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DreamHost – Shared Hosting Review

Webmaster — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:30:00 +0000

We have been testing out a new product recently which has been specifically designed for load balanced setups on shared hosting servers. We deployed this product for testing purposes across some known good shared hosting service providers. Dreamhost.com has been one of them and so we are sharing our thoughts about their services.

Setup:

The setup was almost instant and we got the mail with the login details within minutes. We had signed up for their 30 day free trial first. We really liked their uptime and security setups on the servers and so went ahead and paid them for the rest of the term of the plan.

Control Panel:

Dreamhost runs their own perl based proprietary control panel. It is customized to provide all the offerings they can provide on the shared servers as well as custom setups like Google MX or Jabber IMs are available in it as well. The control panel may need some hosting knowledge before hand as some options available in are quite geeky. Overall, its fast and does it works. We could not find a single option which was buggy or did not work in the control panel.

Some of the features we really liked in their control panel are as below:

1. Amazon Cloudfront Support

2. Subversion Support

3. Media Streaming Support

4. Jabber IM Support.

5. 50G of backup space.

6. Ability to create Unix groups.

If you are someone who loves to work with SSH access, dreamhost is the host for you as you can host unlimited domains with them in a single account.

Server Performance:

The best part we liked about their hosting services was the server’s performance. We did not see a single minute of downtime since we used them ( Yes!. We have been monitoring using a third party service which checks the sites each minute ) and the sites are quite fast. With 15-20k unique visitors a month, we have not had even a single report of someone sending us a note that they cannot access the site. The network connectivity just seems top notch.

Overall Results:

We really did like their hosting features a lot. Overall we would rate them 4.3 on a scale of 5. The only thing they appear to loose out on a not so user friendly control panel although their wiki has every bit of information you need. However, you require some skill to setup things like mail piping etc. with their servers. We actually cannot give out much details on the exact project we tested their services but we can surely say that with the amount of traffic we had been generating, it was a tough stress test for their servers in which they performed very well.

You can get a $5 discount when signing up with them for an unlimited disk usage and bandwidth yearly plan by using the coupon code as “rrdns5bucksoff” currently. Happy Dreamhosting

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VPS clusters now available

Webmaster — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:55:23 +0000

Hello People, We have been working constantly on expanding our scope of services over the past one year or so. We are thrilled by the success we have achieved in the first couple of months for our shared hosting services and it has given us more motivation to keep moving forward. This success has helped us to add more skilled System Administrators to our team and also given us the opportunity to work on new tailor made custom services. We wish to proudly introduce our VPS clustered services today for our medium budget customers. These services are specially for clients who need complete root access and isolation to their clustered website as well have custom software requirements but do not want to spend more on dedicated clusters to start with. We do not have fixed plans available for the VPS clusters like the shared hosting service but some of the features that can be made available on VPS clusters are as below:

Processors: Core2 Quad 2.4Ghz
RAM: from 256M up to 2048M
Bandwidth: from 500G upto 2500G
Disk Space: from 50G upto 1500G
Custom Kernel Support: Yes
Raid Setup: RAID 10 SATA II

The prices per node on the VPS clusters start from $89/node excluding management and would change depending on the specifications needed. A VPS cluster would need a minimum of three nodes for failover and proper site performance. If you need a custom quote and have specific requirements, please feel free to contact us via the contact form and we will be glad to get back to you with the best possible pricing we can offer. If you have questions, we would be glad to assist you via our Live Chat option now available 24×7 on our website.

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GeoLocation – Explained

Webmaster — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 18:50:06 +0000

Geolocation refers to the method of identifying the actual Geographical location of a Computer on the internet or a visitor on your site or even the a mobile device. With reference to Hosting Clusters, we mostly trace the geographical location of the website visitors. There can be various procedures used to track down the geographical location of the visitors some of which are:

Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) Lookup:

This is the most common procedure we use on our setups. The visitors are traced on the basis of the whois lookups done to their current IP address. These lookups are automated, real-time and are implemented using special server side modules or even third party lookup services. These lookups can provide the most accurate locations of the visitors as these IP whois databases can always have updates.

Media Access Control Address (MAC Address):

Media Access Control or MAC addresses is an Unique Identifier assigned to most network adapters or Ethernet Cards by their Manufacturer. It contains a combination of the manufacturer’s unique Identification number and some other codes to generate an unique MAC address for the physical device. The location of this device can be traced based on the Sales data for the manufacturer or some other similar methods.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID):

Radio Frequency Identification or RFID uses Radio waves to transmit data with the help of devices like Transponders. RFID does not have much applications on internet related geolocation but it has wide uses in corporate and enterprise supply chain management systems for inventory tracking and other applications.

Global Positioning System (GPS):

Global Positioning System or GPS uses different Artificial Satellites to interpret the microwave signals obtained from certain GPS enabled mobile devices to calculate the exact geographical location of the device. The device receives this interpreted data which it can use to locate itself and obtain navigation instructions for a particular destination from its current location.

The IP whois lookup method is the most commonly used method for clusters. We will study the exact implementation of this technique in the actual case studies we will be releasing soon.

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Site Design Tips for Websites which use RRDNS

Webmaster — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:21:39 +0000

Websites which need to be hosted on a Round Robin Environment are usually high traffic websites. It is very important for them to maintain functionality as well as a good site speed to be able retain their traffic . Site design can play a very important part to maximise the performance of a clustered hosting environment for such sites.

Although the design changes or tweaks depend on the type of site you have or are building but we will just try and touch base to some of the major points that can be taken into consideration during the site design phase for hosting it on a cluster. We will be adding some case studies later on our site for particular types of sites we have hosted and their design changes we implemented for optimal performance. The general tweaks would be as below :

1. Distribution of static and Dynamic Content

The site design can be done in such a way that there is scope to distribute static and dynamic content to different servers. Use of subdomain paths on the is a method which is helpful to achieve such distribution.

2. Prevention of Excessive Remote Includes

URL includes from the site to its own URLs causes and increase in the http traffic. This needs to be avoided as far as possible so that http does not have heavy traffic from the server itself.

3. Mysql Based Session Management

Websites which require sessions need to use mysql based sessions in order to maintain proper sessions on the site. The session mechanism can use a different mysql server if needed as well.

We will elaborate more on each of these points with examples in the case studies we will be posting.

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Technical Terms

Webmaster — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:36:52 +0000

We will be using a lot of technical terms on this site both in our tutorials and in the normal content as well. So we thought of adding a post explaining all these terms in brief. Following are some of the internet definitions of the terms we will be using.

DNS: DNS is the short name used for Domain Name System (or Service or Server). This is an Internet service which translates domain names into IP addresses.

FQDN: Fully Qualified Domain Name. This is the fully resolvable DNS name for any server on a network.

Network: A group of computers or devices connected to each other is called a network.

Server: A server is a computer or device on a network which manages network resources. Like file server just stores files which a web server handles web requests.

Node: A node is a server or device on a complex network which is commissioned to a specific job on the network.

Load Balancing: Distribution of network traffic evenly across multiple nodes on a network is
called as load balancing.

Fault Tolerance: A systems ability to react and implement auto corrective measures when a fault it detected on one of its components is called as fault tolerance.

Server Clusters: Connecting two or more servers/nodes together to perform a single task form clusters. Clusters are used for Load Balancing

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