b5media

November 16th,2006

b5media Partners with LogicWorks for Server Hosting

By Jeremy Wright

A couple of weeks ago, Aaron posted about our upcoming migration to a new server cluster. We’ve had a number of inquiries since then from other web companies wanting to know what and who we chose - and why. Now that the migration is effectively complete, I figured it would be a good time to share.

Our journey with hosting over the last year and a half has been a long and fairly intricate one. We started off hosting b5 on my shared hosting account (back when we were just 12 blogs), then moved to a single cheap dedictated box. That started going down every few hours, so we moved to a 3-server kinda clustered environment. Eventually that too became overloaded and we began looking for a new solution.

We quickly realized what we really needed was either a fully managed high-end solution or to own our own hardware. For a variety of reasons, we felt the managed scenario was best (lean and mean, outsource whatever isn’t your core competency). After pinging RackSpace and looking at Amazon’s new grid service, we stumbled upon a compan called LogicWorks.

At the same time, it became apparent that we were entirely likely to close this VC deal, which meant we could go for the “right” solution instead of just the solution we could afford - which had been our problem up until that point.

After a lot of emails, a great sales and support team, a datacenter tour, lots of negotiating and settling on a fully redundant, clustered, SAN-driven, load-balanced beast of a cluster we’ve now fnally moved.

Special thanks to Brian Skowron, our Account Manager at LogicWorks, Aaron Brazell and Sean Walberg for doing the move and helping us move to a world class facility and solution. We look forward to a long and happy relationship filled with as few late-night panick-stricken phone-calls as possible!