The HostAdvice blog presents the finest and most valuable tips, tools and ideas for small business owners, start-up’s and entrepreneurs.

GoDaddy to Shift Web Hosting Data Centers to AWS Cloud

Written by: , Mar. 29, 2018
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Cloud Transition: Majority of GoDaddy Web Hosting Services to Run on AWS with Kubernetes

GoDaddy made a joint announcement with AWS in a press release this week stating that the company, known as the world's largest domain name registrar and most recognized brand in the web hosting industry, would be conducting a multi-year transition from independent private cloud data center management to investing in public cloud hardware and software services from Amazon.com for business operations. It can be argued that the investment in and maintenance of large scale data center operations on a private basis by web hosting companies has been one of the most distinguishing traits in the industry among the major brands. GoDaddy is one of the largest of the major web hosting companies to shift to AWS for hardware and platform tools that allow them to operate on massive scale of over 17 million registered users. It should be noted that GoDaddy already runs their managed WordPress hosting plans on AWS hardware using custom web server stack software optimized for the CMS, as WPengine, Pantheon, Acquia, & many other startup companies also currently do in competition. GoDaddy will continue to manage client domain name registration information on private data center hardware & facilities while most of the shared, VPS, & dedicated server web hosting plans will be transitioned to AWS public cloud hardware for easier maintenance with better pricing, security, & upgrades. GoDaddy also seeks to leverage AWS's available "machine learning, analytics, databases, and containers" platforms such as Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), & P3 Instances for AI/ML/DL generated product recommendations on domain appraisals. Although this is a major deal for both companies, the financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. It looks like a major capitulation by GoDaddy/MediaTemple to AWS.

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Cloud Container News: Ubuntu OpenStack, Tata Communications, JFrog, Open BMC, & Kaggle

Written by: , Mar. 22, 2018
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Container-as-a-Service (CaaS), SSD Storage, & Open Baseboard Management Controllers

Ubuntu OpenStack released statistics last week which positioned the Linux software distribution as #1 overall in market share for cloud data center management built using OpenStack for network administration. Ubuntu claimed 55% of the total business investment in this sector in 2017 over rival enterprise Linux platform distributions from Red Hat OpenShift and SUSE Cloud 7 with MicroOS. In India, the software development outsourcing firm Tata Communications announced new support for a cloud Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform developed by their programming teams as a solution for:

  • Enterprise companies like telecoms, banking/finance, manufacturing, or ecommerce to adopt quickly in database modernization;
  • The production of custom-coded web/mobile apps with high performance cloud hosting support at the highest levels of user traffic;
  • Managing public/private/hybrid cloud network hardware for web publishing, mobile application, & SaaS product requirements.

Tata Communications continues a trend launched by Infosys and Wipro in building proprietary private cloud software solutions that can be used by outsourcing teams in supporting many enterprise corporations in operations simultaneously. Integrator companies can install Red Hat OpenShift, Ubuntu OpenStack, SUSE Cloud 7, CoreOS, or RancherOS with Docker virtualization to manage complex solutions for enterprise clients using open source software tools. Other major announcements this week included new VMware, IBM, & AWS collaboration in cloud platform solutions; Microsoft establishing new SSD/BMC standards for hardware manufacturers & data centers (Project Denali/Project Cerberus); and continued fall-out from insiders over Google's acquisition of the data science company Kaggle, including their expert programming staff, archives of research data, & millions of AI/ML/DL platform customers. Apache Hadoop adoption is still growing quickly as a solution for "big data" requirements, including IoT, ecommerce, self-driving cars, cloud network analytics, & search technology.

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Varnish Cache: Accelerated HTTP(S) Cache Control with Hitch TLS & VMSE Data Services

Written by: , Mar. 18, 2018
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Varnish HTTP Cache Control with Improved SSL/TLS Management for Web Servers

Varnish Cache is used by over 2.5 million websites in production in 2018, including by some of the largest IT & media corporations like Twitter, NYT, Wikipedia, Guardian.uk, Facebook, & Vimeo. Varnish Cache is a reverse-proxy HTTP cloud load balancing software that can speed up website content delivery to browsers through page load request processing on the same hardware by 300 to 1000 times. Varnish Cache accomplishes these web server performance improvements through better repeat request file caching on network I/O transfers, where Hitch can be used for more efficient encryption connection management & control at scale for web servers running under https with SSL/TLS certificates. Varnish Cache supports Apache & NGINX web servers and installs on either Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, & CentOS) or FreeBSD to operate. Drupal, WordPress, Magento, and other CMS website publishers can directly integrate Varnish Cache with their web page content management system and secure better performance with support for web traffic on hardware in the ongoing maintenance of cloud apps for business, government, or media organizations. Varnish Cache has open source versions, cloud licensed, and enterprise licensed products available depending on the web hosting traffic volume or data center size.

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NetCraft: NGINX Manages 26% of Popular Website Traffic, Cloudflare CDN Servers Support 5.2% in 2018

Written by: , Mar. 17, 2018
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NGINX Compatible With Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris, or FreeBSD Web Servers

NetCraft is considered a reliable source for web server operating system analysis based on their method of parsing the HTTP meta-tag values of the top 1 million websites in the world by the measure of total user traffic. The NetCraft report for February of 2018 shows use of the NGINX web servers at 25.9% of the market surveyed, which was down 4.6% from the previous month due to the way that the Cloudflare CDN service codes output pages on client websites. The launch of a new Cloudflare server category follows the introduction of a change in HTTP response header encoding by the company. Previously Cloudflare content carried a "Server: cloudflare-nginx" meta-tag value, which is now being replaced by the HTTP response tag "Server: cloudflare" published on hosted CDN content. From this it is suggested that 4.5% to 5.2% of all NGINX web server traffic was running on the Cloudflare CDN data center architecture internationally during or before February 2018. Overall, Apache has 36.8% of the web server market, NGINX web servers (including Cloudflare CDN) powered around 31% of the top 1 million websites, while Microsoft Windows solutions accounted for 9.4% of web traffic volume, and LiteSpeed web servers represented 1.4% of total IT hardware deployments. These figures give an accurate portrait of resource allocation in web hosting internationally or the configurations actively in use that support the top 1 million websites from a variety of third-party service providers or private cloud solutions in enterprise companies and software start-ups. NGINX Plus is a licensed distribution of the web server framework with better cloud network load balancing and optimized content cache systems for managed website hosting. NGINX Controller provides advanced network monitoring and data analytics tools to online businesses. Both the open source version of NGINX and NGINX Plus are supported by AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and the other major public cloud companies, while the web server changes at Cloudflare CDN consolidate huge global scale through their 127+ international data centers and client base.

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DevOps Toolbox: Jenkins, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Vagrant, & SaltStack

Written by: , Mar. 16, 2018
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Jira, Confluence, Trello, CloudApp, Zoom, & Slack - Top 12 DevOps Apps for 2018

DevOps represents the best practices in project management for the development & operation of web/mobile applications in a public, private, or hybrid cloud hosting environment. The main requirement of DevOps is the synchronization of code changes from remote team members through version control standards in programming or maintaining web/mobile SaaS applications in production. A complimentary aspect is the provisioning of full-stack web server software packages for virtualization frameworks in cloud hosting. DevOps software can automate web server provisioning using Git and remote disk image repositories on cloud data center hardware. Containers, VPS, & VM standards have proliferated, where programming teams now support a wider range of languages, databases, APIs, & platform integration requirements. Open source and proprietary cloud software solutions compete for users between large companies, independent web publishers, programmers, and developers. DevOps is based on the best practices from academic computing and CS research departments in creating new code on open source standards, as well as Fortune 500 IT companies which establish working solutions for project management tool integration, web server configurations, & internet programming standards. DevOps tools largely rely on the use of Git for version control in software development between distributed teams of programmers with coding & sandbox environments synchronized on local machines to remote production hardware in the cloud. Containers, VPS, VMs, & elastic servers are all used in production operations for a large number of web/mobile apps which require support for auto-configuration of node clusters in cloud networks. Docker Swarm, Rancher, OpenStack, CoreOS, & Kubernetes are the leading open source standards for elastic cloud web server orchestration that compete with AWS EC2 functionality in the hosting marketplace. DevOps tools form a wide ecosystem with many independent third-party software development firms competing in the sector for market share in cloud hosting. This review presents the Top 12 & Top 100 DevOps Tools for 2018.

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