Explaining the vCluster Timeline
By Jonathon Wednesday, 9th May 2012
The parent company behind CatN, Fubra, has long had aspirations of providing a web hosting service. As the company has grown over the past 12 years it has had to overcome a multitude of hosting related problems and has always thought it was well positioned to help others when they found themselves navigating the same twisty road. Various versions of Fubra’s hosting product reached different levels of maturity; some never making it out of the conceptual stages, some never quite having the development resource to make a polished product. None ever made it to market. In 2010, however, the idea of the CatN vCluster was born. Fubra required a platform which could cope with the traffic levels it’s own sites were generating while being cost effective — they had outgrown traditional hosting offerings and therefore began to develop a new web hosting platform.
The first version of the CatN vCluster was built from an engineering point of view: it was feature rich but hard to maintain, stable but not designed for customers to interact with day-to-day. A team of web developers were brought into the project to develop a control panel which made a large part of the backend engineering code accessible to users and it was this which was launched as the vCluster public beta. This is the system which the majority of CatN vCluster clients currently use. However, while this system proved a large number of the key vCluster technologies, there were still a number of problems with the system which needed to be ironed out. Firstly there was a large amount of duplication in the management layer of the system and, while users didn’t see it, a number of settings were stored in multiple locations requiring each to be updated when any changes were requested. There were also speed issues with the control panel, as well as a number of other technical problems meaning the system required quite frequent maintenance. So in March 2011 a second round of development work started. read more…
Posted in Product Development, Updates, vCluster | 1 Comment »
Migrating the Department for Transport website to WordPress
By Joe Gardiner Monday, 23rd August 2010
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.
Posted in Government Hosting | 5 Comments »