Webhosting at its best? Theoretical and technical approaches to top - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Presented by: Alexandru Lauran Theoretical and technical approaches to top level hosting services

Webhosting at its best?

Webhosting at its best?

• What is webhosting?

We all use the internet nowadays. It has become a big part of our daily routines. But most of us are blissfully unaware about what happens behind our favorite platforms online. We just take for granted that the internet is here for our well being. ** But have you ever thought where is the data coming from? It is retrieved from servers in the internet and someone puts the content there ** So what happens behind the closed curtains of the internet, and why are we talking about webhosting? ** This servers are hosted by so called hosting- or cloud providers, where the customer puts the content on the server of the hosting company, so that you can see it. Thats called web hosting ** Well, webhosting is an important part of what we use across the internet. Think of webhosting agencies as rental offjces. You come to the webhosting agency with the need to have a home for your files and data (hosting the data). So in a sense, we rent you, the client, servers and space for your data to become available around the web.

• What is webhosting?
• What types of webhosting are out there?

Webhosting at its best?

But there is more to webhosting than meets the eye. There are difgerent types of hosting, both relevant and both important, but both mostly unclear to the common internet user. The types are as follow: SHARED HOSTING and MANAGED HOSTING. We’ll have to understand the fundamental use cases and difgerences between those two, as understanding the difgerences between them is really important to understand the underlying insides of webhosting. So the second part of our presentation will handle clarifying the concepts of shared and managed hosting and exposing a technical approach to availability of services and the things that difgerentiate your average web host from the best web host you can get.

• What is webhosting?
• What types of webhosting are out there?
• Managed vs Shared

Webhosting at its best?

Shared hosting gives you the possibility to install lots of apps, have an email address under your domain, play with a lot of disk space if you need, all of this being available on high end, highly available servers run by the webhosting company of your choice. You can administrate everything from a ControlPanel interface, without prior knowledge being needed. Seems nice, right? Well, there are some cons to this type of hosting, one of them being that even though a lot of webhosting companies advertise this type of hosting as unlimited, you can get some limits set on your subscription plans (CPU limits, Disk I/O). Shared hosting is literally shared, you can have hundreds of “neighbours” on the server you run your application on, so load problems can be an issue if mistreated. Another important thing to keep in mind when choosing a shared hosting plan is that you can’t have it customized towards your specific needs, what you see is what you get! So if you need a standard server, without any special configurations then shared hosting is the way to go for you. 
 Managed hosting on the other hand ofgers you the full 5 star experience of webhosting. It’s all about you, having a server specially created for your needs, without any limitations and an endless palette of customizations so you have the best set up for your business. No need to share this one with others. This type of hosting is highly flexible, so you can get top services and top performance. And guess what? If you look for speed, you can get it with managed servers. But there’s a catch. First you’ll have to pay a little more to have a managed server, but believe me the price/quality ratio is totally worth it. Most important thing though is that you’ll need a system administrator, as you won’t have a ControlPanel to manage the server yourself.

• What is webhosting?
• What types of webhosting are out there?
• Managed vs Shared
• Some managed hosting insights

Webhosting at its best?

• What you get?

Managed Hosting Insights

As i mentioned before, if you order a managed hosting package you get a customized experience. We talk to you, to get information on what CPU usage, RAM, and disk space will suit your project. After we get all this information we start the server setup process. Here the technical aspect is the most important, we install and configure underlying software such as Apache/Nginx webserver, mySQL, postgreSQL. We try to ofger the optimal setup in terms of resource usage and speed.

• What you get?
• Layered architecture

Managed Hosting Insights

Servers work on a layered architecture, and most of those layers are handled by the webhosting company. Here is an example of a layered architecture:

• OS Layer
• Server Software
• Application Software

We have to mention a primary difgerence between managed and shared hosting. In a managed environment you, as a client, can’t choose what OS and Server Software you are provided. That is our job, as web hosters. The only layer you have control of is the Application layer. You can choose what CMS you

• use. The before mentioned layer is the only layer you directly interact with.

The other layers are not directly available to the client. For example if the client is using Wordpress and he wants to update content on his websites, he logs in to his Wordpress account, but he is unaware if the server runs Apache, Nginx or lets say LightHTTP

• What you get?
• Layered architecture
• Security and updating policy

Managed Hosting Insights

One thing we hold important (important being a big understatement) is the UPDATING policy. Think of the machines as athletes that participate in a competition and the updates as training those athletes. Could they be performant without training? Definitely not! So can our servers perform without updates? DEFINITELY NOT!!! You may ask why updating policies are so important. Well, it’s a given fact that every software we use today has certain security leaks. We try to combat the imperfections that provide security risks towards our servers. Software becomes more vulnerable as time goes by, so the chances that someone will get into our servers and use your data in malicious ways grows. Patching and keeping every layer up to date is given high importance in this regard, because if there is one thing we don’t want to mess up is our clients data hosted on our servers. You need to understand that all the servers on the web are under constant attack and that out there someone is trying to exploit a server vulnerability as we speak. The moment you created a server on the web, you can see how and when attacks begin via server logfiles. We can tell you that attacks begin after 5 minutes of creating the machine. Remember that, 5 minutes!!!!

• What you get
• Layered architecture
• Security and updating policy
• Recap of the advantages of managed hosting

Managed Hosting Insights

Our intention is not to scare you though. We will handle security for you. And while we are at this, we will handle everything for you. So, we got you covered all the way, because we love our partners happy and our machines safe. Let's recap the advantages, shall we? You get dedicated resources, so your project is served right. Sounds good? Bare with us, because there is more. Your machine is configured exactly to your needs and requests and updated constantly. By now you think your worries are all solved? If not, here is something that will really make you rest your worries aside: regarding the interaction with client applications, you have an easy, approachable interface towards your content, so you can edit, create, update content with ease and hassle free. Did we convince you that we really care about your projects wellfare?

• What you get from shared hosting and what is it?

Shared hosting insights

So we talked about managed hosting and what it has to ofger. But how about shared hosting? Well, as shared hosting’s name says, its shared. What that means? It means you get shared resources(CPU, disk space, RAM) with others on a single server instance. The architecture of shared hosting is the same as managed hosting’, a layered one. The layers taken care of by the web host company are: –– OS layer — Server Software layer

• What you get from shared hosting and what is it?
• Application layer and customer advantages

Shared hosting insights

The application layer in shared hosting is the clients full responsibility. That brings some extra hassle for you, as you have to apply updates to the applications you use by yourself. The main advantage of shared hosting is that management is really easy. You can manage virtually everything in a controlled environment with ControlPanels easily accessible. One other advantage is price, as shared hosting is cheaper due to the fact that you dont have to get a server only for yourself.

• What you get from shared hosting and what is it?
• Application layer and customer advantages
• A note on security of shared hosting solutions

Shared hosting insights

A lot of customers are choosing shared hosting because its cheap. But they always tend to do their work and forget an important thing. With their website up on the server and email addresses up and running, software updates are easily forgotten or outright ignored. This means that down the line, software will get outdated and vulnerable. Those vulnerabilities make clients data unsafe and a lot of clients come to us with problems due to updates not being installed at the right time. This sort of problem is a relatively common occurrence, which sadly creates a lot of hassle for you, as the end user. Managed hosting in view from the customer is more thing: Set up the website and forget about if it is running. Shared hosting requires more responsibility from the customer.

• What you get from shared hosting and what is it?
• Application layer and customer advantages
• A note on security of shared hosting solutions
• Managed versus shared from the client point of view

Shared hosting insights

The client is pretty simple minded, which is not bad, don’t get me wrong. He thinks of managed hosting like this:
 I will do my work on the server and leave it to my dedicated sysadmin and hosting team to do the rest for me. As long as everything is fine and working, i really don't care about it. But this isn’t the case for shared hosting. It requires a lot more awareness and implication from the end client. Ideally you have to run all the updates on all your apps so you keep your data safe. *NOTE* That usually doesn’t happen.

Managed hosting use case Game Servers for McDonalds

• Infrastructure explained ->

Managed hosting use case

One of our clients, McDonalds, runs promotions by using seasonal adapted games. Those games are created with PHP and available to mobile clients. Being the name that it is, McDonalds already has a huge registered account base for the games, user base that they notify via push notifications for iOS and Android, newsletters and TV advertising. What does this means to the hosting servers? Well lets take for example a 300.000 iOS user payload and a 400.000 Android user payload getting the push notification about a new game starting. Predictably enough many of them will click the notification and start the game. That means that our servers have to handle over 200.000 requests simultaneously with the game being delivered and the users notified. The challenge on

• ur part is how we handle that load, so we provide available services and reliable response times. We have to handle well the spikes of traffjc caused by

massive request waves to the servers and still be able to provide good end user experience with the game, which means preventing latency spikes. Our approach to the matter is a 7 backend servers, one load balancer and a DB server architecture. Therefore we built a infrastructure with 7 backend servers, a load balancer and a database server. Dont use that in the presentation, but keep it for answering questions: ——————————- For internal use, and maybe you will be asked what kind of servers this will be:

• each backend server has 6 CPUS and 16 GB RAM
• servers are virtual servers
• virtualization is KVM
• why we use virtualization:

Infrastructure explained

First interface with the servers is an loadbalancer powered by nginx. It handles the traffjc we talked about earlier on, distributing requests to one of the 7 backend servers. Every backend server agent “talks” to the loadbalancer, giving it information on it’s load so the balancer knows who can accept requests without over burdening the backend machines. As you can see, all the backend servers are doing selects and updates in to the database server. Therefore its also very important that the database server is very fast. This works smooth, as long the database is configured correctly. For fast queries a column indexation is required. If an index is missing, and the database needs a few milliseconds longer for a query, this can be fatal in such an environment, because requests on the backend servers are queued and slowing down the whole system. As long as everything is configured correctly from the developers side, the system runs smooth, even when loads are very high. The highest peaks are coming from push messages, and if users are accessing the game because of the push messages, all backend servers are going to handle high load, cpu and memory usage, but they respond fast to the client.

• Web hosting at its best?
• Q&A Session

Conclusions

Ofgering highly available services, with the best technical approaches to them, means in our opinion doing what we do in the most optimal manner. Handling our clients needs and ofgering him support so that every problem he encounters is solved is what makes us stand a cut above the rest. We value

• ur customers, consider them our friends and this makes us provide the best experience.

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