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(Gawkwire.com) – As part of the World’s Shortest Webinar Series, veteran data center manager and virtualization monitoring expert, Steve Francis, will demonstrate how to effectively monitor virtualized data center infrastructures, and reveal why issues within virtual environments often go undetected. Data center managers and system administrators will learn how to diagnose puzzling performance issues using LogicMonitor’s automated data center monitoring service.
Webinar Details
Date: Tue, Aug 17, 20110
Time: 11:00 AM
Register here:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/945490817
On the idea for the World’s Shortest Webinar on Virtualization Monitoring, LogicMonitor CEO, Steve Francis notes, “Because virtualization makes it so easy to spawn new machines, systems come up and down much quicker, and more often. That can pose significant challenges for monitoring systems, as well as the IT staff who are responsible for keeping these constantly changing monitoring configurations up-to-date.”
The demo will allow IT managers to see that in-depth data center monitoring doesn’t have to be a time-consuming process. With automation from LogicMonitor, they can have a world-class monitoring service up and running in about 30 minutes.
The Virtualization Monitoring demo is LogicMonitor’s fifth episode in The World’s Shortest Webinar Series, the first four covering NetApp Monitoring, Netscaler monitoring, MySQL monitoring, and open source monitoring alternatives.
“We managed datacenters for ASPs and Enterprises for over 15 years. During that time, we were never able to find a monitoring system that delivered what is really needed in the trenches by a web-focused company. So we built it ourselves,” stated Francis.
http://www.gawkwire.com/events_html/webinar_to_demystify_virtual_data_center_monitoring.html
(Gawkwire.com) – Are you a programmer? Want to do something for the environment and even make the world a better place? Then start optimizing your code!
It seems like today the solution to most software performance issues is to throw more hardware at the problem instead of making the software run faster on existing hardware. Doing more with less is a forgotten mantra, and Wirth’s Law continues to ring true:
“Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.”
Jeff Atwood has an interesting article in his Coding Horror blog (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001198.html) regarding the value of code optimization versus just buying more hardware. His argument is that since hardware is cheap compared to programmer salaries, the first step to make software run faster should always be to buy more hardware. We recommend you read the whole thing (it’s an interesting read).
He rounds off the article with this recommended approach:
1. Throw cheap, faster hardware at the performance problem.
2. If the application now meets your performance goals, stop.
3. Benchmark your code to identify specifically where the performance problems are.
4. Analyze and optimize the areas that you identified in the previous step.
5. If the application now meets your performance goals, stop.
6. Go to step 1.
This makes perfect sense if you actually go through all the steps and really do optimize after the initial short-term fix of buying more hardware.
HOWEVER, it is all too common that companies don’t take code optimization seriously enough and never go beyond step 3 above. The solution will more or less always be to throw more hardware at the problem.
In addition to this, a lot of programmers simply assume that it’s ok to demand more powerful hardware for their software to run well and don’t put much effort into doing more with the same resources.
These two things combined give us an environment where increasing amounts of increasingly powerful hardware is being used as a crutch to compensate for the poor performance of our software.
Four BIG problems
Here is why today’s tendency to simply throw more hardware at software performance problems is unhealthy and shortsighted:
1. You do not leverage anywhere close to the full potential of your hardware.
2. You end up with more hardware, which consumes more electricity, which will cost more in the long run (especially if you run a large-scale operation).
3. Using more electricity is not just a cost issue, it’s bad for the environment.
4. More hardware means more components, which in turn is bad for the environment.
Saving costs is often used as an argument for not putting in the time to make code run faster, but there are plenty of costs on top of the purchase price to take into consideration when you add more hardware; increased power consumption, sys-admin resources and future scaling issues should also be taken into account.
The implications of more efficient code
What if we could double overall code efficiency? (Don’t say it isn’t possible.) That would mean a huge reduction in the amount of hardware that companies would need to run their operations, especially on the server side (since office workers would still need a computer each).
Imagine your web servers being able to handle twice the requests they are today. Imagine modern top-of-the-line software running fine on modest, even old, hardware. It’s a nice thought, isn’t it?
Hardware manufacturers might not be all too happy with that development, though… But here is why we shouldn’t care about that:
In 2005, servers consumed as much power in the United States as televisions (http://royal.pingdom.com/2007/03/08/servers-consuming-as-much-power-as-color-tvs/) , and that was four years ago! We don’t know what the full carbon footprint of the world’s servers (and other hardware, it’s all running software!) actually is today, but it is bound to be significant and growing.
Why needing less powerful hardware is a Good Thing
There is another very important benefit that would come from a more efficient code base: The faster our code is overall, less powerful hardware is needed to run common applications, which in turn would make it possible to create more affordable computers. This would be a huge benefit to third-world and developing countries, not to mention less fortunate people in the industrial nations.
Please get that old-school mentality back
Huge gains in performance can be made from effective, competent optimizations of algorithms and code. Even when you think your code is fast, it can usually be made to perform several times faster with the right approach.
To give you some examples, just look at the impressive performance gains between first-generation games for game consoles and those released a couple of years into the life-cycle of that same console, or the things coders were able to make C64 and Amiga computers do back in the day. These are examples where software performance was improved by leaps and bounds without resorting to hardware upgrades.
The Coding Horror article we mentioned above has a quote from Patrick Smacchia (from CodeBetter.com http://codebetter.com/blogs/patricksmacchia/archive/2008/12/01/lessons-learned-from-a-real-world-focus-on-performance.aspx ), where he observes how Amiga programmers were able to increase software performance by an incredible 50 times in the time frame of just a few years by continuously challenging themselves on the same hardware.
Do more with less
If doing more with less was a more valued mindset in software development, we would all reap substantial long-term benefits. We would need less (and less powerful) hardware, we would save money, we would save power, and in doing so, we would help save the environment.
Think about that.
http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/using_hardware_to_compensate_for_slow_software.html
Virtualization is obviously great business for hosting and cloud service providers enabling new capabilities in measuring service levels, provisioning, and high availability. The big surprise has been that the more we use virtualization, the more we have storage performance issues.
For all the latest HostingCon news and information, visit HostingCon – The largest gathering of hosted services professionals in the world.
http://www.gawkwire.com/events_html/virtualization_drives_storage_performance_problems.html
The following is a post by David Wartell of R1Soft, who will be presenting at HostingCon 2010 on Tuesday, July 20th at 8:00AM.
Virtualization is obviously great business for hosting and cloud service providers enabling new capabilities in measuring service levels, provisioning, and high availability. The big surprise has been that the more we use virtualization, the more we have storage performance issues.
Virtualization is all about sharing and making the most of hardware resources. Let’s face it, we would all like each application to have its own dedicated physical server, but when it comes down to it it’s just a matter of cost and manageability, and all we are trying to do is squeeze as much out of our hardware and floor space as possible.
This all sounds feasible with quad-cores becoming commonplace, memory perhaps getting exponentially less expensive, and 1 Terabyte SATA drives being found in the bargain bin. The big challenge is that the storage has not really gotten all that much faster in the last two decades.
So now take the same disk performance you had with a physical server running a decade ago and share it with five, ten or even fifty virtual machines. You have now been introduced to what people are calling the Virtual Machine I/O Blender. When you had a single O/S to disk ratio, storage performance was relatively smooth, but as you add additional virtual machines the disks have to manage all of these different I/O loads and this causes serious performance problems.
If you make a list of the top things that can be modified to improve virtualization storage performance you have to look at backups as probably number one without a close second. Typically the largest user and biggest waste of disk I/O is the backup process, and the reason is simple. Most backup software reads all or most of the data off of the disks every time it runs.
A decade ago if we were talking about backup software we would be talking about how to save network bandwidth, how to save CPU cycles, and how to get the backup off of the network and server. This was accomplished one of two ways. First, SAN backup where you read the data directly off of disk without involving the server CPU or network, and second the rsync algorithm, an ingenious way to determine small parts of files that changed and only use network bandwidth for the changed parts or deltas. Both of these methods are widely used by most commercial and free backup software backups. Both of these methods do nothing to help your storage performance problems.
The way to check-off backups from the list of virtualization storage problems is to use asynchronous-replication type backup software. What asynchronous replication does is drastically reduce the I/O requests involved in a backup operation. And by “drastically”, I mean it takes 15 minutes instead of 15 hours. This works by using special device drivers to know ahead of time which parts of your file system or virtual disks have changed since your last scheduled backup operation. By doing this, only the data that actually changed is read from the disk, and the rest is ignored because, on average, only a fraction of a virtual machine’s data changes on an hourly or even daily basis. This means very little disk I/O is done during the backup operation. You can learn more about asynchronous replication products at http://www.r1soft.com
Join David Wartell from R1Soft on Tuesday, July 20th at 8:00AM for a HostingCon session where he will discuss how asynchronous backup is revolutionizing disaster recovery and data storage in the cloud.
About David Wartell
David Wartell is the founder of R1Soft. Prior to BBS Technologies, Wartell was the President and CEO of Righteous Software Inc. Wartell has over 10 years experience in software development and Internet infrastructure and has held positions ranging from software engineer and network engineer to CEO. Before starting R1Soft he worked as the Sr. Network Engineer for EV1Servers/ThePlanet in Houston, Texas where he was responsible for one of the largest computer networks that supported over 20,000 Linux and Windows servers.
For all the latest HostingCon news and information, visit HostingCon – The largest gathering of hosted services professionals in the world.
(The Hosting News) – White Paper provides insights into study methodology and CloudLinux’s innovative technology that solves critical performance issues for Hosting Providers and Data Centers
Princeton, NJ (March 24, 2010) – CloudLinux Inc., an innovative software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, today releases a technical white paper, “How to Squeeze More Efficiency Out of Your Infrastructure.” The paper details current inadequacies in the hosting arena and how the CloudLinux Operating System (OS) effectively addresses these issues. In particular, with CloudLinux technology, the study proceeds to explain how web hosts can double the density of their shared hosting servers while simultaneously improving server stability.
The proprietary research conducted by CloudLinux was meant to provide evidence of the inadequacies of existing server management techniques. Included is a detailed analysis of the two research methodologies used: a statistical analysis of server log activity and a survey of the experiences of real world hosting providers.
The study details the impact on –hosting providers who, today, lack the ability to optimize the number of clients on a server due to risk of increased instability. Key findings include:
46.6% of web hosts reported they experienced downtime due to a lone site at least a few times a month
Frequently a single site or a very small number of sites utilize a disproportionate amount of resources:
Top 1% of sites are responsible for 39% of the static requests (on average) to the server
Top 5% of sites are responsible for 65% of static requests (on average) to the server
On 25% of the servers analyzed, top 1% of the sites are responsible for 50% or more of dynamic requests to the server
Reasons for server spikes which can bring down an entire server can include:
One badly executed script on one site
New software introduced to a site
To mitigate some of these risks, many hosting providers keep server capacity at 60% or below in order to maintain stability, but they sacrifice optimizing their infrastructure in the process. This is the problem that CloudLinux solves with its new Lightweight Virtual Environment™ (LVE) technology. It has the capability to vastly improve the density of shared hosting servers, often enabling hosting providers to double server density without sacrificing stability. The benefits of this approach include:
Properly manage hundreds or thousands of websites simultaneously on one server without risking server stability
Prevent one site from affecting the performance of other sites on a server
Gain control and manage server resources down to an individual site level, versus a server level
More quickly identify sites which are not functioning properly without running the risk of a single site slowing or taking down a whole server
The release of this white paper comes at a critical time. With the growing demand by websites to run a new array of rich applications and cloud services in a stable server environment, data centers and hosting providers are challenged to provide the quality service these customers require, cost effectively. With the CloudLinux LVE technology, hosting providers can introduce a new level of flexibility that optimizes their infrastructure. “Based on my many years of experience in the hosting arena, I am thrilled to show how CloudLinux LVE technology closes the market gap that exists in the web hosting environment by outperforming the standard OS,” states Igor Seletskiy, CEO and Founder of CloudLinux. “As our white paper outlines, it is now possible to achieve a balanced, stable server environment along with improving density of shared hosting servers through a well-supported Linux version specifically optimized for web hosters.”
CloudLinux OS is an innovative cost-effective solution designed to improve control in the shared hosting and data center arena, while simultaneously increasing control and stability, as well as improving overall performance. For a free copy of the white paper, go to www.cloudlinux.com/whitepaper. For more information, please visit www.cloudlinux.com
About CloudLinux, Inc.
Founded in Princeton, NJ, CloudLinux is a privately funded company that combines unique expertise in the service provider business with in-depth technical knowledge of hosting, kernel development and open source.
CloudLinux provides hosting companies and datacenters with the only commercially supported Linux operating system (OS) optimized for their needs. The new technology behind CloudLinux has been proven to increase density; stability and performance helping customers realize reduced operating costs and increased profitability. For more information, please visit www.cloudlinux.com
CloudLinux Research Demonstrates Critical Performance Issues
(The Hosting News) – White Paper provides insights into study methodology and CloudLinux’s innovative technology that solves critical performance issues for Hosting Providers and Data Centers
Princeton, NJ (March 24, 2010) – CloudLinux Inc., an innovative software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, today releases a technical white paper, “How to Squeeze More Efficiency Out of Your Infrastructure.” The paper details current inadequacies in the hosting arena and how the CloudLinux Operating System (OS) effectively addresses these issues. In particular, with CloudLinux technology, the study proceeds to explain how web hosts can double the density of their shared hosting servers while simultaneously improving server stability.
The proprietary research conducted by CloudLinux was meant to provide evidence of the inadequacies of existing server management techniques. Included is a detailed analysis of the two research methodologies used: a statistical analysis of server log activity and a survey of the experiences of real world hosting providers.
The study details the impact on –hosting providers who, today, lack the ability to optimize the number of clients on a server due to risk of increased instability. Key findings include:
46.6% of web hosts reported they experienced downtime due to a lone site at least a few times a month
Frequently a single site or a very small number of sites utilize a disproportionate amount of resources:
Top 1% of sites are responsible for 39% of the static requests (on average) to the server
Top 5% of sites are responsible for 65% of static requests (on average) to the server
On 25% of the servers analyzed, top 1% of the sites are responsible for 50% or more of dynamic requests to the server
Reasons for server spikes which can bring down an entire server can include:
One badly executed script on one site
New software introduced to a site
To mitigate some of these risks, many hosting providers keep server capacity at 60% or below in order to maintain stability, but they sacrifice optimizing their infrastructure in the process. This is the problem that CloudLinux solves with its new Lightweight Virtual Environment™ (LVE) technology. It has the capability to vastly improve the density of shared hosting servers, often enabling hosting providers to double server density without sacrificing stability. The benefits of this approach include:
Properly manage hundreds or thousands of websites simultaneously on one server without risking server stability
Prevent one site from affecting the performance of other sites on a server
Gain control and manage server resources down to an individual site level, versus a server level
More quickly identify sites which are not functioning properly without running the risk of a single site slowing or taking down a whole server
The release of this white paper comes at a critical time. With the growing demand by websites to run a new array of rich applications and cloud services in a stable server environment, data centers and hosting providers are challenged to provide the quality service these customers require, cost effectively. With the CloudLinux LVE technology, hosting providers can introduce a new level of flexibility that optimizes their infrastructure. “Based on my many years of experience in the hosting arena, I am thrilled to show how CloudLinux LVE technology closes the market gap that exists in the web hosting environment by outperforming the standard OS,” states Igor Seletskiy, CEO and Founder of CloudLinux. “As our white paper outlines, it is now possible to achieve a balanced, stable server environment along with improving density of shared hosting servers through a well-supported Linux version specifically optimized for web hosters.”
CloudLinux OS is an innovative cost-effective solution designed to improve control in the shared hosting and data center arena, while simultaneously increasing control and stability, as well as improving overall performance. For a free copy of the white paper, go to www.cloudlinux.com/whitepaper. For more information, please visit www.cloudlinux.com
About CloudLinux, Inc.
Founded in Princeton, NJ, CloudLinux is a privately funded company that combines unique expertise in the service provider business with in-depth technical knowledge of hosting, kernel development and open source.
CloudLinux provides hosting companies and datacenters with the only commercially supported Linux operating system (OS) optimized for their needs. The new technology behind CloudLinux has been proven to increase density; stability and performance helping customers realize reduced operating costs and increased profitability. For more information, please visit www.cloudlinux.com
CloudLinux Research Demonstrates Critical Performance Issues
(The Hosting News) – White Paper provides insights into study methodology and CloudLinux’s innovative technology that solves critical performance issues for Hosting Providers and Data Centers
Princeton, NJ (March 24, 2010) – CloudLinux Inc., an innovative software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, today releases a technical white paper, “How to Squeeze More Efficiency Out of Your Infrastructure.” The paper details current inadequacies in the hosting arena and how the CloudLinux Operating System (OS) effectively addresses these issues. In particular, with CloudLinux technology, the study proceeds to explain how web hosts can double the density of their shared hosting servers while simultaneously improving server stability.
The proprietary research conducted by CloudLinux was meant to provide evidence of the inadequacies of existing server management techniques. Included is a detailed analysis of the two research methodologies used: a statistical analysis of server log activity and a survey of the experiences of real world hosting providers.
The study details the impact on –hosting providers who, today, lack the ability to optimize the number of clients on a server due to risk of increased instability. Key findings include:
46.6% of web hosts reported they experienced downtime due to a lone site at least a few times a month
Frequently a single site or a very small number of sites utilize a disproportionate amount of resources:
Top 1% of sites are responsible for 39% of the static requests (on average) to the server
Top 5% of sites are responsible for 65% of static requests (on average) to the server
On 25% of the servers analyzed, top 1% of the sites are responsible for 50% or more of dynamic requests to the server
Reasons for server spikes which can bring down an entire server can include:
One badly executed script on one site
New software introduced to a site
To mitigate some of these risks, many hosting providers keep server capacity at 60% or below in order to maintain stability, but they sacrifice optimizing their infrastructure in the process. This is the problem that CloudLinux solves with its new Lightweight Virtual Environment™ (LVE) technology. It has the capability to vastly improve the density of shared hosting servers, often enabling hosting providers to double server density without sacrificing stability. The benefits of this approach include:
Properly manage hundreds or thousands of websites simultaneously on one server without risking server stability
Prevent one site from affecting the performance of other sites on a server
Gain control and manage server resources down to an individual site level, versus a server level
More quickly identify sites which are not functioning properly without running the risk of a single site slowing or taking down a whole server
The release of this white paper comes at a critical time. With the growing demand by websites to run a new array of rich applications and cloud services in a stable server environment, data centers and hosting providers are challenged to provide the quality service these customers require, cost effectively. With the CloudLinux LVE technology, hosting providers can introduce a new level of flexibility that optimizes their infrastructure. “Based on my many years of experience in the hosting arena, I am thrilled to show how CloudLinux LVE technology closes the market gap that exists in the web hosting environment by outperforming the standard OS,” states Igor Seletskiy, CEO and Founder of CloudLinux. “As our white paper outlines, it is now possible to achieve a balanced, stable server environment along with improving density of shared hosting servers through a well-supported Linux version specifically optimized for web hosters.”
CloudLinux OS is an innovative cost-effective solution designed to improve control in the shared hosting and data center arena, while simultaneously increasing control and stability, as well as improving overall performance. For a free copy of the white paper, go to www.cloudlinux.com/whitepaper. For more information, please visit www.cloudlinux.com
About CloudLinux, Inc.
Founded in Princeton, NJ, CloudLinux is a privately funded company that combines unique expertise in the service provider business with in-depth technical knowledge of hosting, kernel development and open source.
CloudLinux provides hosting companies and datacenters with the only commercially supported Linux operating system (OS) optimized for their needs. The new technology behind CloudLinux has been proven to increase density; stability and performance helping customers realize reduced operating costs and increased profitability. For more information, please visit www.cloudlinux.com
CloudLinux Research Demonstrates Critical Performance Issues
(The Hosting News) – White Paper provides insights into study methodology and CloudLinux’s innovative technology that solves critical performance issues for Hosting Providers and Data Centers
Princeton, NJ (March 24, 2010) – CloudLinux Inc., an innovative software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, today releases a technical white paper, “How to Squeeze More Efficiency Out of Your Infrastructure.” The paper details current inadequacies in the hosting arena and how the CloudLinux Operating System (OS) effectively addresses these issues. In particular, with CloudLinux technology, the study proceeds to explain how web hosts can double the density of their shared hosting servers while simultaneously improving server stability.
The proprietary research conducted by CloudLinux was meant to provide evidence of the inadequacies of existing server management techniques. Included is a detailed analysis of the two research methodologies used: a statistical analysis of server log activity and a survey of the experiences of real world hosting providers.
The study details the impact on –hosting providers who, today, lack the ability to optimize the number of clients on a server due to risk of increased instability. Key findings include:
46.6% of web hosts reported they experienced downtime due to a lone site at least a few times a month
Frequently a single site or a very small number of sites utilize a disproportionate amount of resources:
Top 1% of sites are responsible for 39% of the static requests (on average) to the server
Top 5% of sites are responsible for 65% of static requests (on average) to the server
On 25% of the servers analyzed, top 1% of the sites are responsible for 50% or more of dynamic requests to the server
Reasons for server spikes which can bring down an entire server can include:
One badly executed script on one site
New software introduced to a site
To mitigate some of these risks, many hosting providers keep server capacity at 60% or below in order to maintain stability, but they sacrifice optimizing their infrastructure in the process. This is the problem that CloudLinux solves with its new Lightweight Virtual Environment™ (LVE) technology. It has the capability to vastly improve the density of shared hosting servers, often enabling hosting providers to double server density without sacrificing stability. The benefits of this approach include:
Properly manage hundreds or thousands of websites simultaneously on one server without risking server stability
Prevent one site from affecting the performance of other sites on a server
Gain control and manage server resources down to an individual site level, versus a server level
More quickly identify sites which are not functioning properly without running the risk of a single site slowing or taking down a whole server
The release of this white paper comes at a critical time. With the growing demand by websites to run a new array of rich applications and cloud services in a stable server environment, data centers and hosting providers are challenged to provide the quality service these customers require, cost effectively. With the CloudLinux LVE technology, hosting providers can introduce a new level of flexibility that optimizes their infrastructure. “Based on my many years of experience in the hosting arena, I am thrilled to show how CloudLinux LVE technology closes the market gap that exists in the web hosting environment by outperforming the standard OS,” states Igor Seletskiy, CEO and Founder of CloudLinux. “As our white paper outlines, it is now possible to achieve a balanced, stable server environment along with improving density of shared hosting servers through a well-supported Linux version specifically optimized for web hosters.”
CloudLinux OS is an innovative cost-effective solution designed to improve control in the shared hosting and data center arena, while simultaneously increasing control and stability, as well as improving overall performance. For a free copy of the white paper, go to www.cloudlinux.com/whitepaper. For more information, please visit www.cloudlinux.com
About CloudLinux, Inc.
Founded in Princeton, NJ, CloudLinux is a privately funded company that combines unique expertise in the service provider business with in-depth technical knowledge of hosting, kernel development and open source.
CloudLinux provides hosting companies and datacenters with the only commercially supported Linux operating system (OS) optimized for their needs. The new technology behind CloudLinux has been proven to increase density; stability and performance helping customers realize reduced operating costs and increased profitability. For more information, please visit www.cloudlinux.com
CloudLinux Research Demonstrates Critical Performance Issues
You would be amazed at the amount of social networking and community software tools that are on the market today. The immense popularity of MySpace, Facebook and YouTube has encouraged many people to create their own online community. Community sites are expansive in topics, ranging from sites such as dating and video sharing to pets and video games. Below are just a few of the many options that exist for online communities:
Social networking sites
Social media sites
News publishing sites
Dating sites
Blog sites
Video sharing sites
Photo sharing sites
What Type of Hosting Do You Need?
Web hosting plays a huge role in the creation of these types of community sites. Such a website requires an added dose of power in comparison to the typical website. However, what it requires the most is a scalable environment that supports the growth of the community. As your site increases in popularity, it will attract more users, which means it will be populated with more pictures, videos and possibly other interactive features. This tremendous growth means that the average shared hosting package may not suitable for the needs of your community. You have to consider critical resources such as disk space, bandwidth, RAM and CPU, all of which impact the overall performance of your website. While you might be able to pull this off on a shared hosting platform from a technical aspect, your community could be the one to suffer from slow loading pages and sluggish performance.
A dedicated server makes for one of the most reliable ways to host an online community. This type of hosting will give you the scalability you need and dramatically reduce the occurrence of performance issues you would endure on a shared server. The problem is that maintaining a dedicated server can be very complex and expensive. Leasing the server can run you upwards of $100 per month – and this is just for an unmanaged service. If you choose to run your community on a dedicated server, keep in mind that you will be responsible for updating the operating system and web server software in addition to managing all the applications and security mechanisms it requires. This is something many people simply are not equipped to deal with. For this reason, you should strongly consider looking into a service provider that specializes in community hosting as they are more likely to have the unqiue environment you require.
Conclusion
A community site can be very beneficial, but only when choosing the right web hosting solution. Before heading out to look for a service, take both the present and future growth into account when factoring in your requirements. Think about the features you need, the type of content and media you plan to host, and the volume of traffic you anticipate. If you truly want your community site to be a success, don’t hesitate to ask prospective web hosts questions and find out exactly how they can suit your needs. This will make it much easier to find the ideal solution for your online community.
Control panels are certainly a vital element in today’s web hosting operation, helping to transform complex tasks into simple processes that can be handled by users of varying skill levels. The vendors that distribute these products and the hosting industry in general have no trouble pushing the software on the market, but critics are now questioning whether control panels are truly necessary in the VPS environment and what value they actually provide.
Potential Issues
In terms of performance and security, industry leading control panels such as cPanel and Plesk are not always what they are cracked up to be. These powerful applications consume a great deal of resources and often force customers to upgrade their packages to continuously thrive in a VPS hosting environment. This consumption is due to HTTPD processes ran by web servers like Apache that make a VPS more susceptible to performance issues and less able to handle exploits such as DOS (Denial of Service) attacks. Though very useful, cPanel and Plesk are both resource hogs that are more likely to reduce the overall responsiveness and performance of web applications, leading customers to upgrade to more costly packages they do not necessarily need. In addition to this, even simple tasks such as creating email account and managing databases are slow and lagging processes that generally take too long to complete.
Alternative VPS Control Panels
cPanel and Plesk are ideal for shared and dedicated hosting arrangements but could result in more problems then you bargained for when using them with a virtual private server. Two more efficient control panels you may want to consider for your VPS hosting solution are DirectAdmin and LxAdmin as both are incredibly lightweight and consume notably less system resources than cPanel and Plesk. This essentially means they are far more responsive, faster and likely to give you a better performance than the leading products. A number of tests are increasingly showing that they are also more stable and secure than the competition.
Many observers are stepping out to the make the claim that cPanel’s days as a VPS control panel are numbered, attributing this to the fact that is the most resource leeching solution. Due to its mass popularity and widespread use, it is also among the highly targeted by hackers, which presents numerous potential security risks to your hosting environment and sensitive data. For this reason, you may want to carefully consider utilizing this control panel with your virtual private server. Unless you have a robust VPS plan with a lot of RAM or absolutely require automation, it might be worth the risk to install a glamorous commercial product.
Conclusion
We are not telling you to refrain from using cPanel or Plesk as both are on top of the control panel market for obvious reasons. However, in many situations, going with a lighter product or performing command line administration will allow you to get the job done in a faster, more efficient and secure manner. Fortunately, there are several control panel applications specifically designed for the VPS environment, better assuring the optimal performance and adequate security you need to thrive with your web presence.
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