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Blog Archives

DreamHost – Shared Hosting Review

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Dreamhost Logo

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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Clustered Shared Hosting Demo available at downlods.info

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

Hello People,

We have had an enormous response to our services ever since we have launched them commercially. We appreciate all your queries and we will always try our level best to satisfy them all. We have noticed a common trend with most of the clients from whom we received information or quote requests. They asked us for example sites where in the round robin DNS has been implemented for them to review the speed, functionality and benefits of these services. We have now setup a demo site ourselves which shows the entire range of features we can offer with this service. The demo site’s URL is http://www.downlods.info and we will be explain more about the unique setup step by step below:

1. The domain hosts a wordpress site which has almost 1700+ random articles from different RSS feeds found on the web. We are still populating the site with more and more content and we intend to put in a few thousand pages/posts on it so that we can show how a resource intensive can work on the clusters. The first thing you should notice is that the site uses round robin DNS and so it has two A records.

[root@server ~]# host downlods.info
downlods.info has address 69.10.60.149
downlods.info has address 69.10.48.100

Thus the domain runs from two different IPs to balance out the traffic on the domain using round robin DNS configuration.

2. These two IPs run lighttpd installations with PHP configured on FastCGI mode. This can be seen as below:

[root@server ~]# HEAD 69.10.60.149
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:29:42 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.23
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:27:25 GMT
Client-Peer: 69.10.60.149:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.10
 
[root@server ~]# HEAD 69.10.48.100
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:29:46 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.23
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:27:29 GMT
Client-Peer: 69.10.48.100:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.10

Lighttpd has been custom tweaked on these servers to handle scripts like wordpress and acts as a proxy to pass http requests to much lighter Nginx instances. You can notice the actual site is served from Nginx as below :

[root@server ~]# HEAD http://www.downlods.info
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:28:25 GMT
Server: nginx/0.8.7
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Client-Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:26:09 GMT
Client-Peer: 69.10.48.100:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Set-Cookie: wassup=MDE5Y2Y5N2QzYjNkMjRiNWZlYTM1NDg5ZDVmNDBlMzQ6OjEyNjE2NDk2MDU6Ojo6NjguMTY4LjIwOC4xMDo6c2VydmVyLmRvd25sb2RzLmluZm8%253D; expires=Thu, 24-Dec-2009 10:18:25 GMT; path=/
Set-Cookie: wpgb_visit_last_php-default=1261646905; expires=Fri, 24-Dec-2010 09:28:25 GMT; path=/
X-Pingback: http://www.downlods.info/xmlrpc.php
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.10

Traffic is distributed using round robin balancing which can be seen as per the logs below:

2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1105) proxy - start
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1143) proxy - ext found
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1214) proxy - used round-robin balancing
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1277) proxy - found a host 66.45.229.83 80
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.392) connect delayed: 15
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1017) proxy: fdevent-out 1
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.828) proxy - connect - delayed success
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1105) proxy - start
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1143) proxy - ext found
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1214) proxy - used round-robin balancing
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1277) proxy - found a host 69.10.60.149 8080
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.392) connect delayed: 17
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.1017) proxy: fdevent-out 1
2009-12-24 04:33:36: (mod_proxy.c.828) proxy - connect - delayed success

PHP is configured to run in FastCGI mode across the clustered setup and thus gives amazing speed to the blog site. You can use various third party tools to confirm the site speed even when the blog has more than 1700 posts and runs numerous ads as well. Here are some of the readily available tests we have already done.

The various results can be found at the links below:

Pingdom Results :

Website information

Total loading time: 4.9 seconds
Total objects: 29 (373.9 KB)
External objects: 5 (120.8 KB)
HTML (X)HTML: 1 (41.6KB)
RSS RSS/XML: 0
CSS CSS: 6 (19.3KB)
Scripts Scripts: 4 (144KB)
Images Images: 18 (169KB)
Plugins Plugins: 0
Other Other: 0
Redirected Redirected: 0
SiteUptime Results:

Quick check for: www.downlods.info (http)

Date City Country Time (s) Result
December 24, 2009 10:59:18 New York United States 0.184 Ok
December 24, 2009 10:59:19 London United Kingdom 0.190 Ok
December 24, 2009 10:59:20 Hong Kong China 0.460 Ok

Average Response Time: 0.278 seconds

HyperSpin Results:

Location
Status
Time
Traceroute
1. Seattle, Washington, USA (WA)
OK
 2346ms do traceroute
2. San Jose, California, USA (CA)
OK
 1274ms do traceroute
3. Dallas, Texas, USA (TX)
OK
 834ms do traceroute
4. Ashburn, Virginia, USA (VA) Test temporarily unvailable
5. Chicago, Illinois, USA (IL) Test temporarily unvailable
6. Montreal, Quebec, Canada (QC)
OK
 1680ms do traceroute
7. Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK (UK)
OK
 3160ms do traceroute
8. Amsterdam, Netherlands (NL)
OK
 2728ms do traceroute
9. Madrid, Spain (ES)
OK
 3788ms do traceroute
10. Milan, Italy (IT)
OK
 4692ms do traceroute
11. Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany (DE)
OK
 4144ms do traceroute
12. Singapore (SG)
OK
 4973ms do traceroute
13. Zhongzheng, Taipei, Taiwan (TP) Test temporarily unvailable
14. Neihu, Taipei, Taiwan (NH) Test temporarily unvailable
15. Brisbane, Queensland, Australia (AU)
OK
 6406ms do traceroute

The domains we host on our shared clustered servers as well as on our custom built dedicated clustered have similar configuration and speed like this test domain. They infact have higher performance as each cluster is deployed with tweaks needed from a pre-hosting professional analysis of the sites we do. If you have further questions with the site setups on clusters, please feel free to contact us for clarification.

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Choice of two webservers available on Shared Clustered Hosting Accounts

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Our Shared Clustered Hosting Accounts now offer choice of two webservers to select from.

1. Nginx:

Nginx (pronounced as “engine X”) is a lightweight, high performance web server/reverse proxy and e-mail (IMAP/POP3) proxy, licensed under a BSD-like license.

Basic HTTP features:

  • Handling of static files, index files, and autoindexing; open file descriptor cache;
  • Accelerated reverse proxying with caching; simple load balancing and fault tolerance;
  • Accelerated support with caching of remote FastCGI servers; simple load balancing and fault tolerance;
  • Modular architecture. Filters include gzipping, byte ranges, chunked responses, XSLT, and SSI. Multiple SSI inclusions within a single page can be processed in parallel if they are handled by FastCGI or proxied servers.
  • SSL and TLS SNI support.

We have php running in Fastcgi mode on our servers with Nginx.

2. Lighttpd:

Lighttpd (pronounced “lighty” or “Light-TPD”) is a web server designed to be secure, fast, standards-compliant, and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments.

Basic  features :

  • Load-balancing FastCGI, SCGI and HTTP proxy support
  • chroot support
  • select()-/poll()-/epoll() based web server
  • Support for more efficient event notification schemes like kqueue and epoll
  • Conditional rewrites (mod_rewrite)
  • SSL and TLS support, via OpenSSL.
  • Authentication against an LDAP server
  • RRDtool statistics
  • Rule-based downloading with possibility of a script handling only authentication
  • Server Side Includes support (broken [1])
  • Flexible virtual hosting
  • Modules support
  • Cache Meta Language (currently being replaced by mod_magnet) using the Lua programming language
  • Minimal WebDAV support
  • Servlet (AJP) support (in versions 1.5.x and up)
  • HTTP compression using mod_compress and the newer mod_deflate (1.5.x)
  • Light-weight (less than 1 MB)
  • Single-process design with only several threads. No processes or threads started per connection.

We run php running in fastcgi mode on our servers with Lighttpd.

You can select from either of the two webservers for Shared Hosting accounts. The sales department will send a email confirming your choice once your order has been verified. For further plan details, please check RRDNSHosting.com

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Shared Clustered Hosting Services Available

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

We are happy to announce the launch of our Shared Clustered Hosting Services. The shared hosting services are suitable for moderate traffic websites which require a load balanced environment to take advantage of advanced site optimization techniques such as geolocation, lighting fast load time etc. The services and packages are specifically designed to make Clustered Hosting affordable to site owners whose sites have high traffic and have great potential to grow even bigger and need 100% reliability when it comes down to their Hosting needs.

We currently have three plans launched and are working on getting more plans worked out as well as offering custom plans on Shared Clusters. The details and links to each of the available plans are as below:

  1. Basic Clustered Hosting Plan
  2. Deluxe Clustered Hosting Plan
  3. Professional Clustered Hosting Plan

If you have a custom requirement which does not fit in any of the above hosting plans, we will be glad to accomodate you as well. Please use the Contact Us form from our site and let us know your requirements. We will get back to you with a free quote for your requirements.

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Posted in Services | 5 Comments »