAM, CPU, hard disk utilization).

- At low traffic, at night BKK time, we are using about 5% of the server/bandwidth resources.

AVAILABLE BANDWIDTH:

- We pay huge money for a guaranteed 4 Mbit/second, burstable to a whopping 100 Mbit/second, fiber link to the international backbone in Singapore, co-located at Equinix Data Centre which is a first class IBX centre with excellent peering. Here is a list of some of their biggest customers.

We are normally using around 50%-60% of our dedicated bandwidth.

You can check the bandwidth and ping time to our server here: http://speedtest.thaivisa.com

MONITORING:

- We have a part time employee, Unix and database specialist, who monitors, maintains and tweak the system, plus an automated system that monitors the servers outside office hours that alerts us via SMS 24/7 if any problems.

SERVER UPTIME:

- The server uptime is better than 99.5%. Server monitoring statistics: http://media2.thaivisa.com/pingdom

The minutes per month we are down, is because we need to lock the database when backups are taken or when we optimize the database.

THE PROBLEM:

Should you experience a slow or unreliable internet connection to Thaivisa, it's normally not at our fault!

- The problem is simply the Thai ISP's, their caching/proxy problems, CAT international gateway and the their bandwidth limitations between Thailand and Singapore/overseas. Check out Thailand Internet Connectivity Map

- Also, most people use Internet Explorer which is much slower than Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome.

I can with full confidence say, that the problems some users are experiencing you should not blame Thaivisa for. We are not perfect 100% of the time, but we honestly perform very well. And yes, sometimes the system is down due to software upgrades and server maintenances, but we have to live with that.

Show me your traceroutes, please!

In Windows: --- Run -->> In MS-Dos prompt type tracert thaivisa.com and we could help together to find the bottleneck(s) and try to find a solution.

But I doubt there is an immediate solution for our Thailand based members due to the bandwidth limitations here.

Kind regards,

George

[Crushdepth]

Very cool What monitoring service do you use for the SMS alerts? I'll give you a trace when I get back to Thailand!

[george]

Very cool What monitoring service do you use for the SMS alerts? I'll give you a trace when I get back to Thailand!

We are using pingdom.com

[paul1970]

Here is my trace route, hope it makes sense to you and also the speedtest.

[Maestro]

Doing a Google search for something else I came across this web page:

www.robtex.com/dns/thaivisa.com.html

It is much too geeky for me to understand but it looks impressive. Four nameservers.Seven mailservers with ten IP numbers. Must be quite a job to administer it all.

--

Maestro

[z21rhd]

Very cool What monitoring service do you use for the SMS alerts? I'll give you a trace when I get back to Thailand!

We are using pingdom.com

Thanks George for the very clear concise description of Thaivisa hardware - server, support etc.

Much appreciated.

Richard

[Kan Win]

Hi 'george',

Thank you the info.

AVAILABLE BANDWIDTH:

- We pay huge money for a guaranteed 4 Mbit/second, burstable to a whopping 100 Mbit/second, fiber link to the international backbone in Singapore, co-located at Equinix Data Centre which is a first class IBX centre with excellent peering. Here is a list of some of their biggest customers.

Both links do not work btw

http://www.ap.equinix.com/error/

Hope this helps.

Yours truly,

Win in Kan

[frenchFARANGbkk]

Hi,

As i guess you must be expert can you tell me any company name that provide dedicated servers (but not monsters!) at reasonable price in Singapore ?

And can you confirm that hosting in Singapore is better than in Malaysia ?

Thanks.