Monat: September 2020

With much of our world shifting online in the past few months, reliable web hosting has become a critical business necessity. Whether you are hosting websites, applications, or office infrastructure, it is vital to have the right plan with the right resources.

But how do you choose from the different types of web hosting?

Web hosting options abound and can be overwhelming for the average user.

There are undoubtedly many things to consider outside of the hosting choices themselves. Business owners need to consider budget, age of the project, third party software licenses (where applicable), and the list goes on.

Business owners need to evaluate their needs when it comes to specific web hosting offerings.

We seek to ease your stress by noting the different types of web hosting available and for whom they work best.

What are the Types of Web Hosting?

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is web hosting where single sites get placed on a single server with other websites, all sharing RAM, CPU, storage, and bandwidth resources. These types of web hosting plans are typically the least expensive of the hosting options. Because of the sharing of resources across multiple websites, performance and security can also suffer.

For those just starting with a brand new site, shared hosting is a good starting point. The low cost is attractive but is only fit for static websites with not a lot of traffic. Businesses that aim to scale quickly should consider other hosting options with independent resources.

VPS Hosting

Virtual Private Server Hosting (VPS) is a dynamic virtualized hosting server within a parent server on cloud infrastructure. While many VPS servers can exist on the parent server, the resources get explicitly dedicated to the user, unlike shared hosting.

A cluster of servers makes up the cloud infrastructure behind VPS servers. The server instances themselves are independent partitions of the parent server with a set allocation of resources to each server instance.

They are single-tenant, which means the RAM, CPU cores, and storage is specific to a single user instead of being shared among many users.

A central feature of VPS hosting is root access. Users have full control of the environment and can carry out more configuration tweaks.

Liquid Web’s VPS Hosting offers all of this in upgradeable instances with packaged bandwidth. In addition to root-level access, users also get Secure Shell (SSH) and Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) access. InterWorx, cPanel, and Plesk are the available control panels for Linux, and we offer Plesk for Windows servers.

A VPS solution is a great option if you are hosting a few websites and applications that are not resource-intensive. They are also the perfect solution for file storage and sharing.

Cloud Dedicated Hosting

Cloud Dedicated hosting is a single-instance dynamic virtualized hosting server on a parent server on cloud infrastructure. Both exist on the parent server, and the resources get explicitly dedicated to the user. The primary differentiation is the fact that a Cloud Dedicated server is the only server instance on the parent server.

Often called Hybrid Dedicated servers, Cloud Dedicated server hosting also gets backed by clustered cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Dedicated servers from Liquid Web provide options to fit the needs of business owners, Resellers, and agencies needing dedicated resources in an easily scalable virtual server. Whether you’re hosting resource-intensive websites and applications, multiple sites and apps, databases, or want simple upgrade options, Cloud Dedicated servers will work for you.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting is a single-tenant environment where physical server hardware and resources belong to a single user. Primarily, the owner of the dedicated server operates off of the physical components with the operating system, web server stack, and optional control panel for their hosting environment.

Dedicated servers are popular among resellers and agencies hosting a large number of small websites and applications. They are also great for more significant sites and apps that need more resources.

Liquid Web has been in the industry for several years, offering Dedicated Hosting solutions. We have everything from smaller, single processor options to larger configurations with dual processors. And customizing your server hardware is easy to do with multiple options available from storage, RAM, chassis, and bandwidth.

Cloud Hosting

There are many implementations of cloud hosting environments. Cloud Hosting in general refers to a network infrastructure that includes multiple physical servers connected via software. Both the private and public clouds are forms of cloud hosting.

Private Cloud

Private Cloud hosting solution is a single-tenant environment. A single organization can take advantage of a cluster of servers in a private cloud environment and use the combined resources to fit their needs.

By leveraging software like VMware, businesses can create as many virtual machines as can be handled to run their SaaS applications, websites, or other projects. Liquid Web’s Private Cloud powered by VMWare and NetApp provides business owners and digital agencies a premier private cloud solution to stand up to today’s demands.

Public Cloud

On the other side of the spectrum from the private cloud is Public Cloud Hosting. Public cloud is a multi-tenant hosting environment where multiple organizations reside in the same hosting environment, siloed from one another.

It is elastic and scalable, much like a private cloud, but the infrastructure is not specific to one organization. The cluster is much more robust and managed by the provider, offering business owners the ability to deploy scalable solutions quickly. It is also more cost-effective than a private cloud since the provider removes the burden of organizations paying for an individual cluster.

Liquid Web is proud to bring our Cloud Servers solution to the masses. For customers looking to move their workload to the cloud and eliminate in-house hardware, this is the solution. Customers can reduce hardware costs for their websites and applications while gaining redundancy and high availability.

Specialized Hosting

Several other solutions exist within the realm of the above-mentioned hosting options. They are either built on top of, or combinations of, traditional or cloud solutions to create a complex infrastructure that meets your specific hosting needs.

Enterprise Hosting

Enterprise customers have needs that go beyond basic hosting. They deal with large amounts of traffic and need highly available solutions with no downtime. Disaster recovery is a must.

For Enterprise customers, Cloud Hosting is not always what they want. They often prefer dedicated infrastructure, running their sites and applications directly off of physical server hardware. They then duplicate it, and failover to another replicated setup should something happen to the production environment.

Liquid Web offers hosting for the Enterprise, including dedicated server clusters, high-performance setups equipped with load balancing, and high availability environments with failover.

HIPAA Compliant Hosting

HIPAA Compliant Hosting is dedicated hosting secured behind lock and key that can only be accessed by specific users with logs maintained, and specific processes followed to ensure data integrity and security at all times.

For business owners dealing with Protected Health Information (PHI) or Electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI), it is essential to have hosting that meets HIPAA requirements. The fines for loss or compromise of PHI can be steep, so it is imperative to ensure proper implementation of HIPAA hosting.

An independent auditing firm validated and confirmed that our data centers are compliant with HIPAA security and privacy guidelines. Their findings include administrative, physical, and technical safeguard measures.

Liquid Web has HIPAA Compliant dedicated server packages specific to the needs of those hosting PHI and ePHI. Speak with a hosting advisor today to ensure that you have the right solution and the information you need to get your HIPAA environment set up.

How Do I Choose Which Type of Web Hosting is Right for Me?

With the plethora of web hosting options available, how do you choose which hosting is right for your business? Keep the following guidelines in mind as you make your choice:

• Choose VPS Hosting if you are hosting a few websites and applications that are not resource-intensive.
• Choose Cloud Dedicated Hosting if you are hosting resource-intensive websites and applications, multiple sites and apps, databases, or want simple upgrade options.
• Choose Dedicated Hosting if you are a reseller or agency hosting a large number of small websites and applications or have significant sites and apps that need more resources. Also, choose this hosting option if you need more customizable storage options.
• Choose Private Cloud Hosting to leverage the cloud to create as many virtual machines as can be handled to run your SaaS applications, websites, or other projects.
• Choose Public Cloud Hosting if you are looking to move your workload to the cloud and eliminate in-house hardware. Also, choose this option to reduce hardware costs for your websites and applications while gaining redundancy and high availability.
• Choose Enterprise Hosting for complex needs requiring dedicated server clusters, high-performance setups equipped with load balancing, and high availability environments with failover.

Ready to get started? Speak with a hosting advisor today to set up the hosting environment that’s right for you.

The post What are the Different Types of Web Hosting? appeared first on Liquid Web.

VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure. VMware, founded in 1998, brought revolution to the IT industry with its virtualization and cloud solutions. Today, the company has 75.000 partners across the globe. These partners are coming from various industries such as banking, healthcare, retail, telecommunications, and other various industries.

We are proud to be one of those VMware partners.

In this article, we will introduce you to VMware Private Cloud Hosting, a revolutionary cloud solution for business owners seeking to consolidate infrastructure and gain high availability.

What is VMware Private Cloud?

VMware Private Cloud is a service through which you have the ability of connecting two or more physical servers into one. All of the resources from physical servers or nodes are joined together into a single pool of resources which can be distributed across virtual machines (VMs) that you deploy on your nodes.

Think about Private Cloud as a massive pool of resources which is capable of spreading those resources on-demand. When you need them, where you need them.”

Are There Different Types of Private Cloud?

Just like any other hosting solution, private cloud has three different types of the services.

Virtual Private Cloud

A Virtual Private Cloud is a remotely-hosted private cloud instance located within a public cloud. This type of Private Cloud is a bit different from the rest, because it exists in a separate area of public cloud instead of being hosted on-premises.

Hosted Private Cloud

A Hosted Private Cloud is a type of cloud hosted by a cloud service provider on-premises, most likely in a data center. This type of cloud isn’t shared with other organizations, and the cloud service provider is the one who manages the network and takes care of the hardware that is behind the cloud. Software updates are also taken care of by the cloud provider.

Managed Private Cloud

A Managed Private Cloud is the type of private cloud that we are offering. A Managed Private Cloud hosting provider is responsible for networking, hardware, software, and day-to-day operations of the private cloud. With this being a managed service that has few different deployments, we are also offering a couple of additional perks with our product, including our dedicated vCenter to safeguard your data, and VMware backups that are powered by Acronis Cyber Backup. The Managed Private Cloud can save businesses considerable time and money in the long run.

Liquid Web Private Cloud Powered by VMware and NetApp

Our Private Cloud solution gives you all the benefits of a public cloud with the sheer strength, flawless performance, and fortress-like security of an isolated infrastructure on dedicated hardware.

Specifically, we are offering a managed VMware environment that uses ESXi to virtualize two or more physical servers and create guest VMs that operate on a hardware cluster backed by NetApp SAN.

The number of virtual machines that you can create depends only on the resource that you have at your disposal.

Before we explore the technology further, let’s explore the terminology and technology behind VMware.

ESXi

ESXi is a bare metal hypervisor. A hypervisor is a virtual machine monitor, or a virtualization software, that allows you to create and manage your virtual machines. ESXi is installed directly onto the physical server.

Some of the features that ESXi is offering are:

• User-friendly experience due to modern user interface based on HTML5
• Enhanced security because of the powerful encryption capabilities
• Reliable performance because you are able to apply individual solutions to each of yours virtual machines

If you are considering a managed private cloud, Liquid Web can provide you with an unmanaged private cloud which can be used for custom licensing.

Hardware Cluster (HW Cluster)

Hardware clustering is a hardware-based method to combine two or more servers (nodes) into a cluster that will work as a single system.

NetApp Storage Area Network (SAN)

A NetApp Storage Area Network (SAN) is the most used storage networking architecture when it comes to enterprise setups. SAN stores your data within centralized shared storage, and all data travels through the network. That way you get much better performance, latency is lower, and it costs less than to run old fashioned hard disk drives (HDDs).

How Does VMware Private Cloud Work?

Everything starts with the NetAPP Storage Area Network (SAN), your storage entity that is operated by System Manager software. The NetAPP SAN array then sends the data to storage switches.

A storage switch is a device which is routing traffic between your clustered servers and your SAN.

The storage switches then route data to your nodes or clustered servers. Each of the servers (nodes) can have unlimited numbers of virtual machines running on them; your resources limit the amount of virtual machines possible.

Once your nodes, and the virtual machines on them, receive the data from storage switches, your developers can apply necessary patches or tweaks to your application or website. After that, they can deploy to a live environment.

Next, the data is sent from the virtual machines on your nodes to firewall switches and through the hardware firewall.

A firewall switch is a device similar to the storage switch. The purpose of a firewall switch is to route traffic from your virtual machines and nodes to the hardware firewall, and vice versa.

A hardware firewall is a physical device that filters traffic that is coming and going from your cluster with rules set to block malicious traffic from entering your server.

Once traffic reaches a hardware firewall and it is filtered, it is ready to be served on the Internet.

What Features Come With VMware Private Cloud?

VMware vSphere High Availability (HA)

This is pure gold when it comes to making sure that your application or site runs all the time, no matter what happens. vSphere HA monitors all server hosts that are running in ESXi, and it is detecting for critical failures.

In case one of the virtual machines goes down for any reason, vSphere HA will immediately failover anything that was going on in that VM to another VM that is up and running. On top of that, vSphere HA will check if there are enough available resources to restart the VM that is down. If there are enough resources, the VM with the critical failure will be restarted.

Distributed Resource Scheduler

A Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) makes sure that all virtual machines that are deployed always have enough resources to run properly.

For example, let’s say that your VMware setup includes two nodes, with each node running five virtual machines. Suddenly, one of the virtual machines on one of the nodes starts to get overloaded with traffic and thus begins to consume more resources. DRS will notice the resource imbalance due to increased traffic, and will move the VM between hosts to make sure that resources are balanced.

vMotion

VMware vMotion is used to perform live migrations without service interruption. You can migrate everything that you deployed between the hosts, and everything will be accessible during the migration.

Yes, zero downtime during the process! vMotion is today’s standard when it comes to live migrations.

Migrations are performed through a migration wizard, which quickly identifies the best host to migrate your virtual machine to. It uses real-time information gathered by the migration wizard. You will always know how much resources you have, as well as how much resources the VM that you are migrating to will have.

vMotion can also run multiple migrations at once.

Storage vMotion

Storage vMotion works very similar to vMotion. The main difference is that vMotion moves workloads between hosts, while Storage vMotion is moving virtual machines between your disks and storage media in your SAN with zero downtime.

vSWAP

This technology comes in handy when you are working with limited resource and constrained workloads. vSwap allows your virtual machines to use the memory of the hosts on which they are running instead of the disk memory, which can improve performance dramatically when your disk memory is having a tough time with the workload.

VMware Snapshots

With VMware Snapshots, you can make any changes on your setup without the fear of completely destroying months and months of work. Just save a snapshot of your virtual machine before you make changes, and if something goes seriously wrong, you can roll back to the snapshot. You can have multiple snapshots stored at once (up to 32 snapshots total), but VMware suggests that you do not keep a single snapshot for more than 72 hours.

Enhanced vMotion Compatibility

Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) makes sure that you avoid any failures during migrations or upgrades due to incompatible CPUs. EVC achieves this by ensuring that all hosts in a cluster present the same CPU feature set to virtual machines, even if the actual CPUs on the hosts differ. To put it simply, EVC is masking the CPU that is showing to the virtual machines.

Thin Disk Provisioning

Thin Disk Provisioning ensures that virtual machines that you deploy use the amount of disk space that they actually need, no matter how much disk space you provision for a virtual machine during the deployment. This type of disk provisioning is enabled because we are using ESXi for our hypervisor.

In the image below you can see an example on how disk space is utilized with Thin Disk Provisioning.

Liquid Web’s VMware Private Cloud Packages and Management

With Liquid Web’s VMware Private Cloud, all of the technologies above are included in all of our plans. Best of all, our Private Cloud is a fully managed product, which means that we take care of everything for you, giving you more time to focus on growing your business.

Below is a complete breakdown of what we are managing for you, and what you have access to, in your Private Cloud.

As you can see, all the major aspects of the private cloud are handled by Liquid Web.

Please note: Liquid Web only supports CentOS 7 and Windows 2016 operating systems at this time. You do have the option to use other operating systems if you prefer, but we will not support those. Also, we support cPanel and Interworx on CentOS 7, as well as Plesk on CentOS 7 and Windows. Core managed and unmanaged versions of CentOS 7 and Windows 2016 can also be applied on your virtual machines, if you so choose.

What Are Some Real World Use Case Examples of VMware Private Cloud?

Point-of-Sale (POS) Software

Let’s say that you have developed a point-of-sale (POS) software which will run on Mac, Android, or PC. Let’s also say that your software plugs into WooCommerce directly. Your whole product would have to be composed of a bunch of smaller components. Ideally, you would want to run web servers, java application servers, a database server, and additional various services. All of these components would have to be logically separated with uptime as a key component, since POS systems need to be online at all times.

Liquid Web’s Private Cloud is the perfect solution for this type of setup! If anything goes amiss, the VMware software that is running on our Private Cloud will move all VMs to another node, and uptime will continue to be achieved.

Business-to-Business eCommerce Application

In our second scenario, let’s say that you are running an application that is constantly creating small virtual machines on your nodes. Those virtual machines are constantly gathering data which is stored and written in a database. Now, imagine if your database server goes down while a massive query is underway.

On a dedicated or VPS server, a database server going down would probably corrupt the database, and restoring the server would cause some downtime. However, with VMware Private Cloud, you have nothing to worry about. VMware can sustain these types of issues and you won’t have to rebuild your application on the virtual machine. You may see a moment of downtime, and then your query will continue to run just like it did before the database server went down.

Booking and Client Management Software

Now imagine that you are building a booking application for a client that is running a chain of Spa Salons across the state of Michigan. This means that your software has to be quite big to manage such high numbers of clients in several different locations. Suddenly, the booking application receives a spike of 400 new bookings for the next two days at one of the locations. All of those bookings have to be processed, and at this point the Distributed Resource Scheduler kicks in and redistributes resources from other virtual machines to assist. Additionally, vMotion will come in handy for setups like this because VMs will run out of space eventually and upgrades can be done with no downtime.

Is VMware Private Cloud Right For Me?

In today’s hosting world, high availability and resources on-demand are something that will keep you in front of the competition. VMware Private Cloud provides all the tools necessary for your business to host successful websites and applications for years to come.

The post What is VMware Private Cloud? appeared first on Liquid Web.

The needs of businesses and corporations are rapidly changing. A global pandemic has changed how we do business, how we live, and how we work. More than ever, we are looking to managed hosting providers and cloud computing to meet the demand for quarantine and work from home orders. But how can you compare one vps hosting provider to another?

More than ever, we rely on virtual and cloud computing to connect teams of all sizes to complete our day to day tasks. We also rely on cloud servers to keep our websites and applications running. Our businesses need servers that offer the best performance for the platforms that keep sites going.

Fortunately, there are many VPS hosting providers to compare from to meet your pricing needs. But, where performance is concerned, there is one clear winner: Liquid Web.

Liquid Web’s VPS Hosting Outperforms Its Closest Competitors in LAMP Stack Performance

Cloud Spectator conducted performance studies on four major cloud service providers. The report breaks down performance in five categories: Virtual Processor (vCPU) Performance, Random Read/Write IOPS, Apache Web Server Performance, MySQL Mixed Workload, and PHP Performance.

We must keep in mind that this comparison is a server-side performance test. Your mileage may vary when it comes to the site or application you have developed. The VPS hosting comparison performed by Cloud Spectator tests server performance for platforms that rely on the LAMP stack. Such platforms include WordPress, Joomla, or other commonly used CMS and eCommerce software.

What is the LAMP Stack?

The LAMP Stack is the collection of web service software for Linux servers. LAMP is an acronym for the original four software components that make up the “stack” or suite of software:

• L – The Linux Operating System
• A – Apache Web (HTTP) Server
• M – MySQL relational database management system
• P – PHP programming (scripting) language

The components of the stack are interchangeable with other options that exist. These are the necessary components with which most Linux servers start.

To measure the performance of websites for this study, Cloud Spectator examined the performance of Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and each piece of the LAMP stack.

How Testing Was Done and the Data Collected

Cloud Spectator collected data on entry-level virtual machines (VMs) across Liquid Web (VPS), Amazon, Rackspace, and DigitalOcean for 48 hours. In those 48 hours, Cloud Spectator ran multiple types of performance tests. The median results are in their report.

The VMs tested with each provider were as follows:

• Amazon AWS: C5.Large with SSD EBS – US East
• DigitalOcean: 4GB Compute Optimized – US East (NYC)
• Liquid Web: 2GB SSD VPS – US Central (Zone C)
• Rackspace Cloud: Compute Optimized 4GB – US Central (Dallas-Fort Worth)

The Linux operating system used in this testing was Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

LAMP Stack Performance Results

vCPU Performance

The virtual processor (vCPU) of a VPS what a standard CPU is to a physical computer. The vCPU performs the server’s processing tasks, such as reading and writing data, compressing images, or encrypting data. It aids in delivering the desired website experience to the user.

The faster a processor completes its tasks, the better the performance users will experience. Cloud Spectator ran several processor-intensive jobs across Amazon, DigitalOcean, Liquid Web, and Rackspace VMs. The results show Liquid Web leading in the rankings for single-core vCPU performance.

Random Read/Write IOPS Performance

To measure Disk I/O (input/output) or storage performance, they looked at the results for Random Read/Write IOPS (input/output operations per second). IOPS is a metric commonly used to measure disk I/O performance.

When it comes to blogs, eCommerce sites, and mobile apps, a considerable amount of files get stored. These files need to be updated or refreshed periodically, which means faster read/write performance directly impacts your website or application’s responsiveness.

Random read/write performance can have a notable impact on any I/O intensive application’s performance. Some such applications are Magento, WooCommerce, and many other eCommerce content management systems (CMS). While it is essential to have fast read performance, what matters most to business owners when traffic is high is how many orders your CMS application can handle. Liquid Web provides the top disk performance no matter what the application requirements are.

Apache WebServer Performance

Apache Webserver is a widespread web server that handles client request traffic to your website or application. Other commonly used web servers are Nginx or LiteSpeed. For this test, each server was running Apache.

The more per second requests Apache can serve, the more responsive the website or application is. The number of website requests depends on the vCPU performance, examined previously.

Performance data for Apache was collected by running Apache and Apache Benchmark on the same VM (localhost) to isolate VM performance. Liquid Web’s VPS offers the best raw Web server performance.

MySQL Mixed Workload

MySQL is a database management system that stores all of the critical information that a website needs to deliver a fully dynamic and vibrant Web experience to your end-users. If a user is required to login to access specific parts of your website, the user identity and credentials would presumably get stored in a MySQL database. Additionally, customers who purchase something from your online store will search (reads) and refresh (writes) the online store’s database.

Cloud Spectator created a test for MySQL databases to examine the performance of each server type. They included both reads/writes to the database. The database comprised roughly 5 million rows and was reviewed with 24 simultaneous threads to ensure requests were coming in and out continuously, stress-testing the system. The results illustrate Liquid Web’s superior database performance.

PHP Performance

PHP is a programming language commonly used by many popular Content Management Systems. One of PHP’s most prevalent use cases is to generate the dynamic content on a website and query MySQL for precise data. For example, PHP will produce the registration page and transfer it to MySQL, which will store that information in the database for long-term retention and future transactions.

Apache and PHP must perform as quickly as possible to avoid website performance degradation. eCommerce stores rely on transaction speed and response time. PHP performance is measured by testing numerous aspects of the PHP interpreter used by VMs to execute PHP code. The PHP interpreter performance is directly affected by the vCPU. Better vCPU performance translates to high PHP performance, although various other aspects of the VM and operating system (OS) may also impact performance.

In the tests performed by Cloud Spectator, Liquid Web’s PHP performance topped the competition.

VPS Hosting Comparison: Why is Liquid Web Better?

What sets Liquid Web’s performance apart is a combination of best practices and ingenuity. Our servers, built specifically for high performance and incredible speed, are the direct result of our team’s technical prowess, technology knowhow, and a drive to implement the best products for our customers.

We’re incredibly proud of the performance results we see from our VPS Hosting. The performance comparison showcases the real power of our Cloud Platform. Liquid Web’s VPS Hosting surpasses our competitors in vCPU Performance, Random Read/Write IOPS, Apache Web Server Performance, MySQL Mixed Workload, and PHP Performance.

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