High Performance Web Hosting. What is this?

HC Blog

High Performance Hosting is a term that describes a web hosting account that has the capability to handle a website load much higher than the average rate in a specific niche. In this article, we use the term to describe "High Performance Shared Hosting," or in other words, a Virtual Hosting environment, where the computing resources are shared between a number of accounts and clients.

What Makes Any Web Hosting Service A High Performance One?

The standard Shared Website Hosting services have long been delivered from stand-alone physical servers. One of the most popular hosting automation control panels, cPanel (which has become an industry standard), and most other (or all other control panels) are developed to run in a single server environment. For many reasons, some of them, due to rights and licensing, are usually locked to the server's CPU and cannot operate within a multi-server environment

This creates an obstacle for the computing environments use for Shared Hosting. They can not operate in a multi-server environment. The computing tasks that require cPanel control panel and other hosting automation panels cannot be executed in a clustered server system. Between 2009 and 2011, Host Color has been experimenting with an infrastructure solution, a cluster of physical servers that ran GlusterFS on top of a Red Hat Cluster Suite based multi-server system. It featured load-balancing and was an advanced technology, which was a naturally High Performance Hosting solution. However, due to various circumstances, including changes in the OS kernel and other development issues, the solution has never entered the market.

When the virtualization technologies advanced, we have decided to move all Shared accounts on top of a VMware ESXi Virtual Data Center. This way HC switched from website hosting services provided from stand-alone servers to Cloud Web Hosting.

What Kind Of Processing Power Is Required For High Performance Hosting?

HC uses VMware ESXi based computing instances to host Shared Hosting accounts. Our underlying physical infrastructure is entirely virtualized and features:

Automated provisioning of all nodes and services, which simplifies the infrastructure management
Improved business continuity of the data processing cycle
Simplified roll out and management of the networking services
Enables the web hosting services to be delivered through a standardized OS and software environment, rather than depending on the vendor's hardware specifications resulting from the vendor locked-in technologies.

As a result of the technical advantages described above, HC offers much better service quality, and our customers enjoy business continuity. It is easy for HC to deploy networking services and maintain them. We can scale the Cloud VMs used for hosting websites at any time with a very short or zero interruption of the services. Our customers also enjoy improved service roll-out. We can install new software and add services to their accounts without disrupting the network services due to the Cloud infrastructure's natural agility that serves Shared Hosting Accounts.

The only thing we need to consider is to use CPU and RAM redundant Cloud VMs to power the Shared Hosting services, as our Fault-Tolerance function of the processing operations features certain limitations in terms of CPU Cores. However, this is a minimal price to pay to maintain the exceptional Virtualized Data Center infrastructure HC uses to deliver Cloud-based High Performance Hosting.

What Kind Of Storage Service Makes A Difference?

The Storage operations are the key to achieving high performance in a Shared computing environment. It is virtually impossible to offer a combination of high Input/Output and increased reliability on a stand-alone physical server. HostColor uses a Storage Area Network (SAN) built with enterprise-grade Solid State Drives (SSD) and an overall capacity of 250 000 IOPS (Input/Output Per Second). In comparison, our own SANs built with Hard Drives (HDD) have a capacity of 1700 IOPS (Input/Output Per Second), which is significantly more than I/O offered by stand-alone physical serves with enterprise SATA HDD.

The storage appliances part of Host Color's SSD-powered SAN is connected to the Cloud VMs used for processing operations through multiple 10 GigE ports using low-latency interconnect. The low-latency internal network helps us guarantee one of the fastest Shared Web Hosting services the website owners can find on the market.

Are There Any Other Services To Ensure A High Performance?

Yes, there are. No matter how fast the Input/Output Per Second operations are, any storage system could fail, resulting in an interruption of all IT services. To increase the business continuity of our Cloud-based Websites & Hosting services HC uses SAN appliances that feature Fault-Tolerance and и Built-in Data Protection. In an unlikely event of a failure of the storage services or any other issue on our SAN, HC uses a technical solution that allows us to go back in time before the moment of any failure and to recover all the data, preventing any loss of information.

All components part of the Host Color's Cloud infrastructure used to deliver Shared Hosting services are hardware redundant and easy to replace, without a need to stop the IT service delivery.