AnyHosting

I have been following the excellent Data Center Knowledge blog lately, they have a good write-up on Cisco getting into the server business.

However it’s pretty unclear to me what “unified computing” means exactly, it seems like they are talking about some kind of virtualization approach, the end result being that you can buy all your server and networking gear from Cisco and have your own private cloud.

Hard to tell though, the NY times article is pretty fluffy (“New tools developed by VMWare, the market leader, make it possible to shuffle business applications around a data center just by pointing a computer mouse at an icon on the screen.”) and the Cisco blog posts are fairly grandiose (“If not us, who? If not now, when?”).

I guess I’ll just have to wait until they actually have something to sell. I would rather have a step towards commoditization and not away from it. If Cisco is going to sell solid-state servers with the same kind of support and reliability as their networking gear, then that sounds great. It so far does not sound like that is what this is.

One of the major concerns I have with running my own CMS like Joomla or Drupal (or blogging software like WordPress for that matter) is keeping it up to date. These kinds of tasks are often seen as annoying busywork, and nobody wants to break a site that is working already, but having your site broken into and/or defaced via the CMS is a definite possibility.

This has happened to WordPress quite a bit, which is one reason I advise people to use a hosted service if at all possible. The makers of WordPress do their hosting, and you can find support on lots of low-cost web hosts.

Any recommendations for sites providing CMS hosting (including applying security updates)?

I’ve been experimenting with managed hosting lately. I ended up going with Fastservers.net for a pilot project, and so far it’s been totally smooth.

So far I’ve only had a West Coast US presence, and managed seems like the best way to get an East Coast and European presence (FS has datacenters on both coasts, as well as in Amsterdam and Tokyo).

I requested quotes from over a dozen different vendors, the primary reasons I went with them had to do with:

• responsiveness – they actually got back to every email, did not ask repeat questions, etc.
• upfront pricing – they included prices on my quotes, and did not hesitate to break it down for me to use for my internal reporting
• turnaround time – in addition to server/network uptime, their SLA covers bringing up new servers (within 24 hours) and hardware replacement (within 2 hours).

Anyway, exciting stuff. I should be able to go live with them very soon, going to just go with round-robin DNS for the initial launch, although I am starting to look into hosted GSLB vendors. I’m not sure that GSLB is such a great thing, but it seems like a marginally acceptable choice among the set of complete bagbiting loser WAN load-balancing methods out there that we have to work with out here in the real world (with apologies to jwz).

Now that I’ve settled into my new day job, I am going to start blogging here and working on web stuff again.

I’m getting very interested in the analytics and accounting side of things, so expect to see more of that here! I’ve got some articles in the pipeline, too.

In particular, I’m very keen on exploring more about how small businesses can take advantage of hosting services (managed hosting, cloud computing, etc. etc.) and how to determine when it makes sense to build your own infrastructure.

There’s a ton of business advice out there, and I tend to get one idea stuck in my head – do one thing, and do it well. There’s a similar idea behind the concept of the Unix shell and commands, although arguably fragmentation has muddied the waters quite a bit.

The tough part seems to be balancing what you think you do best against missed opportunities. Amazon saw the potential to lease out it’s datacenter, which is a huge shift toward developer-facing web services, from direct customer-facing web sites.

I don’t know yet whether this is a good or bad move for them, but it certainly takes guts. I wonder what kind of internal decision-making route this took, to get from someone’s idea to final implementation; it’s surprising to see this from a company already seeing huge success in it’s core business.

I guess I can see parallels in Google and Microsoft, who were able to parlay dominance in one area to success in others. Still, they tend to only actually be wildly successful in one area, and use that to support ventures in the others.

Not sure how I missed 3tera before, they look like an interesting entrant to the “utility computing” market, which everyone is excited about again since Amazon’s got into it.

I haven’t really done my due diligence on this company yet, but I checked out the slick demo  (bonus points that it shows their app running in Firefox, takes the worry of cross-browser compatbility off the table) and have been reading back issues of the blog, and it sounds like a pretty solid offering.

If you don’t have time to watch the demo, in a nutshell it looks like you can architect your own virtual datacenter using their browser-based drag’n'drop schematic editor, including things like load balancers, and they automatically instantiate everything for you.

The Dynamic Appliance idea sounds pretty cool, as the idea of being able to seamlessly tap into more supply when demand runs high (and not pay for supply when demand runs low) seems to be the whole point of the utility computing thing.

I worry a little about what happens to my servers if this company goes away, or if they’re bought and put into maintenance mode, etc. but this is a pretty normal worry for any company. I think open-sourcing more of their stuff would assuage this a bit since I wouldn’t necessarily have to reconfigure everything to move to a competitor, but I can certainly understand their business reasons for not doing this.

However, like I said I haven’t looked at them in-depth yet, so take these worries with a grain of salt. Hosting providers of all flavors are susceptible to this kind of thing, as they often have their own home-grown or customized administration software, so it’s generally a pain to move between different providers.

I think that to be a true commodity, switching between providers has to be no-brainer as it is for services like telephone and electricity: you get the same dial-tone and same voltage, just at a different pricing model. I think this issue will be forced if the utility computing idea really catches fire this time.

I’m thinking about doing series of how-to style articles on more technical subjects, here are some thoughts on a starting point: how to install and use Ubuntu Server, with AnyHosting as a case study.

AnyHosting currently uses Ubuntu Server (LTS) on a Rimuhosting.com virtual host. Ubuntu is very easy to install and use as a desktop, but if you haven’t done administration purely from the command line then Server can be a bit daunting. There are excellent starter guides and forums on the Ubuntu website.

Services

The following external services are provided (description followed by Ubuntu package name) :

• web server – apache2
• SMTP(+SSL) email server – postfix
• IMAP/POP(+SSL) email server – courier
• FTP – proftpd

Additionally, there are some internal services running, which are not visible from the internet (blocked by the “iptables” firewall):

• Database – mysql
• Monitoring/auto-recovery service – monit
• Automatic installation of security updates – cron-apt
• Log monitoring and reporting – logwatch logcheck
• Append-only network backups – rsync

Security

All unused ports are blocked. Any connection attempts are logged and reported. FTP and email services authenticate against the database, so clients do not need system or shell accounts.

For shared hosting, Apache is configured to proxy to chrooted installs which users have access to (as discussed previously). This is not as secure as having a real separate VM or better yet a separate machine for each web hosting client, but therein lies the dilemma of low-cost shared hosting versus moderate-to-high priced dedicated hosting.

The primary goal is to protect legitimate users from eachother; protecting the system from unauthorized intrusion (and detecting such intrustion) probably deserves it’s own series of articles, however the last few services listed in the “Services” section above should give some clues.

UPDATE link to secure shared hosting on ubuntu server part 1

If you run your own web, email, or other services, you need to be notified if these services are not up and running. There are tons of great choices available; which is right for you depends on your needs (how many operating systems do you support, what is your tolerance for complex configuration, how large of a system are we talking, etc). Two that I’ve used and can recommend are Nagios and Monit.

I’ve used Nagios in mixed Unix/Linux/Windows/MacOSX environments, and although it’s fairly time consuming to configure, it’s definitely very powerful. The workhorse of a Nagios system are plugins, which are simple Unix commands (they just return an exit code and optionally an informational message to tell Nagios whether the service is OK, in a warning state, or critical).

There are tons of Nagios plugins already written, which can check disk space, load average, monitor a specific TCP port, etc. Custom plugins can be written in any programming language that you like.

Nagios has a bunch of features like escalation (e.g. paging an on-call person if the service is down after an initial email), attempting to restart services, a web interface to schedule planned downtime and acknowledge outages, etc.

Nagios is great, but as I said it takes a little while to come up to speed on configuration, and if you only have one host it might be a bit more than you need. A much simpler system that I’ve been using on standalone hosts lately is Monit, which primarily exists to attempt auto-recovery and alert when service outages happen.

For example, if you want to try restarting your MySQL server before being paged, that’s really simple to specify in monitrc (the Monit config file):

check process mysql with pidfile /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid
  start program = "/etc/init.d/mysql start"
  stop program  = "/etc/init.d/mysql stop"
  if failed port 3306 then restart
  if 2 restarts within 3 cycles then timeout

You can also use Monit to restart or stop an application if it uses too much CPU, spawns too many children (as Apache does for each incoming connection), starts taking too much memory, etc. which can help to mitigate bugs and deal with denial of service attacks.

Monit isn’t a client/server system like Nagios, but this does not necessarily preclude you from configuring it centrally if you use a good deployment system (that’s a subject for a future blog post, though).

I’ve put up an article on Web Hosting Basics – the bare necessities of running your own site.

However this doesn’t really tell the whole story, so I’m going to start working on first blogging and then writing followup articles on the major themes, in no particular order:

• purchasing a domain
• choosing a hosting provider
• promoting your business

If hosting yourself:

• running a web server
• running an email (SMTP, POP, IMAP) server
• backups
• monitoring

I’ve just put up a new article in AnyHosting’s article section – “Reliable, scalable, and growable web services“.

This touches on a few of my previous posts,  just trying to distill it down for anyone out there searching for some basic information.