With the ever increasing demand of more and more internet traffic , one of the most important facets of any popular website is being able to handle that traffic and remain stable and fast. Downtime can be disastrous forcing customers and also revenue to look elsewhere.

What can be done? The solution is simple, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. This can be achieved by using hardware and software to build out highly redundant and highly scalable network services. One of the most popular methods is currently load balancing your site across multiple machines.

Load balancing as defined in wikipedia is the following:

a technique to distribute workload evenly across two or more computers, network links, CPUs, hard drives, or other resources, in order to get optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload. Using multiple components with load balancing, instead of a single component, may increase reliability through redundancy. The load balancing service is usually provided by a dedicated program or hardware device (such as a multilayer switch or a DNS server).

Now thanks to the Linux Virtual Server Project and the growth of Xen powered Virtual Servers provided by that great company dediserve.com , you can now very simply and very cheaply build out your own load balanced cluster for as little as €80 per month.

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One of the constant daily/hourly battles faced by all providers and server administrators managing mail servers is spam – the bane of many sys-admins lives. And With Spam now accounting for 80 – 85% of all email traffic, it can be a time consuming job ensuring only proper mail actually gets delivered.

Thankfully Justin Mason and the apache project provide a super free tool to easily deal with this issue and it’s called spam assassin. To very easily configure spam assassin within your virtualmin control panel , simply click on the server you want to configure then  Services > SpamAssassin

Virtualmin provides an excellent very easy to use web based interface, which allows you to easily manage the white/black lists, as well as stop specific emails based on their headers.

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As a follow on from the django framework post i wrote about previously , i will now talk about a second framework that we also offer pre-installed on our virtual servers, which is probably the fastest growing framework out there today and thats Ruby on rails , RoR is also an opensource web application framework for the ruby programming language and is used for rapid development.

As your VPS comes already pre-installed and pre-configured with the RoR saving you time and hassle, you can login straight away and start configuring your app/site.

If your New to RoR, you can, via the RoR website  follow the step by step screencast to building your own blog engine. Which will give you a good overview of the power and flexibility of this framework.

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As a server provider we constantly speak with customers about the best architecture for their server set-up. Ideally you are looking to provide a redundant, scalable server cluster with a good spec on a redundant platform at a good price.

This is something Dediserve can now provide at exceptional value , via a single user interface you can easily manage multiple virtual machines all running different technologies , you can have a dedicated mail server , database server and web server in your own virtualized cluster for as little as  €60 per month, and easily upgrade each individual server as the requirement of that server grows, meaning if you have a large database but small website , easily upgrade the database server to handle the added load whilst leaving the web server as is.

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This is one debate that will continue to raise its head time and time again over the coming years, as people look for the best solution for their site/application. As Dediserve offers both these options we’d like to think were well placed to offer out thoughts.

At Dediserve we definitely see virtual servers as the most progressive option of the two and the one that will eventually overtake the traditional dedicated server hardware model, there are several reasons for this:

• Data centres are running out of space
• This is driving the cost of data centre space higher as it becomes a premium resource
• The cost of power continues to rise due to instability in the middle east and the threat of “peak oil”
• Cooling factors come into these costs as the more physical machines needed the higher amount of cooling also needed
• Traditional servers far from fully utilized on by most applications/sites leaving alot of waste of resources

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Back-ups in the IT world are very much like, house or car  insurance, its something you only ever think about when things go wrong. And unfortunately most companies especially SME’s tend to completely overlook back-ups until something goes wrong.

This can be for a number of reasons such as:

• cost savings,
• not understanding the importance of back-ups,
• not having someone with the skill to set them up
  
• Simple just forgetting about them.

I’ve personally lost a hard drive on my own PC many years ago, which contained three years of work. It’s certinaly not a good experience and not one i would recommend.
Most  people only  tend to learn about the importance of back-ups after a bad experience , generally one which cost’s alot of time and money.

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One of the most daunting aspects of server management that often scares and confuses people is the “command line” this is the black screen you see when you first SSH into your server. Being able to manage your server via the command line is a great skill to have but like most skills takes time to learn and master.

One of the best ways to circumnavigate this issue is to simple install a graphical user interface on the server. What this control panel allows you to do is to more easily manage your server via a more user friendly control panel.

One such control panel that we have pre-installed on our centos virtual servers is a control panel called Virtualmin.

Virtualmin as described via their website:

Virtualmin is a powerful and flexible web server control panel based on the well-known Open Source web-based systems management GUI, Webmin. Manage your virtual domains, mailboxes, databases, applications, and the entire server, from one comprehensive and friendly interface.

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