Compare dedicated server softwareWhen you have finished building a site, you’re only halfway there. Now you have to choose a hosting service to give you the space to put the site on and the domain name to go with it. When you start searching for one, you’ll come across a wide selection of Website hosting firms. You want to put some time, effort and research into picking the one that’s best for you and your newly created site.
cPanel = CRUD PANEL
Thu, 14 Sep 2006 19:49:25 -0400
In today’s web hosting world there is a 'de-facto' control panel called cPanel. There is a large segment of reseller hosting and shared hosting customers who look for cPanel hosts. To a certain extent, many of those looking for reseller web hosting accounts are looking for cPanel hosts.
Because cPanel is one of the most established control panels in the web hosting market, if a customer transfers to a new host, choosing a host with cPanel will make it easy for them to migrate their settings and will minimize the learning curve with the new host.
Of course there are other competitors (DirectAdmin, Plesk & H-Sphere to name a few), but cPanel is simply the most wide-spread.
cPanel has become a force in the market - they have easily past the critical mass of customers that they need to be a dominant market power and they can charge whatever price they want, they can be slow with bug fixes, they can be slow with new features and they cna be slow with updates.
There are many problems with cPanel... a very breif list would be:
* While some of cPanel is open-source, there are a lot of encoded, compiled routines that are vital to its functioning. If you find a bug (and believe me there are many), you have to wait for cPanel to decide that they want to fix it.
* A lot of the cPanel code is compiled Perl - this makes extremely large and extremely slow binaries that need to run each time or whm is called.
* cPanel offers no clustering support (I don't call distributed name servers 'clustering')... scalable hosts need the ability to have separate email servers, MySQL servers, email list servers, etc). Because some vital routines are hard-coded into cPanel, it can't even be ported, upgraded or patched to do distributed hosting without major problems
* cPanel tries to offer everything to everyone (and run on over a dozen Linux/Unix platforms and windows!]) you wind up with an installation that is simply bloated well beyond what most hosts will need. Can you fathom cPanel + windows? It's a sysadmin nightmare. What sane web hosting system administrator would want this burden on their shouldiers?
My advice to cPanel is simple: Stop trying to support dozens of operating environments, choose an OS, support it, fix it and maintain it.
There are simply so many bugs that are confirmed by cPanel but not fixed. For example this bug report was reported by us in November of 2005, confirmed by cPanel on Dec. 1st 2005 and it is still unresolved as of Today, Sept 14th, 2006.
Instead of spending their time fixing known (and confirmed) bugs and improving their software, cPanel decided to work on their own script-deployment system (cPAddons).. that'd be a very useful feature except that Fantastico for cPanel provides around 50 pre-installed scripts, blogs, message boards and more. *shock* - cPanel has wasted their time.
Reseller hosting customers have expectations from their providers: speed and reliability from the servers and quick resolution from the hosting company. cPanels compiled binaries & bloating have slowed our servers down, bloated them down with useless software and their (extremely) slow response times have simply forced us to give responses such as "this is a cPanel bug, our hands are tied until cPanel resolves this issue".
The above is an excellent summary as to why our shared web hosting system runs on our own in-house developed control panel, SimpleCP. Running our own control panel on our shared hosting servers gives us power, flexibility, scalability & performance that we could never dream of with cPanel. It is for those reasons as well that we will be creating a fast, clustered/distributed and responsive replacement for cPanel for our reseller customers.
One of the many disadvantages of Web design templates is that they almost all suffer from overusing graphics. The graphics are often large file sizes that suck up bandwidth and increase loading time. Worse yet, pretty butterflies, skyscrapers, or forests on the periphery of
your site, detract from the focus of your content. Graphics should be more than pretty objects adorning your site’s space.
March 2008Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:06:58 -0400
Zoho Doubles Customer Count in 5 Months, Racing Google Apps to 1 Million User MarkMon, 05 Mar 2007 17:20:00 -0400
When I first met Raju Vegesna at the Office 2.0 conference last October, Zoho had just passed the 100,000 user mark. Less than 5 months later, Raju says they're closing in on 200,000.
While Nielsen/NetRating (PDF) claims that Google has a 92% share of the web-based productivity apps market, Raju points out that Zoho and ThinkFree together attract as many unique visitors as Google Docs and Spreadsheet. (See Ismael Ghalimi's elaboration on the user count discrepancy.) 432,156 users visited Google Docs last December; that's 3% fewer than in October. Zoho, on the other hand, has undergone rapid growth (as CEO Sridhar Vembu puts it, "we try harder") - and hopes to beat Google to the 1 million user goal.
By the way, when Raju and I were introduced, a colleague of his described him as Zoho's PR strategist. I just found out that in addition to attracting favorable coverage in every possible media outlet, he was also in charge of company's data center infrastructure. (Raju recently managed to offload this responsibility.) He insists it wasn't as much work as it sounds, because Zoho's apps run on a self-healing grid that's attached to a pool of standby servers. If any application server dies, the appropriate code will automatically be deployed on one of the standby machines. The failed hardware can be swapped out whenever someone has time. As for customer data, everything is replicated three times and backed up offsite.
(Zoho's Rackable servers are colo-ed at Savvis and Equinix. They're in the process of migrating from 32 bit to 64 bit machines with dual core Intel Woodcrest processors and 8 to 16 GB of RAM. The new machines arrived last week, but won't be deployed until late March. As Google's recent hard drive study shows, a longer burn-in period can help weed out faulty hardware.)
Zoho's HR processes are similarly efficient. Adventnet, Zoho's parent company, has 600 employees (and counting). Whenever a new Zoho product is conceived, a dedicated team of 2-6 developers is allocated to the project. Having rapid access to talent gives Zoho a tremendous competitive advantage. Forget Google Office; the loooong list of ideas and partnerships that Zoho's in the process of implementing might coalesce into Zoho Life: single sign on access to an ever growing suite of fully integrated web apps that do... everything.
Keep an eye on Zoho; they're setting the standards for delivering a seamless SaaS experience. And sign up for an account if you don't already have one. Lastly, stay tuned. They've got some big announcements on the way.
To answer all these questions, we recommend that you check out
web host reviews,
user feedback and
tests sites already running with the company you have in mind (important for checking speed).
Increasing PHP Application Performance with XCacheFri, 30 May 2008 00:49:00 +1000
Most interpreted programming languages parse source files and translate/compile them into opcode/bytecode that are suitable to be executed in the virtual machine. Python for example, dumps the compiled opcode into the .pyc or .pyo files so when the same file is imported again in the future, no parsing and compilation needs to be done. On the other hand plain vanilla PHP does not really have a way to save cached opcode so that at every request, source files have to be parsed and compiled into opcode again and again.
So we have the PHP accelerators which are mostly opcode cachers + optimiser, which cache the compiled opcode to either memory or disk, so the scripts don’t need to be parsed and compiled again in subsequent requests. They greatly improve the performance, and even the up-coming PHP6 will have the APC built in by default.
Introducing XCache
Personally I am using XCache on most my PHP apps. From its introduction page:
XCache is a open-source opcode cacher, which means that it accelerates the performance of PHP on servers. It optimizes performance by removing the compilation time of PHP scripts by caching the compiled state of PHP scripts into the shm (RAM) and uses the compiled version straight from the RAM. This will increase the rate of page generation time by up to 5 times as it also optimizes many other aspects of php scripts and reduce serverload.
Maybe not 5 times, but there is definite improvement from a standard PHP installation without the opcode cacher. Here is a CPU utilisation graph for my VPS at Linocde — I took XCache off trying to debug a segfault issue, and put it back on a few hours later.
Installing XCache
Installing XCache on most Linux distributions is trivial. Most my production boxes are running Ubuntu now, so I just
$ sudo apt-get install php5-xcache
And restart my web server — it’s done! Or on my Gentoo development box:
$ sudo emerge dev-php5/xcache
The bundled xcache.ini (found in your PHP’s configuration directory) has pretty sane setting. You might wish to adjust xcache.size to reflect your memory size.
But Is It Stable Enough for Production?
An optimisation technique is useless, if it hinders stability. This is actually the reason why am I posting this story — because my PHP/FastCGI servers crash at least once a day that render the Lighttpd front-end returning “500 Internal Error”, which I suspect might be XCache related (although I usually don’t have a chance to debug the processes and verify).
It is not huge load — lighttpd is only serving around 4 requests/second. The crash also seems to be random, i.e. not always at the peak of the traffic, and it happens during weekends as well as weekdays (that site of mine gets around only 70% of traffic during weekends). I actually wrote a simple shell script to monitor the site every minute and if 500 Internal Error is detected, spawn-fcgi is restarted — but I can imagine my users must be very annoyed.
Or maybe there is just nothing wrong with XCache itself but the fault lies on PHP or Lighttpd — I have no idea. Easiest way is just disabling XCache for a few days and see whether my site still crashes. Might do that this weekend.
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dedicated server software have always fascinated me. This is the initiative I needed in getting this article written on dedicated server software, to let this fascination fascinate others. #
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