Hosting: Your options
Choosing hosting is more than just choosing the company that offers the best features for you. Hosting products can vary drastically based on the infastructure the company offers, and some companies offer more than one type of hosting setup.
At CatN we think we’ve found the perfect solution, balancing performance with security, but lets look at the other options so you can see why our solution is so good!
Wordpress VIP hosting for the rest of us…
As you may have read, TechCrunch, a blog focused on profiling and reviewing internet products, was hacked a couple of weeks ago. They were using Rackspace’s hosting service, but if you run a traceroute on the TechCrunch domain you’ll see that it’s now pointing to wordpress.com. Even more of a giveaway, they have changed the hosting tag in the footer of their site, so it now says, “Powered by WordPress.com VIP“.
Why Wordpress is the most popular CMS…
Is Wordpress the best blog/content management system available? We think so, and in 2009 the Open Source CMS Awards thought so too! Lets have a look at what makes Wordpress so popular.
According to Technorati’s most 100 visited blogs and CMS wire’s research, and Pingdom’s recent review of the blogging market, Wordpress blogs claim at least a 27% market share. If the wordpress.com hosted blogs are to be included, that figure could be as high as 36%.
more…
Speculations on the Facebook PHP Rumours…
Rumours abound this weekend, and as usual in such matters, details are thin on the ground. Did that meeting really happen? And who is this lonesome coder supposedly re-writing PHP for the last two years? Is it a new runtime or a compiler? Someone knows, and for sure something is afoot, but what is it?
Calling vCluster beta testers!
As we gear up for the full product launch of our vCluster hosting platform, we enter the final period of testing to ensure our product is ready to be unleashed on the public!
Securing mod_php – without the vasectomy
In it’s most typical setup, Apache 2/mod_php is not secure enough for shared virtual hosting.
With the typical mod_php setup, a rogue webmaster or bug in a single PHP script could compromise every script and configuration file for every site hosted on the server, no matter how security conscious the developer.
Backing up your Wordpress blog
It might seem like an obvious suggestion to backup your Wordpress blog, but countless users do not have a regular backup schedule, use redundant plugins, or update their wordpress install without backing up before hand. Bad idea…
How many times have you read horror stories about hacked blogs or failed updates? To reiterate, backing up your blog on a regular basis is extremely important!
Atmospheric pressure graph tweak
I’ve just made a small improvement to the atmospheric pressure graphs displaying information from our weather station.
The shorter period graphs were often having their y-axis auto scaled from 1,000 – 1,200 millibar. This wasn’t very helpful when the pressure was varying by only small values just above the 1,000 millibar mark (as isn’t uncommon on the 24 hour graphs) — it left a lot of empty graph space at the top. The change forces the graph to display the fixed range of 900 – 1,100. This places 1,000 millibar in the centre of the plot, making these small variations much clearer.
OpenVZ forced umount of lustre mount problem
Recently we managed to find an answer to a quite worrying lustre problem that has been bugging us for some time. Every now and then on servers running OpenVZ containers that make use of lustre filesystem we would see a log entry in /var/log/messages saying:
kernel: Lustre: setting import lustre-server-MDT0000_UUID INACTIVE by administrator request
followed by a number of broken mounts/fs errors inside containers running on the server that the log entry appeared. In effect, all the containers making extensive use of the same lustre server would stop working properly (for example, apache serving sites from lustre mounts would start spawning processes all of which would be unsuccessfully trying to read data from the mounts).
Adventures with Lustre
For the last few months we’ve been busy integrating, testing and tuning Lustre for use on our hosting platform. I thought I’d share some notes…
Lustre is most widely used in HPC settings and there seem to be relatively few operations using it in conjunction with web servers and virtualisation. Reading through the wiki and mailling lists it soon becomes clear that Lustre has not been designed with small files and high metadata request rates in mind. more…
