HTTP Blog

Squid is very good for putting it in the front of your current web servers, thus accelerating the content that doesn’t change that often. Depending on your web site configuration and hits, I suggest you go for 2GB or even 4GB of RAM for the squid(s) front-end accelerator servers. The best benefit is to have most of the cached content into the memory – this is the best and fastest method. IO is kinda slow and that is why you need a lot of memory.

A lot of folks have been doing this for years and squid has been reliable and fast enough for these needs. Install it on your server and see the performance raising immediately. You may also need to review nginx for proxying. Very good and fast daemon.

Finally, I just spot a company that offers quality Oracle database remote management service. SharpAdmin offers fully outsourced and remote “Oracle database administrator” service for as low as ~ 330 USD per server. This is really cheap comparing to hiring in-house Oracle database administrator and shelling out more than 70.000 USD yearly.

Very sad news on new Vmware Vsphere licensing.  Before version 4 Virtual infrastructure 3.5 one license was valid for 2 physical CPU server  now Vmware has announced that one license allows just one physical CPU. This means that the price increases a bit. The same applies to support…

Very sad – Vmware are getting more expensive and I think many companies will wait and see if they are going to slash prices or look elsewhere……

Update: June 14, 2009
Vmware has switched licensing model back to old 1 x 2 CPU license -> 2 x 1 CPU licenses. Great news…

Still many folks think that you need a dedicated IP for each site to gain the best SEO rankings. Unfortunately not.  It’s not nice to interlink your own sites for better rankings (so does google say).  You may however get different IPs from different IP blocks so that when a bad IP or IP  blocks get blacklisted by some search engine your IP is not in that range. I myself think that when your revenue increases and you start earning more than a normal dedicated server will cost you it’s time to move dedicated. You get a better control, dedicated resources as well as your own small IP allocation that you can easily increase later.

Oracle bought Sun, Sun owned a MySQL  company so this is it. Some folks think that Oracle will be used more often since MySQL is under their management.

Currently, we do not plan on writing much about Oracle database, however I can recommend a SharpAdmin server management company if you are looking for Oracle database server management. While Oracle admin salaries are sky-high, SharpAdmin offers full Oracle database remote management at the fraction of the cost – around $250/month for one server instance. You can save thousands by just outsourcing Oracle database management.

Three years ago I was very skeptic about blogs. I didn’t enjoy reading blog posts, I usually went to other sites if I spot a blog. After some time, I don’t even remember when, but I published my first blog and from the very first day I started to like blog sites. Particularly, Wordpress based blogs.

Nowadays, I suggest using Wordpress platform for new blogs to my friends and other guys I know. Very stable, easy to set-up platform and very important – actively developed with thousands of pretty cool plugins. It’s free – pretty cool, eh?

I manage quite a few popular blogs for my friends and if the server(s) are correctly tuned, have medium resources, then Wordpress platform can easily serve hundreds of thousands of visitors a day. As long as you use plugins that are coded with performance in mind you should have no problems.  Use Wordpress – it’s a nice publishing tool for your next blog.

One of the best solutions for streaming Flash video nowadays is Nginx. It’s super fast, lightweight and does easily support thousands of concurrent connections without taking up much resources.

By default flash streaming is not activated and you need to turn it on in compilation process. You enable flash streaming by:

./configure –with-http_flv_module …(add other options here)

and then add to nginx.conf the following settings:

location ~ \.flv$ {
flv;
}

Nginx can easily push hundreds of megabits per second so make sure your upstream can support it and you have deep pockets for bandwidth expenses

We got an email last night from a fellow reader asking what tcp_fin_timeout and tcp_keepalive_time we are usually using from small to medium blogs.

At this time, we keep the following settings:

net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout = 60
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time = 60

Finally, a world-class hypervisor – XenServer from Citrix is available for free business usage. I didn’t believe Citrix will be offering XenServer for free including Live motion and other features. Fully supported Windows and Linux OSes under 64-bit as well as 8 virtual CPUs! Very nice platform for virtualization and it doesn’t cost a dollar! It’s free. Use it!

Recently I bought another hard drive and had to add it to my current working workstation that is powered by Windows XP.

I didn’t had a fdisk utility or any other commercial disk management software so I used built in Windows XP disk management utility called diskmgmt.msc
You can run it from Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc <hit enter>

And from there you can add partitions and of course format the drive. Good luck and I hope this small howto paper helps someone.

Everyone is buzzing around virtualization and private servers these days. One of the most popular platform for server virtualization is XEN – it’ s very efficent, FREE, reliable and has a big community behind it. There are many folks that use it and even commercial providers use XEN in their commercial virtualization products. Xen is used as a base on Novell SLES XEN, Oracle VM, Citrix XenServer (they bought XEN actually), Virtual Iron it’ s been very stable and with high performance.

So if you want to test Windows or Linux distributive use Xen – it works on 32 or 64 bit platforms without any problems and the performance is very close to native OS performance running on a dedicated hardware.  Some people report performance gains when XEN is used to virtualize multiple OSes under one physical hardware. Anyway, we have been testing XEN and running it in web hosting environment and it’s really great. It’ s a real virtualization platform you can trust and use for production hosting environment.

We use a medium busy server and do prefer to run prefork.c module with the following settings:

StartServers 20
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 20
ServerLimit 200
MaxClients 200
MaxRequestsPerChild 25000

The server is Dual Core Pentium with 2GB RAM and it’s not very busy server but does perfect.

What OS is better FreeBSD or Linux for a hosting server?  There is no clear answer to this question so I guess stick with the OS you are more experienced. In long run it will pay off since you can manage it better and there is no need to test out things you don’t know and experience downtime in worst case.

I usually select Linux, Centos, Fedora or RedHat Enterprise – I am more comfortable with this OS and update process is quick and easy. Anyway, if you are a pro in FreeBSD there is no need for you to go Linux – FreeBSD is powerful and high-performance OS you can count on. If you are more experienced with Linux – go with Linux. Both Linux and FreeBSD is a nice OS for a hosting server.

Prepare for real performance boost. Run Nginx in a front of Apache and serve all static content directly from Nginx. All php script requests are transparently forwarded to Apache daemon and output forwarded back to Nginx that servers it to a web visitor.

Web visitor -> Nginx -> static content -> Nginx -> Web visitor

if dynamic content then,

Web visitor -> Nginx -> dynamic content -> Apache -> Nginx -> Web visitor

For static content serving you should add the following nginx config:

location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|rtf|js)$ {
root /usr/www;
expires 10d;
break;
}

With the following config you will serve all those files directly via Nginx and it will be very fast. Don’t forget to set-up Nginx listening to public IP and Apache configure to a different port or internal IP.

Alright fellows. Many folks are using Nginx nowadays and I thought we need to open a new category dedicated to Nginx. It’s fast, light-weight and reliable web server that’s becoming very popular.

We will soon have some fresh content and howto’s about Nginx. Stay tunned!