'Net Features : Web Hosting

The Popularity of On-Shore Hosting

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:25:00 GMT

Pingdom has released a study which explores the percentage of sites with a given country code top-level (ccTLD) domain which are hosted in that particular country.

According to the Pingdom research, people in Germany, South Korea, and Vietnam were the most likely to choose "onshore web hosting" (hosting your website in the country where you live or conduct business.) Pingdom examined Alexa's top one million sites to determine the percentage of sites per ccTLD that were hosted domestically.

South Korea had 1,750 ccTLDs in the top one million with 97 percent hosted in that country. Vietnam, with 2,260 ccTLDs in the top one million, was a close second with 93 percent of those sites hosted onshore. Germany, with just over 25,000 ccTLDs in the top one million at Alexa had 92 percent, with Japan close on its virtual heels at 91 percent of its 14,188 ccTLD's hosted onshore.

Pingdom also explored the top 10 ccTLDs in Alexa's top one million sites and found that Russia had 43,000 in total, followed by Germany, United Kingdom (17,558), Brazil (16,991), and Poland (14,235).

1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server Enhances Scalability for SMBs

Michael Garrity — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:10:00 GMT

Web hosting company 1&1 Internet recently upgraded its 1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server that will make the solution more flexible and cost efficient.

The biggest change to the server is an increased focus on scalability that allows it to meet a customer’s performance requirements at any time. This is primarily through the inclusion of dynamically adjustable resources, including Processor Cores (vCore), RAM (GB) and Hard Disk Space (GB) that can be configured up or down by the users, themselves.

In addition, 1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server customers can add up to 99 virtual machines (as required) without migration under a single contract, as the new updates come with no fixed contract, at all; instead, costs are dependent upon the configuration in place, so users only pay for the resources they require and use. There are no basic fees, setup fees, minimum contract terms or transparency of per-hour costs.

All servers are available in both Linux and Windows configurations, which are installed automatically, and include full root access, 2000 GB of traffic, unlimited on-demand Snapshot Backups, Parallels Plesk 11 and a $60 starting credit; they also come with fail-safe security through redundant cores and storage.

These changes to the 1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server give small and medium-sized businesses the opportunity to leverage high performance for just short periods of time, while only paying for the actual requirements they use.

CloudAccess Integrates Identity and Access Management

Michael Garrity — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:30:00 GMT

Cloud-based unified security solution provider CloudAccess has recently announced version 3.0 release of its CloudIDM/AM system, featuring seamless, “unique” integration between enterprise identity management and access controls (i.e. single sign-on and access management) from the cloud.

In addition, CloudIDM/AM 3.0 comes with multi-directional password synchronization between the system’s identity management solution, Active Directory and/or Lightweight Director Access Protocol (LDAP), as well as a federated gateway that allows access to an application or website, a dynamic self-service portal and centralized GUI-based workflow automation.

"We've taken the next evolutionary step to integrate the key capabilities of provisioning, multi-factor authentication and role-based workflow management with an advanced single sign on for SaaS and legacy applications and manage it all from the cloud," said Kevin Nikkhoo, CEO of CloudAccess.

Because of a proliferation of SaaS applications, increased complexity with “bring-your-own-deivce” and general user mobility, many organizations these days are suffering from more and more vulnerability gaps. As a result, regulatory agencies have made it a legal requirement to continuously monitor and report on user access. So, straight out of the box, the newly updated CloudIDM/AM system will include the streamlined ability to automate compulsory reporting in a way that satisfies the compliance governance for a variety of agencies, including HIPAA, PCI, FFIEC, NIST FERC and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Since it is a cloud-deployed SaaS solution, CloudIDM/AM 3.0 doesn’t require any hardware or software to install, and it will integrate with other scalable security solutions, like SIEM and log management systems. Plus, the whole suite can be monitored in real time from a single dashboard.

CloudIDM/AM 3.0 is currently available for direct sale, or through various reseller channels.

Deliver Enterprise Apps with Improved Performance, Speed

Michael Garrity — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:56:00 GMT

Performance is everything for enterprise organizations, particularly when it comes to delivering applications to thousands of users at once.

In order to improve application delivery performance, Array Networks has announced four new enterprise-class application delivery controllers: APV2600 for small-to-medium-sized businesses, APV5600 for enterprise’s with ‘larger traffic demands,” APV10600 for global organizations and service providers and Array’s top-shelf application delivery controller, the APV10650.

Each of these new appliances places a particular emphasis on providing enhanced price performance for 2048-bit SSL acceleration, which is currently the most common “advanced” feature for customers that are buying a load balancer or application delivery controller, as it helps ensure secure applications, content and transactions over the Internet.

In addition, these new delivery controllers provide server and link load balancing, global server load balancing (GSLB), connection multiplexing, SSL acceleration, compression, caching, traffic shaping and application security. It also comes with a number of “next generation features” at no extra cost, such as:

-    ePolicy scripting that allows administrators to create custom logic to control application traffic

-    IPv6 Ready Forum Gold Certification that supports feature parity and the ability to operate in IPv6 networks

-    Support for migration from IPv4 to IPv6, along with a means for both networks and clients to communicate

-    Independent Session Control that improves persistence and security, while enhancing application performance

-    An eCloud API that give cloud providers a scripting tool to assist with integrating APV Series ADCs with cloud management systems

-    And additional ADC features, including TCP stateful failover, N+1 clustering, role-based administration control and advanced ACLs

The new Array APV Series application delivery controllers are available now.

Provision and Manage CloudByte Volumes with OpenStack Cinder

Michael Garrity — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:30:00 GMT

The CloudByte cloud storage service, which was the first to provide guaranteed quality of service (QoS) to every application from a shared storage platform, just announced a new major integration with Cinder, the OpenStack block storage project.

CloudByte also developed a driver for the Cinder framework, known as ElastiStor, to enable service providers to provision and manage QoS-aware CloudByte storage volumes from OpenStack clients and the project’s API.

This means that service providers on the OpenStack platform can create, take snapshots of and manage CloudByte storage volumes using either the Cinder API or the OpenStack Horizon client. These volumes can then be configured to meet the user’s capacity and IOPS needs. With on-demand performance from CloudByte, OpenStack users will now be able to build solutions that an more effectively compete with Amazon EBS.

“Unlike legacy storage solutions, ElastiStor is architected for today’s cloud environments and allows cloud service providers to host performance-sensitive applications without creating any dedicated storage silos” explains CloudByte CTO, Felix Xavier.

Migrate Clouds With Ease

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:15:00 GMT

What is more challenging than moving to the cloud? You guessed it - moving from one cloud platform to another. Fortunately, solutions such as Cloud Converter are able to reduce or eliminate most (if not all) of the transition troubles.

Cloud Converter's technology gives users a way to move their cloud servers between supported platforms. That currently includes all major Linux operating systems on physical or cloud servers, as well as cloud providers such as Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, Host Virtual, Linode and others based on VMware, Xen, KVM, or OpenVZ technology.

The solution works by creating a unique fingerprint based on the cloud provider, technology and other variables between the source and target servers. The service then uses this fingerprint to convert and move data from one provider to the other. Most server installations are moved in between five and twenty minutes.

Taking Security to the Next Level

Administrator — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 19:45:00 GMT

:: By Kelly Meeneghan, 1&1 Internet

With such a heavy reliance on the Internet, online security should be one of the top priorities for both website owners and their visitors. According to a recent study conducted by 1&1 Internet, Inc., more than half of the participants (67%) confirmed that they, or someone they know, have had their personal information lost or stolen as a result of doing business online. As a website professional, it is imperative that all aspects of your work provide a secure environment for both yourself as well as website visitors. Neglecting to exercise significant measures to ensure Web safety can result in extremely damaging losses of information and in turn, credibility. Understanding these priorities, Web hosts put in place security measures to ensure safe and reliable online operations.

1) Redundant Web hosting

Redundant Web hosting has become a staple in many online hosting solutions. Mirroring data on at least two separate servers have proven to be a strategic solution towards preventing downtime, which is always an inevitable risk. Taking it a step further, hosting providers have introduced more complex redundancy procedures like Dual Hosting. Such technology hosts your site and data on two different server clusters in separate physical locations creating a form of ‘geo-redundancy.’ Due to this added layer of security, if one data center experiences any kind of disturbance, your information will automatically be switched to the other location to remain accessible. While necessary maintenance takes place on the interrupted server, there is zero disruption on your website and your visitors online experience.

2) Security Scans

Even though you may think your site is immune to malicious activity, simple mistakes like a misspelling when entering code or forgetting to close a parenthesis can leave your online representation vulnerable to potential hackers. Such infections can not only affect a website’s function, but could also potentially harm visitors to the website and damage your online brand. As this risk can occur at any time, often without your knowledge, security tools like SiteLock allow you to continually inspect your site for any suspicious or dangerous behavior. Among a list of benefits, SiteLock conducts website application scans, SQL injection scans and cross site scripting (XSS) scans across multiple website pages. These valuable scans will detect if the website has been intruded, evaluate the need for upgrades to third party applications, identify the potential for data breaches and provide any necessary steps needed for users to regain maximum security of their website immediately.

3) Secure Data Transports

When working with online transactions, businesses should seriously consider obtaining a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate which is a security protocol that encrypts your site to ensure secure transactions, data transfers and logins. An SSL certificate will provide for a safe flow of information between your Web server and browser, guaranteeing message integrity. By obtaining your SSL certificate, you will be able to visibly show visitors how safe your site is. Activating the lock icon in the browser as well as displaying a “Smart Seal” will help your site illustrate a more secure online representation as compared to competitors and increase consumer’s trust in your business.

4) Recovery Tools

It is inevitable that businesses will experience human error. Web professionals should be prepared should they encounter an experience such as realizing you have overwritten important data or exited without saving. These errors cost valuable time and effort that most individuals have little to spare. Web hosts implement tools such as 1&1’s Webspace Recovery Tool which allows for the recovery of up to six days of data entry, making information restoration a painless process. Take the extra step of prevention to avoid wasting valuable time in a frustrating situation.

Online security is an essential aspect for the success of any Web professional and their visitors. By utilizing these steps and mentioned tools, you will give your online work the opportunity to go beyond these hesitations and instill peace of mind for all online viewers.

Cache Anything and Speed Up Load Times

Michael Garrity — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 17:05:00 GMT

One of the most common methods that webmasters use to speed up their sites is to cache content (such as HTML pages, JavaScript, images or CSS) to reduce bandwidth and server load and speed up delivery.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of content that can’t be cached, and when websites need to utilize that it can be problematic for performance and user experience. CloudFlare, a provider of cloud-based services to help secure and accelerate websites, is looking to alleviate this problem for its users by “caching the uncacheable” through a new Web optimization software called Railgun.

CloudFlare users are already at an advantage, because the service will not only cache content, but also deliver it to users from its various datacenters around the world. However, according to the company’s blog, “only about 66% of content is cacheable,” meaning the remaining 34 percent has to be recovered from the server of origin. That is why the company developed Railgun, which can cache dynamically generated and/or personalized Web pages using a scheme that reduces bandwidth and speeds up the loading process.

Railgun starts the acceleration process for non-cached pages by speeding up the downloading of the initial HTML, which must happen before the rest of a page can even begin downloading.

Primarily, though, Railgun is able to send Web pages across the ‘Net much more quickly because it will compress them to an astonishingly smaller version, which it’s able to do by looking at changes on a page “from download to download.” It will reduce the pages to just 0.65 percent of their original size to ensure that they travel faster from the origin server to the user’s screen, no matter where they are.

This new service is currently only available for CloudFlare Business and Enterprise customers as a part of their service packages.

Janitor Monkey Will Clean Up Your Old AWS Instances

Michael Garrity — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 22:12:00 GMT

If you’re like me, you probably sat down with your family over the holiday break to relax and watch something on Netflix, only to find that its service was uncharacteristically down. Well, it seems that the company has corrected this problem, and now wants to share what it learned with the rest of us.

Netflix officially released a new open source tools for killing old Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances this week known as Janitor Monkey. This solution, which is part of the company’s “Simian Army” of internal management tools, is meant for enterprise organizations that employ a public cloud through AWS, particularly when they are unknowingly spending unnecessary money because they have forgotten to shut off an old instance.

“It is pretty easy to lose track of the cloud resources that are no longer needed or used,” say Netflix’s Michael Fu and Corey Bennett in a recent blog post. “Perhaps you forgot to delete the cluster with the previous version of your application, or forgot to destroy the volume when you no longer needed the extra disk.”

Janitor Monkey works largely with Netflix’s open source Asgard tool, which lets administrators delete their unused resources; this process is streamlined thanks to Janitor Monkey, which does the work of automatically tracking down these useless instances and allowing Asgard to clean them up.

According to Netflix, Janitor Monkey had deleted over 5000 resources from the company’s production and test environments when it was being used as an in-house product.

In addition to AWS instances, Janitor Monkey also detects EBS volumes, EBS volume snapshots and auto-scaling groups, and all of them come with their own unique rules for how they are marked. (For example, EBS volumes are marked as “cleanup candidates” if they haven’t been attached an instance for 30 days.) Once Janitor Monkey inspects these resources and applies the appropriate rules to them, it will determine if they are, in fact, cleanup candidates and, if so, it marks them for clean up and schedules a time for Asgard to do it. These events will be logged in an Amazon SimpleDB table by default, and it should be small enough to fit inside Amazon’s free-pricing tier.

However, just to double check itself and make sure it isn’t acting too hastily, Janitor Monkey will then inform the administrations attached the specific resources with an alert sent two days before it is scheduled to be cleaned up. Out of the box, Janitor Monkey is automatically configured to run on non-holiday weekends at 11 a.m., but it can be modified to run at other customized times.

High Storage Instances Come to Amazon EC2

Michael Garrity — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 21:09:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) wanted to give its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) users a present, and what better way to celebrate the holidays than with family – a new instance family, that is.

The cloud computing services provider from Amazon recently announced High Storage instances for EC2. This additional instance family is optimized for applications that required rapid access to large amounts of data, while also providing AWS customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units of computing capacity, 117 GiB of RAM and 48 TB of storage across 24 hard disk drives. Moreover, these instances are capable of delivering more than 2.4 GB of sequential I/O performance per second.

In other words, because High Storage instances provide such massive amounts of direct attached storage per instance, they are ideal for data-intensive applications like Hadoop workloads, log processing, data warehousing and parallel file systems for processing and analyzing large datasets in the AWS cloud.

High Storage instances follow eight other EC2 instance families, including Cluster Compute and High I/O instances, to help meet the evolving application requirements of Amazon EC2 customers. Like the others, High Storage instances were designed to enhance the performance and efficiency of even the most demanding applications. They also power the new petabyte-scale data warehousing service Amazon Redshift and can help Amazon Elastic MapReduce customers process larger quantities of data more resourcefully, who helps significantly lower costs.

AWS customers can immediately launch High Storage instances through the AWS Management Console, Amazon EC2 and Elastic MapReduce Command Line Interfaces, AWS SDKs and various other third-party libraries. However, at the moment this new instance family is only available in the US East Region; they will be made available in other AWS Regions “in the coming months.”

Riak CS Lets Users Replicate Data Globally

Michael Garrity — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 14:46:00 GMT

Customers can now replicate Riak Cloud Storage (Riak CS) data across multiple data centers to assure its users that they can avoid disruptions from outages and serve content faster to multiple geographic locations, all while building upon its existing compatibility with Amazon S3.

The cloud storage service from Basho Technologies will now allow customers to spread their stored data over a series of data centers located around the world, and the integration of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure guarantees high availability. Basically, Riak CS customers will now be able to replicate their stored data on any data center they want on their own terms, in addition all of the benefits of using AWS, just to sweeten the deal. This solution also reduces some of the risks commonly associated with AWS.

Moreoever, these new replication capabilities will break large data objects into smaller blocks that will be streamed to the underlying Riak cluster, where they will then be replicated for high availability. A manifest for each object will be maintained, allowing the service to retrieve each block from the cluster and present the full object to the end-user. Global information, bucket information and manifests will all be streamed in real-time from a primary implementation to a secondary site for multi-site replication, and objects can be replicated in either “full” or “real-time” sync modes.

Riak CS, built upon Riak, the open source distributed NoSQL database, was just released by Basho last year, and the Amazon S3 integration, which provides Riak CS customers with access to S3 tools and frameworks, was only announced early in 2012.

NetApp Brings AWS to the Enterprise

Michael Garrity — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:41:00 GMT

NetApp, the cloud storage provider, recently brought the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to its customers.

The company’s new solution, NetApp Private Storage for AWS, will use the AWS Direct Connect service to allow enterprise users to establish a dedicated network connection that links their existing infrastructure to AWS. This means they can now replicate data from their on-premises NetApp storage environments in a Direct Connect facility.

Enterprise companies will now be able to use NetApp with a variety of AWS services, including Amazon EMR for more cost-effective big data analysis, disaster recovery deployments with Amazon EC2 and disk backup through Amazon S3, in addition to being able to seamlessly move enterprise applications to the cloud and between AWS regions.

Right now, there is a fear on the part of some enterprise organizations when it comes to
moving workloads (especially larger ones) to AWS, but by going through NetApp, which has been serving enterprises for 20 years, these companies may feel more comfortable using Amazon’s service.

“Our work with NetApp provides customers with the performance, security, compliance, and availability benefits of AWS with the high value enterprise offerings customers have come to expect from NetApp,” says Terry Wise, the head of Worldwide Partner Ecosystems at AWS.

Currently, NetApp Private Storage for AWS is available to select resellers in North America, but it should be available in Europe and Asia sooner than later.

GlobalSign Accelerates SSL-Certified Pages

Michael Garrity — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 16:15:00 GMT

One of the world’s largest SSL certificate providers, GlobalSign, has partnered with Web performance and security company CloudFlare to significantly accelerate the load speeds and reduce the geographical delay of SSL-secured Web pages. And best of all, this speedy service comes at no additional charge or configuration requirements for GlobalSign customers.

After integrating the technology of these companies, GlobalSign has been able to increase load speeds by as much as six times that of traditional SSL. The hope is that by noticeably improving the performance of SSL-secured Web pages, the company will foster wider acceptance and adoption of SSL certificates that help Web businesses reduce the risk of data breaches, compromised sites and, most important, customer identity theft and fraud. Of course, it also helps that faster performing websites tend to increase customer loyalty and diminish site abandonment rates.

Historically, many sites have refrained from implementing SSL on their sites outside of their login or checkout pages out of a fear that it would disrupt the end-user experience. But now, as a result of its collaboration with CloudFlare, when browsers visit GlobalSign-protected websites, they can validate the certificates much quicker. This is because of CloudFlare’s network of 23 global datacenters that reduce the amount of time it takes a Certificate Authority (CA) SSL to deliver an SSL certificate’s validity status to the browser.

In addition, this CloudFlare’s international network provides resilience to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to protect GlobalSign Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) services, which indicate the validity status of its SSL certificates.

But that’s not all in the way of recent news for GlobalSign. Earlier this week, the company announced the general availability of its new (and free) SSL Configuration Checker online service that lets website administrators confirm that their SSL is configured correctly across all of their websites; the service even provides actionable insights and guidance on how they can fix any questionable or exploitable configurations, as well.

When SSL is accurately configured, it dramatically improves the performance of the website and strengthens its ability to secure the site, offering a defense against cyber criminality, such as SSL BEAST, CRIME and other attacks that target faulty SSL configurations.

The service integrates Qualys SSL Labs assessment technology, which audits SSL ecosystems, raises awareness and provides tools and documentation for website owners that allow them to improve their SSL implementations.

SSL Configuration Checker can be used by any organization by simply visiting sslcheck.globalsign.com, where users just have to enter the URL of the site they want to check. Following a quick test, the service will return a letter grade of the site’s configuration, along with a brief explanation of any issues it finds and some remediation steps they can follow to correct the issue(s).

The tool is already available in an array of languages, including Dutch, English, French, Japanese, German, Spanish and Russian.

Remote Support for Private Clouds from RackSpace

Michael Garrity — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:15:00 GMT

The open cloud company Rackspace ranks high among major players like Amazon and Windows in the cloud computing industry, which is an impressive feat. But the company isn’t about to rest on its laurels, as it just announced a slew of new features and enhanced support offerings for its Rackspace Private Cloud Software.

Rackspace just launched Private Cloud Software in August and already thousands of businesses and organizations from more than 125 different countries have downloaded it.

These new additions have been collectively named “Alamo” and incorporate “Folsom,” the latest release of the OpenStack Cloud Software platform that came out in September and included nearly 200 new features. This is the same platform that powers the Rackspace Cloud.

Alamo has allowed Rackspace to extend its service portfolio for the Rackspace Private Cloud, particularly with a new support level – Core Software Support – that includes remote access support for the Private Cloud Software stack all day long and every day of the year. Core Software Support will allow the cloud company’s engineers login to a customer’s private cloud environment to install, configure, patch and troubleshoot, as needed.

Some other new features are highly scalable Block Storage that turns external storage into an additional storage volume and Object Storage powered by OpenStack Swift that allows customers to create “massively scalable” storage resource pools for storing files, with server images taking advantage of commodity hardware to provide reduced costs. It also provides new Monitoring that includes Graphite and Collectd applications to extend monitoring and alerting capabilities. All of these new features were designed to work in private cloud environments.

Percona Offered by Big Hosting Companies

Michael Garrity — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 18:30:00 GMT

High performance is, obviously, the ultimate goal of any Web hosting company worth its salt. Perhaps that is why so many notable names in the hosting industry have been turning to Percona, the enterprise-level MySQL support, consulting, training and development services provider.

Basically, Percona works to make MySQL faster and more reliable for its clients, and as of late, it’s being seeing “rapid and increasing adoption” by hosting providers, some of which are pretty huge names, including RackSpace, Blue Host, HP, Joyent, Crucial Web Hosting and SpeedySparrow.

These providers are all making available to their customers the latest release of Percona’s enhanced drop-in replacement for MySQL, known as Percona Server version 5.5.28-29.1. In fact, Percona Server is actually one of the top three most deployed MySQL alternatives around, according to a report from 451 Research.

And it’s no surprise why, as Percona Server offers hosting providers advanced features that can speed up their searches and increase security, as well as giving administrators more control over their server environments. Plus, it’s a free, open source solution that provides breakthrough performance, scalability, features and instrumentation, in addition to self-tuning algorithms and support for high-performance hardware. Not too shabby.