Category: Cloud

As a cloud supplier we have a vested interest in the cloud market and technologies. Blog posts in this category are about cloud principles and the technology used to achieve them.

8th April 2013 by in Cloud, Labs, LogPipe, Technology, vCluster

Advanced PHP error handling in the cloud

LogPipe is a PHP extension module that extends the default PHP error messages with additional information and allows you to pipe the logs to an external program or write them to a syslog facility.

When a user connects to a PHP website hosted on a cloud platform like vCluster, the response may come from different web servers running on different virtual and physical machines. This introduced the problem of needing to aggregate the PHP error logs from different cluster nodes and then split them up again based on the virtual host. Unfortunately the default PHP error message handler does not provide the information or ability to pipe the error logs to an external program, unlike the CustomLog directive in Apache does.

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3rd January 2013 by in Cloud, Technology, Virtual, Web Hosting

Is ‘Metal as a Service’ too heavy for the cloud?

Cloud AnvilMetal as a Service is a new layer in the stack under IaaS and is described by Mark Shuttleworth as, “…bringing cloud semantics to the bare metal world.”

Essentially MaaS supplies bare metal that can be deployed similarly to cloud instances, however you are actually deploying physical nodes. Traditionally deploying hardware is time consuming and technically complicated, MaaS simplifies this and makes it possible to interact with physical devices similarly to AWS instances (with a greater time frame and without automated API deployments).

Canonical invented and were the first to market with an offering like this, and have integrated the JuJu deployment system with MaaS. Using JuJu, operating systems and services can be deployed allowing rapid scaling without the need for a senior engineer or network architect. JuJu is similar to Chef or PXE and in a similar way allows the rapid and simple interconnection of services across multiple physical hosts.

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16th July 2010 by in Cloud, Web Hosting

Cloud provider sign up check list

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.

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14th July 2010 by in Cloud, Web Hosting

How do large web sites benefit from cloud provisioning?

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 More…

30th June 2010 by in Cloud, Technology, Web Hosting

Benefits of cloud hosting

Cloud hosting is often referred to as an “up and coming” technology that is, “the future”, and it is certainly taking the IT industry by storm. Cloud computing is already here and if there was ever a buzz word, “Cloud” is certainly it!

In fact it has been predicted that by 2012 85% of Fortune 1000 companies will be using a cloud hosting solution or infrastructure. Clearly more than an “up and coming” technology!

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9th February 2010 by in Cloud, Virtual, Web Hosting

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“.

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