EchoHosting » Hosting News

Using Solid-State Drives

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:00:05 +0000

The use of solid-state drives makes a server significantly faster. But not all vendor SSD’s are created equal. We want to give you a tip. Intel drives have proven to be the most reliable. We have tried several others, few with the same performance and so far none with the same trouble free history. From time-to-time we had some arrive dead from other vendors.

There are just a few data centers that have explored SSD in servers. It certainly cuts down on electrical use. Each watt saved on a hard drive is one less watt that is used for cooling as well.

Cloud Computing

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:57:31 +0000

One thing that’s come up in a lot of conversations with clients shopping for a hosting solution is the idea of cloud computing. A lot of people are interested in it and they wonder if that is not the solution they are looking for instead of a dedicated server.

As evidence to the confusion articles on the Internet that explain cloud computing make any number of poor comparisons.

For example, is the following statement correct about cloud computing?

“In a cloud computing system, there’s a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications.”

Yes it could be true but that is also true of good old-fashioned client/server computing. In fact the vast majority of all definitions seem to fit both equally well. The current buzz word “cloud computing” may be the rage but it is fuzzier than ever and seems more about marketing differences than network design.

Since when has one cared before “cloud computing” about where the data that you store is or the application that you run? Most users don’t even care or know if they are hosting on a Linux or Windows server just as long as it works.

Cloud computing is built around the idea of almost limitless resource. In the past if you were a virtual customer sharing a machine and your website became so large, popular or otherwise a very heavy user of resources the hosting company would direct you to use a dedicated machine. So scaling up would be a “cloud” advantage. On the other hand, it is a very minor advantage as that happens on only rare occasions. Also, with the use of modern control panel software it is often just a few button clicks to transfer a website and all the associated services to not just another and larger machine on a data center but to any server on any appropriate network anywhere in the world.

Our own concerns at SecureWebs are predicated in the downside of cloud computing – the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. The type of outages or data loss that we hear about once in awhile now days are because of cloud computing and are of a huge scale. In other words, if you have lots of servers running off one network area storage unit and you loose that unit you could bring down dozens or even hundreds of servers. So do you build lots of stand-alone servers of different sizes for difference needs and practice the art of replacing each one should any software or hardware failure occur or do you build a very large array of servers to do the same thing?

You know you’re old when something that was once a revolution is no longer trendy. Most of us were a part of the PC revolution where each worker has their own private processing power (workstation) and we make decisions on our preferred applications. Given more time it might occur to all these cloud computer article authors that the metaphor for the cloud is very similar to main frame computing from yesteryear where computing time was controlled by the IT staff and you had limited flexibility in changing anything in the computing environment. Not a perfect analogy but cloud computing does remind one of the “bad old days.” Live long enough and everything comes full-circle again.

PHP and IIS7

admin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:07:22 +0000

PHP + Windows

Many PHP developers currently use Windows for their development environment of choice, and with the Windows Web Application Gallery, PHP developers now can choose from numerous applications and solutions, built in PHP, that run well on Windows. In addition, PHP developers can benefit from the huge community bases of ASP.NET, PHP, Microsoft Partners, and other communities out there that are committed to supporting the Windows Web Application Gallery. Microsoft is committed to helping developers, regardless of language of preference, be successful on the platform.

Fast. FastCGI

The IIS FastCGI component enables popular application frameworks like PHP be hosted on the IIS web server in a high-performance and reliable way. FastCGI helps these application frameworks to achieve improved performance on Windows over CGI, while allowing stable operation in production environments.

Say no to buying servers.

admin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:50:02 +0000

Say “No” to Servers. Say “Yes” to Echo Hosting.

The trend is clear. In the past, you purchased servers and when they got old or you needed to expand you bought more. You hired expensive technical talent and then continually reinvest to keep up with technology. You not only had huge capital expense, you also had to deploy, scale, patch, maintain, backup and then monitor it all yourself 24x7x365.

Today, there is a new and better way—buying computing as a service from a hosting provider.

Here’s why:

Hosting frees businesses from hassles of in-house server management
Businesses can shift focus to mission-critical apps, core competencies and innovation
Hosting offers pay-per-use solutions and provides flexibility and scalability

Consider Echo Hosting who will replace your servers as often as you need at our expensive. Forget about backup’s and patching and a growing IT overhead. Leave it to Echo Hosting, it is what we do best.