Igor Seletskiy of CloudLinux presents on Thursday afternoon
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In one of the first Thursday afternoon sessions, Igor Seletskiy of CloudLInux offered a presentation on moving shared hosting resources to the cloud, illustrating a unique element of the CloudLinux focus, and an element of the cloud business that is not discussed nearly as much.
I’m going to skip recording much of the “what is the cloud, really” portion of the presentation, except to say that Seletskiy thinks cloud shouldn’t be considered a technical term, or used as one, and should be considered a marketing term.
That is not to say there isn’t a cloud, or that there aren’t benefits to using cloud resources – and they’re the ones we’re familiar with, performance, reliability and redundancy benefits.
However, there are performance hits, particularly when connecting to storage, and dealing with hypervisor-based virtualization. IO performance issues on servers running in production environments can be very difficult to diagnose and repair, he says.
CloudLinux, he says, helps hosts to move into a cloud VM based environment a little bit at a time, partly by enabling providers to limit usage by the individual user, preventing the kind of resource-usage spikes that can impact the other sites on a given piece of shared server hardware.
Not only does that limit the potential for a given customer to consume too much, it also guarantees each customer that they have dedicated access to a certain pool of resources. That can be another problem in the cloud, since the performance can vary from cloud to cloud, and even from day to day on a given cloud.
He says there are a big variety of benefits to running shared hosting in a clustered environment (which can be done with virtualization products from OnApp or from Parallels), however it isn’t easy to set up, and it isn’t easy to maintain, a clustered environment. Even though clusters are an inherently high-availability environment, they are frequently brought down by things like configuration errors and human error.
A better alternative might be the load-balanced cluster, which splits load between several “mini-clusters.”
According to Seletskiy, Cloud Linux is a good ingredient to bring into your clustering efforts because it can help prevent performance-damaging domino effects that occur from performance-spikes that can quickly take down clusters or mini-clustered. CloudLinux’s per-user usage limiting specifically prevents that kind of spike from happening.
The CloudLinux OS is running in a lot of shared hosting environments already, including VPS.net and HostDime, as well as others. And it’s compatible with all of the widely-used hosting software, including control panels and other various add-ons.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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