Gigenet: Post-migration Review

It's been close to a month since we've migrated away from our former provider to Gigenet, and after monitoring the activity and health of our new servers, I felt it was time to write a review.

This isn't about bashing our old partners, the data center and our former managed hosting provider. I'm leaving names out of this, and I'll appreciate it if the couple people on WHT who know our old providers keep that info to themselves, because this is not about them; it's about Gigenet.

Support
Tickets/support is about as good a place as any to start. Our old setup had all management running through our managed hosting provider, and tickets were either closed unanswered, or we might wait days to get a response, which was too often less than helpful.

Our setup now includes standard management through Gigenet, and we've contracted Rack911 to handle management of some very specialized services and security requirements we wouldn't expect Gigenet or any other data center-based management team anywhere to handle. That's another (very positive) review for another day.

During the course of migrating (five servers during three weekends), we opened perhaps 10 tickets regarding server config, IPs, provisioning certain services, etc., and the longest we had to wait for any ticket to get answered was 9 minutes. In all but one case, the first response resolved the ticket - the remaining ticket did require more back-and-forth communication, which is to be expected. Even better, instead of hearing about everything that can't be done (something we'd come to expect from our previous provider), they focused on what could be done, and they did it. Things were handled properly and professionally every time.

Best of all, I can actually call my admins or chat with them, sort out issues in minutes instead of days or months.

Hardware Performance
Despite how much happier we are with the response we're getting from our admins, this benefit pales in comparison to the performance increase we've seen since we moved.

We have a single client who accounts for three of the five servers we're hosting right now. Again, I'm leaving names out, because this is not their endorsement of Gigenet - it's our endorsement. The performance boost we've seen since moving has been nothing less than astonishing.

Of those three servers, let's consider the old Web server config:
- Xeon Quad Core, one of the mid-2008 E series
- 6GB RAM
- Public 100MBPS connection
- SATAII 250GB HD

And now the new Web server:
- Core i7 920
- 8GB RAM
- Public 100MBPS connection
- 10k Raptor 147GB x2, RAID1

So, it's a step up. Is it a significant step up? I'll leave that to hardware geeks to debate. But I don't think anyone can argue that the increase in hardware does not match the increase in performance when you look at these numbers:

Old Web Server
Typical Load: 2 - 5
High Traffic Load: Always 15+, often 40+, sometimes reaching 200+ and requiring a restart
Typical Idle: 85%
High Traffic Idle: 0%, and it could stay buried for 15-30 minutes at a time!

New Web Server:
Typical Load: .1 - .3
High Traffic Load: .5 - 1 (I've only seen it go above 1 twice)
Typical Idle: 95-100%
High Traffic Idle: 80-90%

We have even more revealing numbers from when we did some post-migration stress testing. I won't get into details here (I might be doing a more thorough write-up about this in the future), but the general conclusion was that the new server could handle 6x the traffic of the old server and still serve pages faster than the old server did even with all traffic already routed off that server.

I attribute this to three things (caveat: I'm not a hardware expert, and this is my best guess).

1) The hardware is a step up, and that will account for some performance boost.

2) Rack911 optimized this server from day one.

3) The components/build are simply higher quality.

If you happen to know the client who uses these three servers, again, please keep this info to yourself, but try surfing their site now, and you tell me whether it's faster, like maybe 3-4x faster! They've been getting quite a few people complimenting them on their site's performance over the last few weeks. I'd like to take credit for that, but I can't.

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So there you have it - another satisfied customer of Gigenet (and Rack911). I hope over time my experience with them continues to be the same quality it is now. We're paying a bit more than we were before (for both hosting and administration), but we're getting so much more for our money!