*UPDATE* And we are now back up after about 3 hours of downtime!

This site will be offline for a few hours between 10pm 18th December 2010 (GMT +8) to 6am 19th December 2010 (GMT +8) for migration of server rack.

Details as followed:

There will be a scheduled relocation of co-location server rack space within the data centre at Creative Resource (the “Data Centre”).

This scheduled migration is part of M1 Net Ltd (M1 Net)’s ongoing endeavors to progressively upgrade the facilities and services. This upgrade will help to prevent potential network failures, optimize the network’s redundancy resources, and maintain the network infrastructure with up-to-date industry standard protocols.

The new racks are designed to incorporate an Earth Leak Relay (ELR) system and will be linked to dual power supply feeders and each individual rack will be linked to a different Distribution Board and UPS. With the ELR incorporated design, the new racks will have greater tolerance for power trip failure and will offer better protection to your servers from any power disruption caused by other end users’ servers/racks. This will also help to ensure the continued efficiency of the network to better serve your needs and requirements.

Please be assured that there will be no change in your service offerings and that as our valued customer, you will continue to enjoy the same quality of service as before.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused =)

Server Specifications
This site can be considered running on a dedicated server as it only host 30 other domains which belongs to friends and families of both Michael and I. This server is housed at M1 Connect (previously known as Qala). It has 1mbps guaranteed and 10mbps burstable bandwidth.

• Dell PowerEdge 860
• Single Dual-Core Intel Xeon 3050, 2.13GHz, 1066MHz front side bus, 2MB cache
• 2x 1GB ECC DDR2 667 SDRAM
• 1x 250GB & 1x 500GB 7.2K RPM SATA II Hard Drive
• CentOS Release 5

I also have a backup server provided by Vodien Internet Solutions which I will rysnc to manually every week.

• Dell PowerEdge 2950
• 2x Intel Quad Core Xeon E5420
• 16GB Ram
• 4x 300GB SAS RAID 10
• CentOS Release 5

If you are looking for web hosting, do check them out, their support response time is fantastic!

WordPress Theme
This theme is developed by me and hence it is not available to the public as I want to keep it unique. I am using Facybox to display single images in a modal window. Yes, I am using jQuery as well. For some of my feeds like my Twitter feed and WordPress Plugins feed are retrieved and parsed using SimplePie which is included in WordPress.

There is also a iPhone version which is optimized for iPhone viewing, just visit this site in iPhone and it will redirect you to the iPhone version.

Most if not all of the pages in this website is validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

WordPress Plugins
I am a WordPress plugins developer however not all the plugins I developed are used on this website as I think plugins like WP-Ban and WP-PostRatings are not necessary as I don’t wish to ban any people from my site or getting my post rated.

I modified only one plugin which is the Breadcrumb plugin by Dan Peverill to have my plugins’ breadcrumbs such as WP-Email and WP-UserOnline displayed using it.

There are also two plugins which I created personally for this website, lesterchan.net Plugin houses several of the functions used in this website and WP-GalleryViewer powers my Gallery. Both of them are not available to the public as it is highly customized to this website.

• Akismet
• Breadcrumb – Modified
• Digg Button
• Google XML Sitemaps
• lesterchan.net Plugin – Not Available
• WordPress.com Stats
• WP-CommentNavi
• WP-DBManager
• WP-DownloadManager
• WP-EMail
• WP-GalleryViewer 1.00 – Not Available
• WP-PageNavi
• WP-PluginsUsed
• WP-Polls
• WP-PostViews
• WP-Print
• WP-RelativeDate
• WP-ServerInfo
• WP-Stats
• WP-UserOnline

Full Details on my Plugins Used Page.

Tracking
I am using the following statistical tools to track and analyze my site traffic.

• Webalizer
• Google Analytics
• WordPress.com Stats
• Extreme Tracking (Depreciated)

URL Shortener
I am using lc.sg as my personal URL shortener and it is powered by YOURLS which is initially developed by me but now, it is developed mainly by Ozh himself. Ozh if you see this, thank you!

Others?
If I missed out anything and you wish to know more about it, do leave it in the comments and I will try my best to add it in.

I am not a guru when it comes to SEO, what I know about SEO is from what I heard from my friends and forums. I also do not believe in paying thousand over dollars just to get a good SEO because most of the tools are free!

Just would like to share the stuff I did on this website to improve it’s SEO:

• Age of domain does matter, I bought lesterchan.net way back in 24th January 2004 which makes this domain close to 6 years old.
• I am using Google XML Sitemaps to send sitemaps to various search engine.
• Post title always appear first in the browser title bar before the domain name or website name, eg “Site Traffic October 2009 « Blog | lesterchan.net”.
• I allow bots to crawl my whole website using <meta name=”robots” content=”all” />
• From a user perspective, I always think what search term might the user Google for and I use that as the post title. eg “Windows 7 Pricing in Singapore” or “SingTel iPhone 3GS Price Plans”. All these post has become my most viewed posts.
• Produce content that users really want in order to get them to link back to you. Example, my highest viewed page is my WordPress Plugins Page.
• Register your website with Google Webmasters Tools.

Tools used to track my website:

• Webalizer
• Google Analytics
• WordPress.com Stats
• Extreme Tracking (Depreciated)

Feel free to add in more SEO tips in the comments.

Li Xiang has a surprise for us (my brother and I) for our birthday! She designed a plastic acrylic sheet for both of us. Mine is lesterchan.net whereas my brother is xeroy with a star. Thank you so much Penguin! Get well soon and drink lots of water!

lesterchan.net – View 1

lesterchan.net – View 2

xeroy

After almost 24 hours of downtime, finally the site is back online. We are there at REACH Datacenter to remove the server at 10pm and after that we reached Qala Datacenter about 11pm. 2 mistakes on our part, firstly we did not bring any CentOS installation DVD to install on Derrick Server and hence we wasted about 2 hours to download the file via torrent at 500KB/s. Since all of us are using old laptops, it took us about 45 minutes just to burn and verify the DVD. The first DVD that we burnt using Michael laptop, the server has problem reading it. Only at the second attempt using my laptop, it works. Hence we wasted another 1 hour and 30 minutes.

The second and biggest mistake of all is we (Derrick and I) forgot to change our Direct Admin license registered IP, the license is still being tag to our old server and hence DirectAdmin cannot start. By this time it is about 4am and everybody is tired, decided to pack up at 5am and went home, after dropping Derrick at Jurong East interchange Michael and I went to my mom office to collect his monitor that he has left it there. Derrick called me and say that his Direct Admin license IP has been updated and asked me to check mine, and yeap, mine is updated as well. Michael updated the license on our server and it just took 5 minutes. Went for breakfast after that at the canteen below my mom office as it operates 24 hours. After everything was done, it was about 6am. Sent Michael home and reached home about 7am.

The waiting game is for our local shitty and slow ISP to refresh its DNS records to reflect our new server IP. Apparently, Michael told me that Starhub do that every 15 hours while Singtel do that every 30 hours. It is because of the DNS propagation that makes this site goes down for about 24 hours.

But anyway, the site can now be considered running on a “dedicated” server with a guaranteed 1Mbps line with a shared 10Mbps burstable line and the server is hosting about 10 domains only.

Anyway, if you all need hosting, check out sgWebster Solutions