Have You Run Your Backups Today?
In case you didn’t get the memo, March 31st was World Backup Day.
You can never have too many backups.
Whether you host your sites on a server in your own IT closet or with a company like ServInt — that offers backup solutions for all its managed servers — you should always keep your own backup of your data off server and offsite. Just in case.
So, in honor of World Backup Day, why not take a few minutes and back up your server?
Need some help? Here are a few resources ServInt customers might find useful:
The basics of data protection
FTP / FTPS and file management in Jelastic cloud PaaS
Scheduling MySQL Backups in ServInt’s Jelastic cloud PaaS
How to back up and restoring MySQL databases
How to download a backup of your home directory in cPanel
How to download a full backup in cPanel
How do You Know When it’s Time to Scale?
Editor’s Note: This post is part of the comprehensive, free white paper, “How do You Know when it’s Time to Scale? Understanding and Predicting Server Resource Consumption.”
You’ve invested in a scalable hosting solution, be it a VPS or cloud. Whether you’ve got a team of developers coding for automated horizontal and vertical server scaling or you’re making your scaling choices manually, how do you know when it’s time to scale up to the next server tier?
Deciding when to scale is one of the hardest hosting decisions to make. Every situation is unique.
The only criterion that matters when gauging how well your server is performing is how fast your sites’ pages load and applications execute. There is no standard for this. Site visitors to a forum with millions of threads and very important content will probably put up with slightly longer load times than someone visiting a landing page for a site they’ve never seen before. Only you can determine how fast is fast enough.
But remember, we’re not talking about simply running a program on your server and waiting until it finishes. We’re talking about things like the number of MySQL queries per second your server can handle, or the number of Apache web processes. And the hard part is, there’s no way to give a standard number that every server should be able to handle. Queries are not all equal. The number of queries a given server will be able to execute has to do with the complexity of the queries. Predicting server scaling needs is about watching trends and determining when your applications are not performing as well as you’d like.
Let’s say you decide your site or application is doing well – pages load pretty quickly and your visitors aren’t complaining. Now you need to monitor the resource usage on your server to get a sense of how much it takes for the performance you have and see trends as they develop. The main resource factors to consider are traffic, disk storage and I/O, CPU, and memory. All of these contribute to the speed your queries are being served up to a given user. Read more
What to Watch When Watching Your Server
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a recent white paper about server scaling published by ServInt titled, “How do You Know When it’s Time to Scale?” You can download the full white paper here.
The only criterion that matters when when it is time to scale is how fast your sites’ pages load and applications execute. There is no standard for this. Site visitors to a forum with millions of threads and very important content will probably put up with slightly longer load times than someone visiting a landing page for a site they’ve never seen before. Only you can determine how fast is fast enough.
But remember, we’re not talking about simply running a program on your server and waiting until it finishes. We’re talking about things like the number of MySQL queries per second your server can handle, or the number of Apache web processes. And the hard part is, there’s no way to give a standard number that every server should be able to handle. Queries are not all equal. The number of queries a given server will be able to execute has to do with the complexity of the queries. Planning for server scaling is about watching trends over a single server and determining when your applications are not performing as well as you’d like. Read more
Planning For Growth
Devon Rutherford, Director of Sales Engineering, ServInt
Most customers come to ServInt understanding that their need for hosting resources will grow over the lifetime of their website and other online applications. Some have already experienced this, outgrowing a shared hosting service or small VPS plan at another company. And, nearly all customers share the dream of hitting it big — seeing massive success in their business that draws viewers to their website and necessitates a larger hosting package to handle the traffic.
That’s just what today’s virtualized hosted infrastructure is built for: rapid server scaling and room for growth.
But how do you ensure that the host you sign up with today is the host you want to be with when your sites explode with traffic?
In this revealing interview, 18-year hosting industry veteran and server design consultant Devon Rutherford takes aim at the hidden pitfalls of relying too heavily on today’s cloudy server technologies — and not enough on planning, coding and other less glamorous forms of online business management. This is serious insight that could save your business serious money! Read more
The Great Migration: VPS host migration versus server migration within a host
Just about every hosting customer with a virtualized product, whether they know it or not, has been migrated from one server to another at some point. Some of these migrations — hardware migrations within a web host’s own infrastructure — are so simple and commonplace, that most customers don’t know when or if they’ve ever been migrated. Others — migrations between hosts — are more complex and can necessitate considerable forethought and planning.
Why are these processes so different? Aren’t they — after all — both simply different forms of server migration? Read more
Choosing a Data Center Whether You’re a Web Host or a Customer
ServInt EU
With the recent launch of our new European data center, a few customers and prospects have asked us: why Amsterdam? It’s a good question — particularly for folks who aren’t customers (yet!) — because your hosting provider’s choice of data center partner can really make a difference for you and your business.
ServInt’s decision to open a European data center was based on one factor: to provide our European, African and Middle Eastern customers a hosting option closer to their customers. Europe was a natural fit both for its central location for the region and its relatively close proximity to our headquarters in Northern Virginia. Read more
The Internet: a Platform for Change
not a reputable international data center
It’s become a truism for most people that the Internet has changed the world. Let me be the first to stand up and say:
No, the Internet has not changed the world.
People have changed the world. The Internet is only the tool they used.
From email to Google and Wikipedia to Twitter and on, the world has gotten smaller because of the Internet. And it’s become flatter too, empowering people with knowledge and communication. Through powerful collaboration applications, the Internet has become a tool for innovation that is only limited by the creativity of its users and designers. Read more
How to Pick a Data Center
ServInt announced some of its biggest news in quite some time last week: the opening of ServInt EU and our new Amsterdam data center. As we continue to take preorders and prepare the full-scale launch, we’ve gotten a few questions from customers who are having trouble choosing between ServInt DC, ServInt LA and ServInt EU.
So how are customers supposed to pick data center locations? Read more
The Tech Bench: cPanel Basics
Sometimes in the Tech Bench, we dive into the deep end of hosting with in-depth articles like Fixing File Permissions or Troubleshooting 500 Internal Server Errors, but today we wanted to focus on answering some commonly asked questions.
This article is for all the cPanel newbies in the house who might be afraid to ask that first (or second, or third) question. To you, we say: don’t worry, you’re not alone. The following is a list of the top ten most requested cPanel/WHM articles in our KnowledgeBase. Click on the links to be taken directly to the articles. And if you have any other questions about cPanel or any other hosting topics, be sure to visit the ServInt KnowledgeBase.
And for any haters out there who want to mock the uninitiated, let me remind you that we were all noobs about this stuff at one time.
Enjoy. Read more
The Tech Bench: The Single Best Security Tip
Your server is only as secure as what you choose to serve.
Harsh words, but it needs to be said. At ServInt, we work very hard to deliver servers to our customers that are as secure as they can be. But every customization of and installation on a server creates holes in that security. It is simply the nature of the Internet and networking. If you have data to share, you must find ways for users to access that data.
Server security is a balance. The most secure server is one that is powered down and not connected to the Internet. But obviously, this server is little more than an expensive brick. To be useful, clients need to customize their servers, installing various programs that serve data out to and receive data from users on the Internet. Read more
