'Net Features : hosting

Drupal Hosting: Pantheon In Focus

Allison Howen — Wed, 01 May 2013 00:34:00 GMT

Obtaining a dramatic spike in traffic is every Web worker’s dream, however, when the website’s hosting provider can’t handle the traffic increase and results in the site crashing, that dream quickly becomes a nightmare.

While one solution to this problem is to change your hosting provider or upsize your virtual private server (VPS), typically both of those alterations require some downtime for the site. Luckily, cloud-based hosting provider Pantheon offers a platform that aims to solve this problem.

Pantheon allows users to build, launch and host Drupal sites. The platform uses one big gridded set of servers to power all of its clients, which range from sites that receive hundreds of page views a month to sites that receive hundreds of millions of page views a month. When a site is run on the Pantheon platform, it automatically uses the company’s Edge Cache, which immediately improves page load times.

“It’s a much more efficient way to serve out a page. (Edge Cache) acts like a CDN,” said Zack Rosen, CEO and co-founder of Pantheon. “It can very efficiently handle a huge amount of traffic at any one time.”

Moreover, when a site is hosted on Pantheon, it is not running on its own siloed server. Instead, the site runs on the same infrastructure that is serving out hundreds of millions of page requests every day for all of the sites on the platform, which means that the site is a “pretty small drop in the bucket” in terms of the service’s overall capacity, according to Rosen.

It is also important to note that Pantheon offers separate development and testing environments to its users, which allows them to try new site features without interfering with their live site. This can help developers eliminate costly mistakes and/or downtime. Additionally, Pantheon allows developers to import and migrate their current sites to the Pantheon platform, supports all versions of Drupal, enables users to manage multiple sites from a single dashboard, allows for one-click Drupal core updates, as well as lets users schedule automatic backups and determine retention periods.

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.

Rackspace Adds to Developer Toolset

Allison Howen — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 23:00:00 GMT

Cloud hosting provider Rackspace has acquired Exceptional Cloud Services in a move to enhance its toolset for developers deploying and managing applications in the open cloud.

Through the deal, Rackspace will expand its developer solutions to include error tracking and Redis-as-a-Service capabilities. Currently, more than 50,000 application developers use these solutions from Exceptional Cloud Services.

“Rackspace is improving the key technologies used by developers in the open cloud. Our focus on the developer community is deeper than ever before and we are carefully adding strategic technologies to our open hybrid cloud portfolio, while keeping the needs of application developers in mind,” said Pat Matthews, senior vice president of corporate development at Rackspace. “Through the acquisition of Exceptional Cloud Services, we’re gaining technology and expertise that will provide startups and cloud developers with the tools that help them deliver more reliable customer experiences and to bring the next generation of cloud-based apps to market faster.”

The acquisition will provide Rackspace with the following products:

Exceptional.io - Exceptional tracks errors in more than 6,000 Web applications. The service not only reports errors in real-time, but also gathers the information developers need to fix errors.

Airbrake.io - Airbrake collects errors generated by other applications and aggregates the results for review.

Redis To Go - Redis To Go helps users manage Redis instances easier, whether it’s one instance or hundreds.

Moreover, the Exceptional Cloud Services acquisition will also assist Rackspace in its recent push into the MongoDB market. This is because the company plans to integrate the Redis To Go solution with the MongoDB database as a service from ObjectRocket. By aligning these two solutions, Rackspace aims to provide developers with a choice of open source-based data platforms that increase the speed and reduce the complexity of building powerful applications on the Rackspace Open Cloud.

"Rackspace has taken another step towards creating a one-stop shop for the growing community of developers that are looking to build complex applications on the open cloud," said Melanie Posey, Research Vice President at IDC. "With today's acquisition of Exceptional Cloud Services, Rackspace gave depth to its application developer toolkit by adding error tracking capabilities, along with a caching solution from Redis To Go, which the company plans to integrate with its recently acquired MongoDB database as a service from ObjectRocket. The tools and depth of expertise that Rackspace gained through its recent acquisitions will collectively work to reduce the complexity associated with building open cloud applications and speed time to market, while helping the company extend its reach to a broader range of global developers.”

The MicroCloud Arrives

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 20:45:00 GMT

Hosting provider Codero just announced the release of a new private cloud product dubbed MicroCloud which will enable its customers to manage their virtualization platform directly.

MicroCloud is available in various hardware configurations and offers a choice of preloaded hypervisors currently in VMWare ESXi or Citrix XexServer and will expand the product line to include more hypervisors and orchestration stacks in the next six months.

MicroCloud pricing ranges from $359-$499 depending on the processer type selected. “MicroCloud offers customers the flexibility of cloud computing in private, with 100 percent dedicated hardware. No matter how many virtual machines a customer launches on their infrastructure, the MicroCloud will always be at a set monthly price,” said Chandler Vaughn, SVP of Product for Codero Hosting.

“Our goal at Codero is to enable customers to leverage the best of both virtualized and dedicated servers so that they can place their workloads on preferred platforms, all with the reliability and exceptional service Codero is known for.”

Amazon Web Services Down Under

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 18:15:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services has announced the launch of a new Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, the ninth in its global cloud computing platform.

“Over 10,000 customers in Australia and New Zealand are already using AWS, and this is before opening our new AWS Region in Australia today,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “With the ability to achieve single-digit millisecond latency to end users in Sydney, store data locally in Australia, and get to market more quickly and inexpensively by using AWS’s unmatched infrastructure technology platform, we expect the launch of AWS’s Sydney Region to further increase the amount of Australian and New Zealand customers leveraging AWS.”

At launch, the Sydney region consists of two seperate Availability Zones (datacenters in seperate distinct locations within a region which are designed to be operationally independent) and will support numerous AWS services including Elastic Compute Cloud, Map Reduce, DynamoDB, Simple DB and the Amazon Relational Database Service among others.

Among the more than 10,000 customers in Australia and New Zealand that are already using AWS, are the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (for running customer-facing Web apps), BrandScreen (which is using Elastic MapReduce to test machine learning algorithms and process data for its real-time ad trading platform), and Halfbrick Studioes - makers of FruitNinja - which is using DynamoDB and multiple Availability Zones to host millions of regular players.

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.

Rackspace Certifies Private Cloud Partners

Michael Garrity — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Rackspace, the developer of a popular open cloud, is now offering product certifications to its Rackspace Private Cloud partners.

In case you still haven’t heard of Rackspace, it’s a company that helps businesses easily deploy and manage private clouds, which can quickly (as in under an hour) be downloaded and used in a customer’s datacenter. These clouds are supported by Rackspace’s open cloud experts.

At present, thousands of different businesses, organizations and individuals across the globe use the Rackspace Private Cloud software, and according to the company, many of their partners have been asking for a way to certify their Private Cloud products, hardware or software through Rackspace. In doing this, it will be able to extend the capabilities of its open cloud solution by providing programs to its partners that can validate their offerings against Rackspace’s solution, making them more attractive to potential customers that also use the Private Cloud.

Because it can be difficult and costly (both in time and monetary investment) to build hardware, apps and platforms that run on Rackspace OpenStack private clouds, as it requires “deep expertise and knowledge,” customers can turn to the Rackspace Private Cloud certification program, which provides a consistent, supportable, tested platform to test products for compatibility with other open private clouds.

To increase versatility, Rackspace is actually offering two different types of product certifications. The first is the Technology Alliance Program that is designed for hardware and platform vendors that offer products and solutions in conjunction with the Rackspace Private Cloud. Partners can include compute, hardware, storage hardware, networking, operating systems and management tools, and they will work with Rackspace engineers to get detailed testing criteria in QA and validation labs to ensure compatibility.

The other type is the “Built For” Program, which was designed for software vendors that want to build applications running in guest virtual machines or to manage app workloads with the Private Cloud. Again, they’ll receive a testing suite and hosted validation environment that confirms their app’s compatibility with the Rackspace Private Cloud.

“Running a large-scale, enterprise private cloud is not an easy task,” says Rackspace’s private cloud vice president, Paul Rad. “Our goal is to help enterprise IT to deploy private clouds that have the efficiently and robustness of Rackspace’s public cloud, which runs thousands of virtual machines. The product certification program opens the door for IT executives to choose a certified stack that has been validated and supported by Rackspace and its certification partners.”

Deliver Dynamic Content with Amazon CloudFront

Michael Garrity — Tue, 15 May 2012 11:00:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is helping businesses get more interactive by launching dynamic content support for Amazon CloudFront, giving customers a simple and cost-effective way to improve the performance, reliability and global reach of their sites and delivery of their content, including dynamic content that changes for every end-user.

AWS customers can accelerate all of the content on their websites, both dynamic and static, for a single price and no up-front fees.

The ability to deliver personalized, dynamic content through CloudFront saves businesses a lot of time and effort that used to go into improving the performance and reliability of the more dynamic aspects of their websites. Typically, this used to require custom codes that had to be written, and even then the solutions offered would be hard to configure and manage.

Now users can run all kinds of Web applications and accelerate their entire sites quickly through the AWS Management Console with no additional cost or architecture complexity. The experience even improves when dynamic content is delivered with origin servers running in EC2, as Amazon will monitor and streamline the network paths from each CloudFront edge location to the various AWS Regions, improving latency and reliability in the process.

VMware Zimbra Comes to Verio

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Verio, best known for its online business solutions such as Web and application hosting for SMB marketing, announced the availability of VMware Zimbra for OEM and via Verio partners.

VMware Zimbra, an open source messaging and collaboration platform, expands Verio’s portfolio of hosted email solutions for its OEM partners. The Verio and VMware partnership will also provide branding options for partners to private-label their solutions through the use of Zimbra Zimlets, which are tools for integrating the VMware Zimbra Collaboration Suite with third-party Web applications.

“The availability of VMware Zimbra for Verio offers IT organizations a flexible collaboration platform that can enable greater workforce productivity,” says John Robb, senior director of product management at VMware. “With its rich email feature set, extensive ecosystem, and broad range of partner programs, VMware Zimbra offers new business opportunities for partners to meet the growing demands of small and medium-sized businesses.”

CloudFlare Comes to Certified Hosting

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:30:00 GMT

Shared web hosting provider Certified Hosting just introduced CloudFlare functionality to all its shared and reseller hosting services. The service is integrated within Certified Hosting's existing cPanel web hosting setup.

CloudFlare is a "firewall in the cloud" service designed to help secure websites and protect them against online malicious attacks. Visitor traffic is passed through one of 13 data centers where it can be monitored. In the event of a traffic spike, CloudFlare checks for signs of spam, DDos attacks and bot crawling. What really makes CloudFlare a valuable platform however is that since it acts as a proxy to numerous websites, it effectively learns from attacks and grows more intelligent over time.

“CloudFlare takes security off of the list of things our users have to manage for themselves,” says Kacy Carlsen, co-founder and CEO of Certified Hosting. “After selecting a security level for their website, our shared web hosting users can let CloudFlare manage their security with no further input required. Even better, in the event that a web hosting server does become overloaded with disruptive traffic, the CloudFlare system automatically calls upon a cached version of the website from one of the distributed cloud servers. Our customers can be completely assured that their website is available to end-users consistently, and is always performing at its best.”

Ho, Ho, Ho-sting Holiday Savings

Allison Howen — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:30:00 GMT

On the 12th day of Christmas Brain Host gave to me: 25 percent off of my hosting fee.

Tis’ the season of savings, so Website Magazine will be sharing a few holiday-themed offers from Web companies with our audience throughout the next few weeks.

In celebration of the 12 days of Christmas, Brain Host is offering 12 days of savings from Dec. 14 – 25. Starting today and running through Christmas, new customers can receive 25 percent off of a one-year hosting plan when they sign up through the holiday special promotion.

"A website is a fun gift to give someone special this Christmas," says Corey Hammond, Brain Host's Chief Development Officer. "Or you could always use the deal to treat yourself to a little present instead!"

Brain Hosts’ packages include unlimited bandwidth and storage space, 24/7 US-based customer support, free traffic and SEO packages and a point-and-click website builder – which allows users, regardless of technical skill level, to quickly create websites.

And remember, stay tuned to Website Magazine for more holiday savings information!

Double the Security at 1&1

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 04 May 2011 22:00:00 GMT

If you’re concerned about your website’s availability – pay attention to this. Web hosting provider 1&1 Internet, is offering up a redundant service technology for its pro-level packages and the price is going to shock you (in a good way).

With a backup server in a different location, websites hosted at 1&1 are guaranteed to have maximum availability of 99.99%. All data and applications are mirrored so websites are more dependable than ever before. For this advancement, 1&1 has improved its Web hosting portfolio and is introducing new and innovative 1&1 Dual Hosting packages. Prices start at $2.99 with an upfront, 3-year billing term. The 1&1 Dual Basic package contains 10 GB webspace, 1 domain, 250 e-mail accounts and 10 MySQL database (1 GB each).

"The 1&1 Dual Hosting concept means a new dimension of reliability because every online presence is managed in two different locations in our high performance data center at the same time", says Oliver Mauss, CEO of 1&1 Internet Inc. "Developers, self-employed individuals, and medium-sized businesses can benefit from a professional safeguard that until now only large corporations could afford."

LunarPages Boosts Reseller Hosting Specs, Reduces Prices

Web Hosting Panel : feature — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 15:30:00 GMT

Reseller web hosting is one of the most competitive environments on the business web. While vendors could compete on the quality of customer service, it often comes down to storage bandwidth, and price. Web hosting service provider LunarPages has made...(read more)

The Planet Paying More – Hosting Resellers

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:18:00 GMT

Hosting provider The Planet improved the commission structure for its partner program; registered referral partners will now receive incentives on an even broader range of contract terms.

In addition to standard monthly recurring payments for contracts of 12 months or longer, The Planet now provides commissions for month-to-month agreements and six-month contracts. The Planet’s Partner Plus Referral Program provides pays out up to 20 percent of deal size.

“We joined The Planet’s referral program to have a trusted technology partner, and we’re confident in their delivery based on our experience,” said Dean Dorazio, chief executive officer at Wakefly (http://www.wakefly.com). “The solutions we build for customers – new websites, custom applications and online advertising – all rely on platforms that are available around the clock. With The Planet’s enhanced commission structure, we can add more value to our bottom line while providing end-to-end technology solutions for our customers.”

“Referral partners like Wakefly consistently look for new opportunities to provide value to their customers while building new revenue streams,” said Drew Jenkins, channel sales manager for The Planet. “To do that, they must have technology partners they can trust. We offer a wide range of hosting solutions within our portfolio, so partners can solve a variety of IT problems for their clients. With the improvements to our commission structure, our channel partners have even more opportunities to benefit from referring business to The Planet.”

eNom Slashing Prices for Resellers

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:37:00 GMT

Domain name wholesaler eNom is offering bargain-basement promotional pricing for hosting companies (and those interested in starting a reseller business or moving over to eNom) who enroll at next week's HostingCon 2010 conference in Austin. WM does not typically cover pricing reduction announcements but we think this one is pretty interesting, particularly for web hosting resellers looking to save a few money or who want to transfer out of their current solution.

According to the release, "Savings of up to 80 percent will be offered to new and existing customers who wish to create a new, or renew their, reseller account with eNom, alongside reduced pricing on .TV domain names and the recently launched VeriSign Trust Seal product."

HostingCon 2010 attendees interested in taking advantage of eNom’s special offers can speak with any eNom reseller account manager at the eNom HostingCon 2010 booth (#133) during regular show hours. Offers are valid July 19 thru July 21, 2010.