Web Hosting Panel : web hosting

1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server Enhances Scalability for SMBs

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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....(read more)

CloudAccess Integrates Identity and Access Management

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

Deliver Enterprise Apps with Improved Performance, Speed

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

Provision and Manage CloudByte Volumes with OpenStack Cinder

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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....(read more)

Cache Anything and Speed Up Load Times

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

Janitor Monkey Will Clean Up Your Old AWS Instances

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

High Storage Instances Come to Amazon EC2

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

Riak CS Lets Users Replicate Data Globally

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

NetApp Brings AWS to the Enterprise

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

GlobalSign Accelerates SSL-Certified Pages

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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,...(read more)

Remote Support for Private Clouds from RackSpace

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

Percona Offered by Big Hosting Companies

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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....(read more)

Microsoft Brings Azure Cloud OS to China

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 18:38:00 GMT

China’s increasingly important role in the future of the Internet and Web hosting just got a major seal of approval from Microsoft, who recently announced that it was going to bring its Windows Azure cloud-based operating system to the Asian nation. This launch, which follows the release of Windows Server 2012, will bring multi-tenant public and private cloud services to millions of the businesses that operate in the world’s most populous country, giving owners a choice in how (and when) they will move to the cloud. Thanks to both Server 2012 and Azure, Windows customers can find the cloud that best matches the needs of their businesses, from on-premises datacenters to a public cloud. According to a report from Forrester Research , the public cloud market in China is set to grow from $297 million in 2011 to an astonishing $3.8 billion in 2020. Microsoft has signed a memorandum of understanding with the municipality of Shanghai and inked a deal to license its technologies with the company 21Vianet , which will provide Windows Azure services from its local Chinese datacenters to provide the best performance for its customers in the country....(read more)

DreamHost's Cloud Storage Service Goes Beta

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 18:15:00 GMT

DreamHost , the Web hosting and cloud computing company, is diving into the cloud-based object storage industry with its new DreamObjects service, which is built upon the open source Ceph file system originally developed by – who else? – DreamHost. In addition to the Ceph file system, DreamObjects was built on a variety of other open source tools, including the Ubuntu Linux 12.4 OS distribution from Canonical and the open source Chef tool for automated provisioning and configuration. DreamHost will also be contributing code back to these open source communities. Over 300,000 developers and entrepreneurs, across the world, currently make up DreamHost’s customers, and the company has been designing much of DreamObjects’s functionality based on that audience’s needs thanks to initial feedback. Among the primary features of the DreamObjects service is API compatibility with other major object storage services (including Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files). It will also come with easy-to-use interfaces and simple pricing schemes that come standard with the service. Pricing starts at seven cents per GB per month, and can dip below five cents per GB per month for some monthly prepaid plans. To transfer data from the service it will cost seven cents per GB. Initially, DreamObjects will be offered as a public beta, and interested users can sign up on DreamHost's website. The company also plans to offer a free two-month trial of DreamObjects with 10GB...(read more)

AWS Comes to CoreSite's New York Datacenter

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is going metropolitan. For the first time, AWS Direct Connect will have a presence in New York thanks to a new partnership with datacenter provider CoreSite . CoreSite provides datacenter products and interconnection services to over 750 customers, including enterprise-level organizations, communications providers, cloud and content companies, financial firms, media and entertainment companies, government agencies and more. And now, the company boasts AWS Direct Connect availability in its New York datacenter. This move helps CoreSite meet the increasing customer demand for access to the AWS cloud, and will help improve its ability to service digital content communities, financial organizations and managed service providers, as Direct Connect allows customers to directly access cloud services using a secure private network connection. Direct access provides increased scalability for throughput and a more consistent network performance for reduced network costs. It also helps reduce bandwidth costs while increasing capacity. More than anything, this decision makes it easy for CoreSite customers to establish a dedicated network connection from their location to the AWS cloud without accessing the public cloud over the Internet. This leads to improved application performance and enhanced security – two of the biggest concerns for companies using the cloud. Customers can access Direct Connect using a standard, single-mode fiber 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps Ethernet...(read more)