This might be a belated post, as we were 2 years old last month on the 7th of February. - However I feel that we need the emphasise that we have been running for 2 years now since 2007-2009. As the owner of Vlexo, I’ve always wanted and have always had that passion in me of running a free web host. I don’t know what it is, I love about free hosting, however it’s something in particular with Vlexo that I want to build up for the future. I’m hoping Vlexo lasts at least, to 2011, to which point we’ll see how things will be going then. Though getting through to the end of 2010 will be a tough goal however I only hope we grow further into a bigger free web host than that of the growth we are experiencing now, to which I still have my advertising and marketing campeign on-hold; until we get our new website functional and running.

I’ve seen hosts on various free web hosting and paid web hosting forums go bust within the first 6 months of operation and this is where Vlexo is much different as we have proven that we won’t go down and if we do; we will have something to say for it. (E.g. we will tell everyone we host and the general public if we close) But the fact is we haven’t closed yet, and we have hopes for the future and to stick around as a quality free web host for as long as 2010 to which we have said we would evaluate everything at that point. I’m looking at creating a “stimulus package” (:p) to revive our community with a crap load of traffic. I hope things only get better from here on, and if you register up to our forums, make sure you post!
Thanks for reading!

To keep everyone updated on the progress of the new changes coming I’m posting in this blog of ours to give information out on the update of our new design. First, let me start of by showing a small teaser of the new design:

It has been coded by eRott, and he has done everything major to it in terms of making it look nice. (Especially those hills) This is just proof that we have a new design on the way and things better to come for Vlexo! The screenshot above, is not much to look at now, however it will look like gold when you see the full version.

Hey all,

Jonathan here again. The site is going to go through a major overhaul and we have a new design coming soon to Vlexo.com! We have had the current black & white design for sometime now and I believe it’s the correct time to change to a more suitable design that will fit Vlexo however does look very different to the current design.

The following are the current ambitions we have set in place:

• A new design
• The forum integrated into the design
• iPanel sign up, automated (Integrated into the design)
• Coding of the actual design
• Forum overhaul
• New information pages
• A much easier sign up
• And much more…

These are all ambitions we hope to achieve, I’m hoping we can get this all done by this month, if not the next, though the sooner the better. We do currently have the design and eRott (Brendon) has offered to code the design for free for us, which by the way is very nice of him. You will see a new face on Vlexo very soon and hopefully we can get back on the road again and start growing.

On the note, that I’m using this blog as a news and progress updater, this blog will also be integrated at a later date!

Thanks,

Jonathan

Hey,

Jonathan here. I’ve sent every user who uses our hosting on the server the following message:

“Hello all,

I’m Jonathan, the owner of vlexo.com.

I’m terribly sorry if any downtime occurred due to the server not being paid! However the server has been paid and will continue to be paid.

For more information please read the following thread.

http://forum.vlexo.com/showthread.php?t=7232

Is Vlexo closing down?

Vlexo.com and it’s services are not closing down. Let me reiterate, that if and when Vlexo closes down, I will announce such an announcement on the forums with an explanation. I know everyone received an email stating to back up your account, because Vlexo was indeed closing down, however this is no longer so. (Your data is safe too)
Read the rest of this entry »

The services and the range of other services hosted on our server is at an all time high, in terms of up time & support. I myself have been closely watching the server, making sure certain processes do not go over the load limit which I check quite regularly, keeping sites loading fast & websites available at all times, thus a 100 up time percentage is something I can give, as I have 3 different up time monitoring websites watching the server every minute checking if http/Apache goes down or if the server is totally inaccessible. What I have noticed is that our main websites (From monitoring services) goes down for a minute or so. To which I find acceptable in my eyes, as this hardly affects anyone (Seeing as our main website/forums are hosted on a totally different network) as they are not hosted on the main Vlexo.com server, however this will get cleared up so this ‘1 minute’ downtime which happens at times, will be put at a stand-still. (On our main website) However so far the quad.vlexodns.com server has retained a 100 percent up time, and any downtime which you see is probably me only rebooting the server after some maintenance has been done.

For example, I’ve seen load levels in excess of 30-32, which I have addressed accordingly which was caused due to certain scripts on the server hosted by our users using badly coded scripts & causing overloads which the server had tried to compensate for. You may have also seen MySQL timeout and this is due to optimization of the MySQL service, which may have caused brief seconds of MySQL timeout.

It’s not all bad news, as with myself and others of the Vlexo team monitoring the server, I also check the CPU temperature to make sure it does not overheat. With this sustainability, reliability can be assured as I check every service to make sure it’s running smoothly. If there is a huge problem, I’m sure a person from the Vlexo Community will report it and we’ll get working on it, as soon as possible.

Oh and for reference, you check the CPU & System temperature here, in real time:

http://news.vlexo.com/server-real-time/

Though for the most part it won’t change, seeing as it’s kept to the same levels for a reason, however if it does change drastically, then we know there is something wrong. Oh and I also wouldn’t post this if I didn’t mean it, but up time is a huge factor and providing it, isn’t hard, however it becomes difficult as more users enter the server and become part of our community. I know I posted back here of ‘100 percent’ up time, when we was on the good ol’ VPS’ and that post was ‘epic failure’ as we did have downtime the next couple of days, however I’m sure this won’t happen in this post.

Thanks for reading,
Jonathan Jones

An idea recently came into thought over a dispute with someones website not fitting the ‘Titanium ads’, thus a compromise had to be thought up of, to which end the 100 posts package came into action. Now when you make 100 posts on our forum, you can upgrade your account to the 100 posts package, to which end you’ll get the same features as the ‘Titanium’ package, however all you would have to put up is an advertisement like this:

You’d have this: (Platinum ads)

Instead of this: (Titanium ads)

As you can see the Platinum ads are considerably smaller than the Titanium ads to which end could possibly suite your website better. However if you want the smaller ads, all you’ll have to do is post 100 times on our forums, then request to be upgraded if you are onto the 100 post package from the Titanium package and you should be set. This just shows a little variation and the ability of us being able to create whatever package to suite yourself and others.

The new ad system we are going to be using is called Chitika, it’s not new and has been in the market for years and I have extensively tested this ad serving platform for over a month and I’m more than satisfied with the results to which it has shown me. As you can see on our forums, we already have such ads shown, those are initially the same Chitika ads which are to be shown on Titanium & Platinum accounts websites. However there is of course the option to choose from between graphical-only and text-only ads and these grant better results for the particular website you are running. As always we have the “Alpha” package which is ad-free, however requires a small link-back to Vlexo.com; this has not changed. We are just at current replacing our old publishing platform.

You can find the ads to place on your website here:

http://forum.vlexo.com/showthread.php?t=2178

From today, you will have 30 days to get these ads up, if not put up within the 30 day period, your account will be suspended then 15 days later termination. However we will give warning of this before we terminate any account and accounts which are only suspended will not face any data loss. As a heads up, we will be sending out an email to every account on file.

Thanks,

Jonathan Jones

Hey people,

So you are probably wondering what we mean by ‘Cleaning out the trash‘, what this bassically means is that we will be going through the accounts and suspending or either terminating accounts to which point we see fit. Now we won’t just randomly go around terminating/suspending accounts (That would be highly immoral and we would not support such action to be taken), this post on this blog is only to set out that we are only terminating accounts which aren’t being used (With no data uploaded at-all) and to which end accounts will be suspended if infringing materials are found such as vBulletin, IPB which have not been caught running nulled versions of those particular softwares.

New server

I also hope you guys are enjoying the new server! It’s running nice and smooth and all accounts are not causing any problems as such. It only has 2GB of RAM which has surprised me as I thought the server would need more as we were maxing to near around a gigabyte on the magnet server alone; yet the Variable as an addon of RAM usage. If there are any problems being faced server wise, please report them in the support forums and we’ll get around to them. - I should be more active now by the way, I’ve quit some projects of mine (Offline) to get working on Vlexo again; thus why I spent over 10 hours transferring all the accounts over to the new dedicated server.

New Ad System

Since we got disabled by our last ad system, we have recently found a nice new ad system which is perfect for the solutions that we want to offer. We have found a nifty ad system which we can make money on and to which effect pay for any upgrades or future designs for Vlexo.com. This ad system will of course re-apply to ‘Titanium and Platinum packages’ as were before.

Enjoy.

-Jonathan

Hey all,

Long time since I’ve posted on this dear blog we setup. To give you an idea on what’s going on right now, we have just finished transferring all accounts from magnet onto our Core2QUAD dedicated server we recently ordered. It took me around 5 hours to transfer all the accounts over, due to the magnitude of the size of some of the accounts we have hosted. So guys on the Variable server are now probably wondering ‘What’s going on?’; I’ll tell ya’.

What’s going on with Variable

As previously stated in emails and on our community forums, we said we were going to move to a dedicated server from the good ol’ VPS’ we were on; as they weren’t quite up to the power to run the websites our users wanted to; plus storage space has gone up quite a bit now we are on this dedicated server. So as for the Variable users, you are also going to be transferred over to the Core2QUAD, we have installed and configured all the programming languages we have had in the previous servers, meaning there should be no compatibility issues with websites during the transfer. - If there is, just open up a thread on our support side of our community forums.

To cut to the chase, I’m currently transferring all websites on Variable to Quad and I have been doing this since 1:00PM - to which now is 6:29PM and at current on 57% of data/websites have been transferred. This does not mean that it will take another 5+ hours to complete as all the big websites have been transferred over. I suspect the transfer will complete in an hour or so, and this is when I will be changing DNS entries to follow to the new webserver. I was initially thinking that I could finish the whole transfer yesterday, in the afternoon however this was of course premature. Once things are done and dusted, thing should go well, at current RAM usage has stayed low and server loads on the Core2QUAD have not gone above 1.0; which is amazing, considering the VPS’ were struggling quite a bit to cope with the accounts on the server. - The only reason loads are going up is as the transfer is at current taking place and this is occuring on a period which is concurrent and an on-going process.

We are also looking into backing up solutions for only those who pay now, as the price of backing up files and accounts is going up, since more space is being consumed, in the end it would work out that we would be paying way over to much, thus why we need to split the costs and get people to pay tiny monthly fee’s to help us pay for the backing up of your account!

Once everything is done, just wait for the new design and aspect of which Vlexo is turning into!

Regards,

Jonathan Jones

The week and ahalf since we have moved to our new provider we have had 100% uptime, though this is only the first week and a half; though I did have services with this new provider of ours before free users were moved over. Hopefully we will be able to uphold this uptime for the rest of the month and upcoming months. With the provider we are with now, I can safely say, we are in safer hands if we were to compare services to what we were with, then you’d be blown out the water. From my uptime monitor which I created to watch the uptime of our service - it has said that we have been up 100% since we moved servers; so things I can say are going well! e.g.

2008-07-05 100.00 0.000 0.253 0.240 0.325 0.324
2008-07-04 100.00 0.000 0.244 0.245 0.345 0.331
2008-07-03 100.00 0.000 0.240 0.242 0.303 0.311
2008-07-02 100.00 0.000 0.257 0.257 0.322 0.327
2008-07-01 100.00 0.000 0.316 0.316 0.383 0.398
2008-06-30 100.00 0.000 0.262 0.262 0.315 0.322
2008-06-29 100.00 0.000 0.286 0.286 0.373 0.388
2008-06-28 100.00 0.000 0.283 0.283 0.348 0.351
2008-06-27 100.00 0.000 0.324 0.324 0.408 0.408
2008-06-26 100.00 0.000 0.320 0.320 0.520 0.546

I’m sure we can keep this ‘reliability’ up, as said, the network we are on and the server we are on is just superb! Things are going good within the Vlexo Community!

Thanks for reading,

Jonathan