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…
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Work Experience at CatN
By Jake Garrad Friday, 23rd March 2012
This week I’ve been working at Fubra Ltd and focusing on the design side of things. I’ve been working with Nick mainly. Although I didn’t have a major understanding of the technical side of CatN after researching a bit and talking to the developers I began to understand the idea of vClusters and pClusters. When I arrived I was given a task brief for the week, but first I had to research some more about CatN, vClusters and pClusters.
read more…
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Welcome to the new CatN!
By Joe Gardiner Thursday, 14th April 2011
Welcome to the new look CatN hosting! With the launch of the new site CatN enters a very exciting period of development with the addition of new products and the hardening of current ones.
I will continue to post on the progress of vCluster development, but in the mean time let’s take a look at the the new site.
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vCluster Billing System
By Joe Gardiner Thursday, 24th June 2010
After many weeks of development I am happy to announce the release of the CatN Control Panel 1.1, a complete billing system, and the finalised pricing page.
You can view our vCluster packages and allowances, usage prices, and support packages at catn.com/vcluster/pricing/. If you’re yet to add a payment method please remember you have until the 15th July, and if you’re deciding to leave us, a big thank you for all the feedback you gave over the development process.
Let’s take a quick look at the new releases…
read more…
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What is clustered hosting?
By Joe Gardiner Tuesday, 11th May 2010
Clustered hosting is the newest way of hosting your website. A cluster is a group of computers or servers, whose combined computational power provides a service.
Clustered hosting involves spreading the website across multiple servers, like layers. In the CatN stack each layer does its own individual task, so one for web, one for databases, one for logging etc. This has one considerable advantage, if one server goes down the others won’t.
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