We’ve been busy for quite sometime in the AUSWEB labs, testing and finalizing our new VMware Cloud Hosting solution. For Christmas we received one of the final pieces of the puzzle, that being our new EqualLogic SAN which will provide both high-availability and fail safe redundancy for our upcoming Cloud Hosting solutions.
AUSWEB’s new Cloud Hosting solutions utilise VMware ESX and vSphere 4 running on our high-powered DELL PowerEdge Server cluster, to deliver cost-effective hosting options with dynamic scalability, offering you high availability and full redundancy with fail safe performance.
Cloud Hosting allows you to add processors and memory on the fly and scalable storage space from AUSWEB’s EqualLogic Enterprise-Class SAN to any AUSWEB Cloud VMware Virtual Machine as you require, meaning you only pay for what you need as you need!
With AUSWEB Cloud Hosting you can run any Guest Operating System that runs under VMware ESX, including all Windows versions, all Linux distributions and many more.
All VMware Virtual Machines are connected to our high speed storage network to deliver blazing fast speed and server performance with a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
Stay tuned to this space for more Cloud Hosting announcements in the coming weeks.
News, Web Hosting News
Cloud Hosting, EqualLogic, ESX, PowerEdge, SAN, VMware, vSphere
One of the most common questions (after SEO) we receive from our customer’s, is about optimizing their website load times and overall performance. The most common area is almost always making sure you’re using the right image type and compression, for the right situation. With modern website design and development, there are of course a lot more considerations to take into account, such as database driven content and advanced scripting languages. All of which can be optimized to ensure a better browsing experience for your visitors! Read more…
Web Design, Web Development, Web Hosting News
AJAX, css, performance, scripting, Web Design, yslow
Matt Cutts Talks Communication Strategy
One thing that Google is pretty good at is providing resources for webmasters to learn from. The regular videos from Matt Cutts in which he answers user-submitted questions are no different. It just happens to be this very topic that is addressed in the latest YouTube upload.
Read more…
Feeds, Google, HTML, News, Scripting & Coding, Search, Web Hosting News
Please find attached the new important Fantastico software security updates for your cPanel Hosting account
- Joomla 1.5: 1.5.12 -> 1.5.13
- Open-Realty: 2.5.6 -> 2.5.7
- SMF: 1.1.9 -> 1.1.10
- TYPO3: 4.2.1 -> 4.2.8
- WordPress: 2.8 -> 2.8.2
- Coppermine Photo Gallery: 1.4.20 -> 1.4.25
- Drupal: 6.10 -> 6.13
- LimeSurvey: 1.82+ -> 1.85+
- OpenX: 2.0.11-pr1 -> 2.8.1
- osTicket: 1.3.1 -> 1.6 RC5
- PHPlist: 2.10.9 -> 2.10.10
- phpWCMS: 1.1-RC4 Rev. A -> 1.4.2 r327
- TikiWiki: 3.0 -> 3.1
- Zen Cart: 1.3.8a -> 1.3.8a [Patched]
- Zikula: 0.764 -> 1.1.1
Please always keep your scripts save and secure and up-to-date to the newest version to prevent server and system compromise, which would not just affect you , but lots of other clients!
Best Regards and thanks you for your cooperation.
AUSWEB Hosting , Domains and Dedicated Servers
http://online.ausweb.com.au/clients/
http://tutorials.ausweb.com.au/
http://ausweb.com.au
CMS, Joomla, News, PHP Applications, Scripting & Coding, Web Development, Web Hosting News, Wordpress, cPanel, drupal
Being in the hosting industry, one of the key elements of hosting is uptime and availability. Trust us when we say this is VERY important. We spend a lot of money on making sure that if problems occur, there is a fail over. If the fail over, fails over – There is a “Plan C”. In order for us to know the moment a server becomes unresponsive, or if part of the network is having issues – We use monitoring.
Having support staff available 24/7 is one thing – They can answer customers queries, keep the information flowing and resolve problems. However, Not always can support staff fix the problem sitting at their desk. Sometimes systems administrators and network engineers need to be dispatched to the data centre at 3am on a Sunday morning, And lets face it – we can’t all work 24 hours a day. So the best way for all of our staff to know when an issue arises is via Instant SMS alerts. To do this, we use a particular service called Pingdom.
Pingdom monitor our network/servers and their response times from multiple locations, and send us SMS alerts when something goes wrong. This allows all of our staff to be aware, the exact moment a server goes down, no matter where we are. Now, they have opened up a new type of account which allows you to monitor your website for free. Part of this package includes 20 Free SMS credits per month.
We recommend you give it a go, Especially if you want to sleep at night – knowing that someone is keeping an eye on your website.
Pingdom: www.pingdom.com
News, Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Pingdom, Uptime, Website Monitoring
Verisign recently published it’s quarterly domain report – “The Domain Name Industry Brief“.
As to be expected from a report dealing with numbers of that size, the latest report is a little on the boring side for the average person, with a lot data and statistics to wade through.
So we’ve picked some of the more interesting figures, which you can see below!
Read more…
Domains, Web Hosting News
Domain Names, Verisign
Recently we made a post about our new cloud computing infrastructure and the hardware we were using to build such a platform. Well, our servers have been delivered and we are in stage two of this set-up which is the install and configuration of the ‘cloud’.
As previously discussed, we have purchased a number of the new Dell PowerEdge R710 servers, and we have since configured these in the data centre and commenced the complex process of getting these servers working in unison. The reason why this stage is so important, is because this is the base building blocks of our cloud. These machines will be doing the hard work of computing the extreme amounts of data we intend on pushing through the cloud. They will also be configured so that in the case that one server (Server A) was to fail or go offline, there would be no downtime for the end user, The other servers (Server B, C & D) in the cloud would compensate and manage the tasks that server A was doing. The data would autonomously be mirrored across the active servers, in the case that another server was to fail. The way that the servers do this, is via a backbone gigabit network.
Read more…
News, Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Ausweb, Cloud Computing, Dell
The Wolfram Alpha team has revealed on their blog, some of the impressive hardware behind their super-duper new “Computational Search Engine”. If you haven’t heard about Wolfram Alpha yet, it’s a recently launched “computational knowledge engine” with an interface similar to a search engine. Wolfram Alpha promises to approach to our search engine needs from a different perspective, with the lofty long-term ambition of “making all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”.
By entering your question or calculation, Wolfram|Alpha uses it’s built-in algorithms and ever-growing collection of data to compute your response. Be it the distance in cm to Pluto, or the age old mystery of ‘how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?’
Read more…
Off Topic, Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Alpha, Search Engine, Wolfram
The Google network dropped off the radar for many Internet users last Thursday. Widespread outages were reported across several Google services including search, Google Docs, Gmail and YouTube, were the main services that left people scratching their heads and wondering what to do next – best catalogued here by the #GoogleFail Twitter stream.
Not all Internet users were affected, but those using larger American providers such as AT&T or Verizon, appeared to be disproportionately effected. A number of larger US based ISP’s “peer” with Google, or interconnect their networks with Google’s networks in order to improve speed and reduce bandwidth. Much like a large-scale highway accident shutting down a key section of road, the effects still ripple off and smaller ISP’s not interconnected with Google were able to route around the problem.
Read more…
Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Google
So you probably think we’re all sitting back at our desks, day dreaming about the weekend or betting on this weekends football matches but that’s definitely NOT the case. (Go the Roosters!) We’ve been busy making purchases in preparation for our new cloud infrastructure! Gigabit switches, Brand new (and amazingly powerful) Dell Servers, brand new cabinets in the new area of Sydney’s Equinix Data centre, and it’s all coming together rather nicely.
We’ve been busy doing research and development so that we can hit the ground running and we may just be the first Australian host to provide cloud services to the public. And we’re VERY excited about it.
Here’s some specifications of the servers we have purchased, for you personalities out there that have geek or technology tendencies.
Dell PowerEdge R710 servers each with:
Dual Intel Xeon X5550 – 2.66Ghz, 8M Cache, 6.40 GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT (These are the new Intel CPUs with performance improvements which absolutely destroy any previous benchmarks)
72GB RAM – Check out the below photos to see how each set of DIMM slots are assigned to each CPU, which from what I’ve heard – doubles the speed.
6 x 300GB SAS (15,000 RPM) Drives in RAID0 configuration. – Due to the way our cloud infrastructure will work, storage will be raided on the cloud layer so we don’t need to worry about mirroring data at the hardware level.
4 x Gigabit Ethernet ports – At this stage we will be using 2 ports per server, but soon enough we will increasing this to 4 or maybe 6 ports per server for better throughput.
Dual PSU Units – These are awesome, allowing us to actually change power supplies whilst the server is running.
Read more…
Rambles, Science & Tech, Software, Web Hosting News
Ausweb, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud Hosting, Dell, PowerEdge
Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius, the original developer of the open-source MySQL database, has left Sun Microsystems and is starting his own company, Monty Program Ab, he said in a blog post Thursday. Widenius and Sun had a slightly rocky relationship since the vendor bought MySQL last year for $1 billion.
In a much-discussed November blog post, he trashed Sun’s decision to give MySQL 5.1 a ‘generally available’ designation, saying it was riddled with serious bugs. Meanwhile, Monty Program Ab will be ‘a true open-source company,’ with only a small number of employees who ’strive to have fun together and share the profit we create.’ The company will work on the Maria project, a storage engine Widenius and others developed, he wrote.’
Taken from: Slashdot
News, Web Hosting News
Monty Widenius, MySQL, Quit, Sun
Well it’s been an exciting past few weeks (besides the Christmas and new years drunken activities) at Ausweb, We’re starting to move into some uncharted territory. We have primarily been a website hosting company, and we also provide dedicated server solutions for customers, Which we do (I think) very well. But now, as the industry changes, we must adapt.
If you keep tabs on the IT industry, you most probably have noticed the hype of late which has been hosting in a virtual environment. This basically gives you the advantage of having the features of a dedicated server, But not having your own physical hardware. It’s done by assigning things like disk space, memory and CPU allocation to customers and keeping them completely seperate from each other in “containers”, Virtual Private Servers are what you could call the new black in the hosting world.
Read more…
Web Hosting News
Ausweb, Clustering, Virtual Clustering, Virtual Private Servers, Virtuozzo
A Blog hosting service called Journalspace has decided to pack up and sell up after recently loosing all of their data. It appears that no external backups were ever made for the six years of blogs which has been accumulating at a slow and steady pace. The owners of the website have turned to selling the domain on ebay.
The website says “There was no hardware failure” but rather that “Both drives are operating fine. The data was simply gone. Overwritten… Clearly we failed to take the steps to prevent this from happening. And for that we are very sorry. So, after nearly six years, journalspace is nore more.”
There is some talks of sabotage as one of the Lagomorphics team has previously sabotaged some key servers several months ago after being caught stealing. So there is some possibillity that the same individual has again, caused trouble for the website.
I think everyone can learn from this lesson and thats BACK UP YOUR DATA.
Web Hosting News
Backup, data loss, Journalspace, sabotage
After weeks of intense testing and feedback all the great new features and optimizations present in cPanel 11.24 EDGE and CURRENT are now in our RELEASE build. 11.24.4 includes many updates and enhancements that have been discussed in past posts. Now, those customers who prefer to use cPanel’s RELEASE build get to find out what all the buzz is about.
To find out more about all the optimizations and updates that 11.24.4 brings to the table please have a look here.
http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpwhm/cpanel11/new-features.htm
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
Please ensure to read the following message carefully as there is important information about MySQL and Automated process killers in relation to the cPanel 11.24 upgrade.
MySQL Root Password
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With cPanel 11.24 now available, it is imperative to ensure that you have set your MySQL root password before upgrading to the latest version of cPanel. If you have previously skipped this step, you can set it now using the “MySQL Root Password” function in WebHost Manager. Failure to set a MySQL root password may cause database corruption on systems running MySQL 4.1 with InnoDB tables. Please set your MySQL root password as soon as possible to avoid any issues. Machines without a MySQL root password set allow access to any database by any user so it is imperative that a password is set as soon as possible.
If you have moved /root
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If you have set root’s home directory to something other than /root, you will need to copy .my.cnf from root’s home directory to /root/my.cnf. In the future, this process will be automated.
Automated process killers
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If you have a system in place that automatically kills processes taking up a lot of CPU time, you should disable them before running the cPanel update as the size of the update has triggered many of these systems. These process killers will kill updates or related process in the middle of the process and cause issues. If you have a failed update, you can force a re-update by running /scripts/upcp –force
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
__________________________________
FreeBSD 4.x End of Support
cPanel support for FreeBSD 4.x will end August 1, 2008. cPanel will
not maintain binary compatibility for FreeBSD versions less than 5.x.
cPanel recommends that all affected users update to the latest
production release of FreeBSD to ensure future compatibility. If you
are unable to update to a more recent version of FreeBSD, then the
system’s update preferences (WHM >> Server Configuration >> Update
Config) must be set to “Never Update” prior to the deadline. Failure
to do so will result in complete loss of cPanel and WHM functionality.
After August 1 2008 and the end of our support for FreeBSD 4.x, you
will not receive any security updates or bug fixes. Binaries and other
files for FreeBSD 4.x will no longer be available from cPanel’s update
servers. We therefore urge everyone currently using FreeBSD 4.x begin
transitioning to updated versions in the FreeBSD 5+ tree.
__________________________________
Mbox & UW IMAP End of Support
In accordance with earlier deprecation announcements of the mbox mail
storage format, cPanel will no longer support mbox as of August 1,
2008. UW IMAP server and cPanel’s cppop server will no longer be
available in future builds. cPanel server owners are strongly urged to
convert any remaining mbox systems to maildir prior to August 1, 2008.
Failure to do so will result in loss of email client functionality.
As always, if you require assistance our technical team is standing by
to help.
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
New cPanel builds have been published tonight to improve installation, speed, memory usage and upgrade experiences. Recently, installs and updates have been taking excessively long due to CPAN module tests during the Perl module updates. New EDGE, CURRENT and RELEASE builds 11.23.3 build 25946 (or later) have been released tonight to address this issue and to improve installer speed and add checks unrelated to Perl. If you have been experiencing update or install issues, we recommend re-downloading http://layer1.cpanel.net/latest for installs or re-running /scripts/upcp for updates.
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
As of today, July 11, 2008, cPanel will no longer be offering One Time Licenses. These licenses are not currently inline with the way we deliver our products and do not allow us to provide the same high level of service to our customers that our other license models do. We apologize for the lack of notice however, providing notice would simply allow for more One Time Licenses to be sold which is the opposite intention of this action. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
cPanel and R1Soft are teaming up again to offer a great deal for cPanel server administrators and datacenters. R1Soft, maker of the industry leading CDP (Continuous Data Protection) backup software is running a special expressly for cPanel software users. For a limited time, cPack can be purchased for 25% off the normal price.
R1Soft’s CDP product is a great way to provide an extra level of data safety above and beyond cPanel’s built in backup facilities. Backups can be accessed directly from the cPanel interface by domain owners. Server owners can also take advantage of the bare-metal restore capabilities which bring servers back online quickly. “Data backup and the integrity of those backups are key to maintaining and growing enterprise level hosting operations and to that end, we suggest you have a look at the functionality that R1Soft can bring to the table,” says David Koston, cPanel’s Vice President of Operations. “We believe that R1’s cPack solution offers serious benefits for both web hosts and domain owners. This promotion is a good way for hosts to add backup services to their current offerings at a very reasonable price.”
To find out more about this promotion, please visit:
http://www.r1soft.com/products/special-offers/cpack/
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
