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SMART SERVERS

Smart Servers FAQ

Common questions and answers.

About the Liquid Web Dedicated Firewall

The Liquid Web Dedicated Firewall provides your server security through isolation from threats on the global Internet. The Dedicated Firewall operates outside of your server environment and provides the same benefits of a dedicated hardware firewall which include: eliminating threats before they reach your server, and processing threats without consuming the resources of your server. The Liquid Web Dedicated Firewall comes with the flexibility to use a simple service-based mode or advanced options for fine-grained control over all traffic. The Liquid Web Dedicated Firewall accepts Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation for easily manipulating large IP blocks.

Instructions for migrating to a Liquid Web Smart Server cPanel server from another server running cPanel

From within WebHostManager (WHM) under the "Transfers" section there is an option to "Copy multiple accounts/packages from another server". This function will ask you to enter in the IP address and password of the old server you wish to copy from. WHM will then copy all your cPanel accounts and associated data to your new Liquid Web Smart Server. Once the data copy is completed, it is important that you verify the accuracy and proper functioning of your new server. After you have verified that the copy was successful, you will need to update your nameservers with your domain registrar to point to the new server's IP address. Once this DNS change has been propagated, your domains will begin running off of the new Liquid Web Smart Server.

A few things to keep in mind:
Any updates on your old server from the time you initiate the copy to the time the DNS change is fully propagated will be lost. This is particularly relevant for sites on which the content is changing quickly like Forums and user-contributed content sites.

Server side software installations are NOT copied. This method of cPanel migration only copies cPanel accounts and user data. Apache/MySQL versions, and all other server software needs to be manually installed or synchronized.

How Does Liquid Web Smart Servers compare to cloud computing products?

Liquid Web Smart Servers are dedicated servers with powerful cloud-like features. Liquid Web Smart Servers are zero-contention servers because they are entirely allocated to you and will not be shared or affected by the performance of other servers.

Unlike cloud computing providers, Liquid Web Smart Servers do NOT utilize bursting, shared resources or any centralized storage which can have a significant negative impact on your server performance. This helps ensure that Liquid Web Smart Servers customers will always have the highest performance dedicated server with maximum I/O performance.

How do Liquid Web Smart Server Backups work?

Each Smart Server has individual backup options that are managed from within the Smart Server Dashboard. Smart Server backup images are transferred to a secure off-server storage pool over a private internal backup network. Smart Servers make the important task of regular data backup easy by eliminating the hassle of backup management and providing two simple options:

  1. Choose the number of daily backups to retain and pay per the gigabyte of storage used by the backup images. Smart Servers will handle the pruning of old backup images for you.
  2. Select a backup quota to specify the maximum amount of backup data that you would like to retain for the Smart Server. Smart Servers will retain all of your daily backups until it has reached your quota. When the quota is reached, Smart Servers will delete the oldest daily backup to make room for new backups. Note: Backups older than 90 days are not retained, regardless of quota.

Smart Server Backup images are a snapshot of the entire file system volume. Smart Server Backups are done instantaneously at a specific point-in-time. This protects against files becoming out of sync during the backup process. Smart Server Backup images can be accessed from the Restoration tab of the Smart Server Dashboard to quickly re-image your server to an earlier date.
Smart Server backups can also be generated manually at any time by creating a Server Image. Creating a server image takes a point-in-time snapshot of your server and saves it to the Smart Server system for later reuse. The server image can be used as a restore point for server re-imaging or it can be used to deploy a new identical server.

How does Smart Servers Private Networking work?

Smart Servers Private Networking provides the seamless ability to securely connect all your Smart Servers together with the click of a button. Private networking allows your smart servers to communicate with each other over an internal, isolated private network. The bandwidth used on the private network is free and does not count against your regular bandwidth usage. As an example, private networking can be used to create a fast secure link to your database server with no additional bandwidth charges!

How are Liquid Web Smart Servers public IP addresses allocated?

Smart Servers include one public IP address. Additional Public IP addresses can be added for $1.00/month per IP. New Smart Servers accounts are currently limited to a total of eight public IP addresses per server. If you require additional IP addresses, simply contact Liquid Web Sales and they will enable additional IP addresses for your account.

Please explain Smart Servers Monitoring and graphing of important server health statistics and alerts

Liquid Web Smart Servers include two types of monitoring:

  • Real-Time Smart Servers Health and Performance Monitoring
  • Smart Server Service-Level Monitoring with Proactive Response or Email Alerts

Real-Time Smart Server Health and Performance Monitoring
Smart Server Health Monitoring includes detailed real-time server-level health and performance statistics that are immediately presented within the Smart Server Dashboard. The Smart Server Dashboard uses real-time and historical server data to create graphs that display important server metrics over time. This helps server administrators recognize trends and evaluate server performance.

Smart Server Service-Level Monitoring & Proactive Response or Email Alert
Smart Server Service-Level Monitoring gives you the control to simultaneously monitor multiple services on each Smart Server including: ICMP, HTTP, DNS, SSH, MySQL, SMTP, POP3 and FTP. For Fully-Managed and Core-Managed Server images, the monitoring preferences you specify will trigger proactive restoration by our Sonar Monitoring Team. We will repair your server and notify you of the actions taken and any recommendations to prevent future problems. If you have selected a Self-Managed Server Image, you will be emailed a monitoring alert to the email address you specified in your account.

How is Smart Server pricing calculated and charged?

All services are charged according to per-day pricing, but you will typically receive a bill only once per month. Any terminated services are charged only for the time they were active. When you create an additional new server, you will be charged an initial payment for service from time of deployment until the next regular billing date, followed by monthly payments based on number of days of usage for each option you have selected. Any billing estimates or projections provided within the Smart Server Dashboard are not guaranteed and should only be used as a guide to help estimate future charges based on variable usage patterns.

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