Wednesday September 1st 2010 by Joe Gardiner
With the release of WordPress 3.0, multi-site functionality allows a network of sites to be managed by a single WordPress dashboard. Unfortunately some of our clients are having difficulties setting up a multi-site network, and WordPress.org codex is not always beginner friendly.
Vhosting offers an alternative by allowing multiple sites to be hosted on your single vCluster IP address. You can then use independent WordPress installs on each of these sites, decentralising a network and allowing you to manage each site manually.
We already have a guide for “vhosting” and “multiple domains on your vCluster“, but you can follow the instructions here as well to setup multiple WordPress installs on vhosts. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Cloud Computing, vhosting, Wordpress
Posted in Wordpress |
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Wednesday September 1st 2010 by Joe Gardiner
CatN experienced unscheduled downtime for the majority of yesterday due to a major hardware failure.
Yesterday we suffered a major RAID card failure on a database server, unfortunately we didn’t have the spares in place, resulting in a fix taking much more time than it should have and prolonged downtime. The server has been rebuilding the majority of the evening and is concluding now. The time it takes to repair an array of the size we host is measured in 24hour periods, not single hours, so waiting for this rebuild is not a viable restoration method.
If we experience RAID failures we need to have a plan for immediate recovery, but unfortunately our current graceful failure plan was not successful due to the catastrophic failure of the RAID controller, which left the entire RAID in an inconsistent state.
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Posted in Hosting, Servers |
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Monday August 23rd 2010 by Joe Gardiner
From the conclusions made in the article UK government’s spending on hosting and development, I decided to migrate the Government site DFT (Department for Transport) to a php application, specifically WordPress, as this is a CMS we have much experience developing and hosting.
Summary
The key points from the rest of this report follow:
Migration – We migrated dft.gov.uk from it’s current management system to WordPress to illustrate the ease of the process and that the site can be moved to an open source, free management system for very little cost. We had no access to any site files but used a small script to crawl the sites content and images.
Hosting – The copied site is now hosted on our php platform vCluster and was developed on the same platform it is now hosted on.
Expenditure – The migration and hosting process resulted in costs to us of £5000. This small investment could save up to £64,800 per month, £777,600 per annum, and this is for a single Government site.
You can view the result of the migration and our sample site running on WordPress here: DFT sample site.
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Tags: Case Study, Cloud Computing, performance, Wordpress
Posted in Case Studies, Wordpress |
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Monday August 16th 2010 by Joe Gardiner
Alexa Internet is a web company owned by Amazon that provides a toolbar that offers advice to it’s user on navigation, and tracks a users behaviour transmitting it to Alexa for analysis of browsing patterns.
Alexa is widely used, especially when attempting to value a website for a potential sale. Some Webmasters focus on improving their Alexa ranking over improving their content in the pursuit of valuing their site higher. This seems like a waste of effort to me, but this practice does take place, but then you already knew that! With this behaviour taking place, and discrepancies when comparing Alexa rankings with analytic services such as Google’s, some concerns over Alexa’s accuracy have been raised.
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Tags: Alexa, Case Study, Long Tail
Posted in Case Studies, Data |
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Thursday August 12th 2010 by Ollie Armstrong
Do you know how to best design a MySQL database, or how to best structure a MySQL query? If not then this post will certainly interest you.
Here we will be discussing the best MySQL practices you can use not only to keep your database running smoothly and quickly but also to keep it user friendly.
10 – Use sensible field names
Have you ever started on a project and designed the database using ambiguous field names like Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: best practices, MySQL, performance
Posted in Best Practices, MySQL |
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Monday August 9th 2010 by Joe Gardiner
WordPress 3.0 integrates the old WordPress MU (Multi User) version into a single version that supports multiple sites on multiple domains on a single WordPress install.
Your CatN vCluster makes an ideal platform for running a WordPress blog farm. If you’re looking for unlimited domains (including vanity domains!) from a single WordPress installation, this guide will get you up and running in no time.
Note: This guide only applies to WordPress version 3.0 and above.
This guide is dependant on you installing WordPress in your root directory, not in a subdomain.
e.g. install WordPress in your www/sites/fubra-customer/http folder
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Cloud Computing, Wordpress
Posted in Wordpress |
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Friday July 16th 2010 by Joe Gardiner
With a plethora of cloud hosting services available to the market it is becoming more difficult to find a provider that suits your specific needs.
I decided to put together a list of questions to help you analyse exactly the service a cloud provider can offer you, to help your move to a cloud platform go as smoothly as possible.
1. Which languages does their platform support?
This may seem like an obvious one, but dig a little deeper. You need to know if your app will run on a providers system, and in some cases even when a platform claims to run any php application for example, certain configurations, such as database, may prevent this from being the case.
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Tags: Cloud Computing, Hosting
Posted in Cloud Computing |
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Wednesday July 14th 2010 by Joe Gardiner
A cloud hosting platform offers many benefits. These are often reduced to four main categories, Cost, Stability, Security, and Scalability. You can read about these categories in more detail in a previous blog post…
For large websites arguably the two most important benefits are scalability and cost, and in a cloud environment they are closely linked. The nature of a cloud platform allows resources to be allocated and removed as a sites demand scales, which is reflected in the expenditure required from the business as quantities of resources are consumed. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Cloud Computing, Hosting |
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Thursday July 1st 2010 by Ollie Armstrong
Welcome to the fourth blog in the series of posts teaching you basic SSH commands.
In this part, we will be building on what you learnt last time to improve your directory navigating, and also going over some more advanced switches.
Once again you will need to connect to your vCluster, and once again I will refer you to the tutorial on connecting to your vCluster. If you haven’t read the third part yet, then you can find it in Getting to grips with SSH part 3.
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Posted in Getting to grips with, SSH |
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Wednesday June 30th 2010 by Joe Gardiner
The COI (Central Office of Information) released the annual report for government websites at the end of June 2010, giving us an insight into expenditure for all sections of government informational websites, and analytical data such as visitor numbers.
This data has allowed us to carry out our own CatN analysis and apply our billing metrics and pricing packages to central government sites data. It is worth noting that these sites are purely static content with some search functions and other small scripts.
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Posted in Case Studies, Cloud Computing |
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