2003 streaming media server dedicated server forum: Best <b>flash media server stream</b><BR>

Learn all about flash media server stream

Shared Hosting vs Reseller Hosting

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 11:10:46 GMT
Shared and Reseller web hosting have many similarities, and many web hosts offer both shared and reseller hosting. The main difference between the two are in the names ‘shared’, you are sharing resources, which is the same for ‘reseller’ in a way but you can resell the server resources. You can create your own web hosting accounts and share your allocated server resources with your clients.

Bluehost for drupal web hosting

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:50:21 +0000
Bluehost hosting will be the right choice if you looking for CMS web hosting plan, or a drupal web hosting plan. In previous Bluehost review I the cover a short review about type of CMS scripts that are supported by Bluehost hosting, the review article is at here. Drupal content management system is fully supported ...]

July 2007

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:22:09 -0400

Web Host Industry Review Magazine - July 2007

Table of Contents

The Shared Landscape

Maximizing Customers

Up-Selling

Shopping Carts

Legal Q&A

Face to Face

Are We Running Out of Storage Space? IDC is Concerned, but Maxell Says Never Fear

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 14:15:00 -0400

I learned about the IDC storage paradox on Zoli Erdos' blog. Zoli mentions this Associated Press article, which cites IDC's estimate that "the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes in 2010".

Even more alarmingly, Dan Farber over at ZDNet reports that according to IBM, "the world's information base will be doubling in size every 11 hours" by 2010. Does this mean that on Jan 1, 2011, our 988 exabytes of data will double to 1,976 exabytes by 11am, and 3,952 exabytes by 10pm?

Fortunately, we don't need permanent storage for all the data we generate. For instance, spam accounted for just 8% of all emails in 2001 (said CNet); its volume rose to 36% by 2002 and 66% by 2004 (MSNBC), and is expected to exceed 90% by the end of this year (IT News). That's a huge amount of data that isn't being saved.

Still, Rich D'Ambrise from Maxell says he expects significant growth in data archiving requirements: in 2007, we will back up 75% more data than we did in 2006. But unlike IDC analyst John Gantz, he's not concerned that we'll run out of space. The storage industry is not standing still. Maxell, for instance, is beta testing 300 GB holographic disks that are no bigger than a DVD, but offer 63x more capacity. 800 GB second generation disks should be on the market by next year, and a 1.6 TB version is planned for 2010. And let's not forget stacked volumetric optical discs (SVOD); each 92-micrometer layer stores up to 9.4 GB. Available storage capacity will absolutely keep up with demand; no question about that!

The real issue is, will we store our zettabytes of data on- or offline? Rich is betting on removable media; he'd rather have mission critical data in his own possession than depend on any service provider. Zoli, on the other hand, says online is more efficient. By sharing/linking to files, we won't each need space for our own copies of the same content. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz says offline storage is greener ("when data's at rest, it consumes no electricity") - and easier to transport on a large scale. (As the New Yorker points out, if you made tiny chariots with DVD wheels and hitched them to snails, you'd get faster data transfer speeds than DSL.)

So, what's this got to do with web hosting? For one, you should probably monitor your oversold disk space closely. At the moment, I'm sure hardly any of GoDaddy's $7 hosting customers are using their entire 100 GB quota. But if you consider Rich's 75% growth projection, the number of customers that same 100 GB is allocated to may have to come down.

PS - Here's a GigaOM post on a 10 more fun storage facts.

Every time you will need to change something on your site, you will have to edit the pages on your computer and upload them again. The website never changes by itself. That's why it's called a "static" site.

NCL Hosting Sydney VMWare VPS Review

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:32:52 +0000

When I first saw NCL Hosting’s end of financial year sale back in June (Australia’s financial year starts from July), I just could not resist it. From their VPS hosting plan page, they are offering 100GB of data transfer for $36.75 (ex GST) per month, and 500GB of data transfer for only $66.75 (ex GST) per month! Bandwidth at this price level might be common place with servers in US, but for NCL Hosting, a Sydney based private company having their servers in Equinix DC (Mascot, Sydney), providing this much Australian bandwidth would be insane!

So basically I asked a few questions in the forums (I am “scotty” on WHT.au) —

Q: Virtualisation? A: Combination of MSFT and Xen

Q: Debian or Ubuntu? A: Yes

Q: Data Centre? A: Sydney (later I found out it’s Equinix)

Q: You insane? A: (1) Limited offer (2) Bandwidth is subsidised (I guess subsidised == oversold)

Well. It’s only around 40 bucks so a few days later I signed up to give it a test. Almost 2 months later I am now writing this review.

VPS Plans — Cheap Australian Bandwidth

Rule of thumb #1 — when someone said it’s “limited offer”, never believe in it! At least I don’t mind in this case, as their “special price” is still available today, 2^nd month into our new financial year. Here’s their pricing table (taken from their website):

$40/month for 100GB is hard to beat, and $70/month for 500GB (AUD$0.14/GB) is way below cost. Storage is on RAID, and the amount of memory is more than enough for what I intended to use this VPS for — serving static data to Australian visitors (as an alternative to using a CDN like CacheFly). I planned to just install Nginx and let it serve Javascript, CSS and small images.

Signing Up

Signing up was straight forward although a bit of manual process is involved. Within 10 minutes of paying by credit card, Nathan from NCL emailed me asking which OS I would like to install. “Ubuntu 8.10” I replied, and then got the welcome email with IP address and “admin” password within two hours — on a Sunday evening at 10pm!

Although the account activation is not instant, NCL and Nathan still got my thumb up for the fast process.

Initial Impression

NCL Hosting Revolution So I have now received my IP address and the password, what am I waiting for?!

There is no SSH access!

There is nothing listening on port 22. Having used several unmanaged Linux VPS for the last two and half years and it’s the first time that I was given a freshly-installed Linux VPS without SSH access. It turns out that instead of installing the minimum Ubuntu Server, the standard Ubuntu was installed. On top of that they have also installed Webmin + other packages that I don’t intend to use (Apache, mod_php, etc). The password in the welcome email was actually the Webmin password.

So for the next hour I was trying to figure out how to log into Webmin and then install the OpenSSH server. A bit of fiddling around I have finally got the Bash prompt as root, and the first thing I did was apt-get remove all the extra packages to strip the VPS back to bare minimum.

Then I tried to check out what kind of hardware I got.


$ uname -a

Linux localhost 2.6.24-16-server #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 13:58:00 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor       : 0

vendor_id       : GenuineIntel

cpu family      : 15

model           : 4

model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.40GHz

stepping        : 8

cpu MHz         : 3400.777

cache size      : 1024 KB

fdiv_bug        : no

hlt_bug         : no

f00f_bug        : no

coma_bug        : no

fpu             : yes

fpu_exception   : yes

cpuid level     : 5

wp              : yes

flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss constant_tsc up pebs bts sync_rdtsc pni

bogomips        : 6857.87

clflush size    : 64

Well. Looks like the previous era of Xeon processor, and I only have access to one of the cores. It is running 32bit Linux with kernel 2.6.24. Here is the result of disk performance test:


# hdparm -tT /dev/sda1



/dev/sda1:

 Timing cached reads:   782 MB in  2.00 seconds = 391.53 MB/sec

 Timing buffered disk reads:   70 MB in  3.07 seconds =  22.81 MB/seca



# ./seeker /dev/sda1

Seeker v2.0, 2007-01-15, http://www.linuxinsight.com/how_fast_is_your_disk.html

Benchmarking /dev/sda1 19751MB], wait 30 seconds..............................

Results: 501 seeks/second, 1.99 ms random access time

Interesting result! The throughput is a little bit disappointing for a RAID storage but 2ms seek time on a VPS?! You have to do a RAID10 on 15k RPM drives or SSD to get that! Or maybe the virtualisation layer is doing some tricks on me?!

Not Xen, Not MSFT — It’s a VMWare

It turns out, that my VPS is not on a Xen node. Nor on a MS Virtual Server/Hyper-V node. In fact it is running VMWare.


# lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 01)

00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 01)

00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 08)

00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)

00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 08)

00:0f.0 VGA compatible controller: VMware Inc Abstract SVGA II Adapter

00:10.0 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI (rev 01)

00:11.0 PCI bridge: VMware Inc Unknown device 0790 (rev 02)

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Advanced Micro Devices AMD] 79c970 PCnet32 LANCE] (rev 10)

When you list out all the processes, you can also see vmware-guestd running. Is NCL Hosting running ESXi? Infrastructure? I have no idea but at least the VPS performs alright over the last 2 months.

I think the main issue I have with VMWare is the leaky vmware-guestd. It uses quite a bit of CPU, and the memory usage grows from 1.2MB to 20MB within a month. I have to run /etc/init.d/vmware-tools restart to claim the memory back every now and then although I have no idea whether it will introduce any ill effect on a VMWare-based VPS.

2 Months Later…

So how is it after 2 months? I installed Nginx to serve up static data so I am not running anything CPU intensive. The load pretty much stays at 0 most of the time. The VPS itself is rock stable — no reboots, no downtime, the network is always up. Basically I got nothing to complain about.

As I am only serving the Javascript, CSS and small images, I used around 30GB last month so I have not yet had a chance to test the limit. Bandwidth wise it seems to be buying from the Wholesale Communication Group, and I am getting Teleglobe.net for international traffic and Optus for Australia-wide traffic. Bandwidth also seems to be capped at 10Mbps which is fine for me. From a work server I had at Optus DC at Ultimo, I can fully saturated the 10Mbps link. However from both my home and work ADSL2+ link I can’t even sustain 1Mbps, for some reason that I have not yet investigated.

Overall it is pretty much “set and forget” and the server has no problem handling the traffic. However I am still hesitated to bring my site back to Australia (after moving it to US earlier this year), as I think I still trust Linode more if a disaster strikes.

However if you have high bandwidth requirement in Australia, I doubt you can find anyone cheaper.

Go Daddy Domains Canada Offers .CA

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000
The Go Daddy Group announced on Tuesday it has officially entered into the Canadian market with its new subsidiary, Go Daddy Domains Canada.

Featured flash media server stream Items

hostican has spent a considerable amount of time developing an ideal solution
that is guaranteed to work well for you. Enjoy our clean and simple Control
Panel, high allowance of disk space and unlimited monthly data transfer. We host
customers worldwide, ranging from blog sites to small online businesses, and
just about everything in between!

Click Here to go to hostican website.

Most of the matter here is relevant to flash media server stream. This was the main intention of writing on flash media server stream, to propagate its value and meaning.
#