Managed Applications
Most Popular Managed Applications
High Performance Web Servers
Nginx
Nginx is a high performance web server that was written to handle some of the world's largest sites. It was designed with an event driven model to take advantage of the system kernel which allows it to provide significant performance advantages over Apache when serving content. Even if your application is dependent on Apache we are able to deploy it concurrently with Nginx to provide significant performance improvements.
Reverse Proxy
Using Nginx as a reverse proxy allows us to direct all of your traffic to the Nginx web server which handles all static files giving you the speed and concurrency benefits that Nginx provides over Apache, while still allowing PHP and other application requests to pass through to Apache on the backend. This allows us to improve the load times for your site without modifying your application layer.
Caching With FastCGI_Cache
If you have a demanding PHP application such as a high traffic CMS site based on Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress we can setup Nginx to do FastCGI_Cache to cache files for dynamic content. By bypassing the inefficient native cache of these CMS applications and instead using Nginx's caching capabilities we are able to dramatically improve your load times, but more importantly decrease your resource utilization.
Lighttpd
Lighttpd was developed to be a light web server focused on serving 10,000 concurrent connections. It's small CPU and RAM footprint have caused it to gain popularity and an active developer community has made Lighttpd one of the front runners when implanting FLV streaming, specifically because of its H.264 integration and security via mod_secdownload.
FLV H.264 Streaming
Lighttpd is capable of streaming your H.264 encoded files including support for seeking during playback, creating an open source streaming and encoding solution. In addition we provide FFMpeg and Mencoder support so that you can encode your files locally. Click here for more about media streaming »
Video Protection with Mod_SecDownload
Video traffic is a large bandwidth expense, using Mod_SecDownload with Lighttpd, we are able to protect your videos by creating a hashed time based URL that expires after five minutes preventing your videos from being posted on forums, blogs, or any other unauthorized websites.
Apache
If your application is heavily embedded in Apache and can't be ported to Nginx or Lighttpd, we still have the opportunity to use these high performance servers (Nginx and Lighttpd) as a reverse proxy and pass dynamic requests to your Apache server. Our extensive experience with Apache allows us to tune the server based on your traffic patterns ensuring that even a plain vanilla Apache server runs at optimal performance.
Web Server Optimization
Although Apache can not match the speed of Nginx and Lighttpd we are still able to optimize its configuration and combined with Nginx, we are able to deliver a robust solution for web delivery that takes advantage of Nginx's native caching features and streamline Apache's application execution. Ensuring that your applications can take advantage of our improved delivery methods while not requiring code updates.
Databases
MySQL
MySQL is the world's most popular open source database software. It provides a great platform that is both stable and robust in it's feature set. Our technical support staff provides full management of your MySQL database services by providing optimization, backups, replication, and performance troubleshooting.
Optimization
MySQL has many different tuning options. Part of our best practice deployment for MySQL is to pre-configure your server immediately with table and query caches that provide immediate performance benefits. The rest of the process is a case by case analysis where we analyze the specific performance bottlenecks that you may experience and then tune or expand your MySQL layout as needed.
Expand with Replication
MySQL supports replication which allows for the use of multiple MySQL servers with a Master server set for WRITE operations and Slave servers used for READ operations. Our technical support staff handles the entire process, setting up the new MySQL slave servers, configuring replication, and monitoring to ensure the servers stay synced to the master. We also provide professional services to help you understand how to take advantage of a distributed MySQL setup to improve your website performance.
Troubleshooting Bottlenecks
Regardless of the amount of optimization that is done when the server is setup, as your database grows your website can begin to hit bottlenecks. This is when our technical support staff analyzes your quries to determine where the trouble lies, whether it be with buffer sizes that need to be updated, specific slow-queries that we'll help you to rewrite, or simply addressing the need for more resources through a migration to new hardware or setting up MySQL replication, you can always rest assured that as your database utilization grows our technical support staff will manage your MySQL solution to ensure it scales with your business.
Sphinx
Sphinx is a full-text search engine designed to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant full-text search functions to your applications utilizing MySQL or PostgreSQL as the backend. While MySQL provides native full-text search support Sphinx can be laid on top of it to provide faster query results and better indexing. The benefits become apparent as your data set begins to grow (millions of rows), at which point MySQL's native full-text searching becomes a performance bottleneck.
Faster full-text searches
Sphinx creates its own indexes which it uses to pull search results from. It can manage text unto 100GB or 100,000,000 records on a single CPU. It has substantial improvements for search relevance over the default full-text searches of MySQL.
Distributed searching
Sphinx has support for distributed searching allowing for the creation of a cluster of Sphinx servers to meet even the highest demand for full-text searches. Ensuring that your website has the ability to scale as your search needs increase.
PHP Acceleration and Security
memcache
memcache was developed to offload PHP applications database load by storing commonly requested MySQL queries as objects in memory. These objects can be retrieved directly without the need for your application to query your MySQL server, the result is request are completed faster and database loads are decreased. Our technical support staff can work with you to integrate memcache with your application.
eAccelerator
eAccelerator imporoves the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compilation is eliminated. In addition it optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. Depending on the application it can improve your PHP execution by 1-10 times and typically reduces server load for PHP driven websites. There are no code changes required to take advantage of eAccelerator.
Suhosin
Suhosin is a hardened version of PHP thats installed by default on all of our servers. It provides protection in two layers. First, it hardens your PHP installation against low-level security exploits such as buffer overflows. The second is fine-grained control, giving you the ability to set security policies on a per function basis. By default we setup Suhosin in a passive state and utilize its extensive logging capabilities that are vital in tracing the source of exploits.
Content Management Systems
Installation and Configuration
Our technical support staff has performed countless installations, configurations, and optimizations of the most popular and commonly used content management systems, such as Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, CakePHP, and others. In addition to providing installation and configuration services our technical support staff provides recommendations on best practices and most commonly used plug-ins.
Performance Optimization
In addition to the native caching functions of your CMS of choice we can also deploy Nginx as a reverse proxy. Combined with fastcgi_cache this allows Nginx to by pass application execution and instead serve your requests from cache, even for dynamic pages. This greatly increases your server's ability to serve concurrent requests, allowing you to grow your websites and at the same time providing the fastest possible load times to your visitors.
Ad Network
OpenX Ad Network
OpenX Ad Network allows you to create your own ad network similar to google's adwords, providing you with analytical information to asses how well your ads are performing as well as track them across multiple websites and servers.
Track ad impressions
Using OpenX Ad Server you are able to track the number of impressions that your ad's receive across multiple servers, providing you with a central location for all of your traffic stats, specifically as they relate to your ads. OpenX provides a drilled down view of your traffic similar to google analytics, but is able to combine the information across multiple websites and servers.
Sell ad space and text links
Whether you want to sell ad banners or text links OpenX provides support for both giving you the ability to launch your own google ad words style network and take control of monetizing your traffic.
Media
ffmpeg encoding
ffmpeg can be used to encode and convert multimedia files between various formats. If you are using expensive online encoding SaaS websites you can dramatically lower your costs by having us setup a dedicated encoding server for you. If your needs for encoding are smaller we can install and configure ffmpeg to work on your existing server to allow you to tie in FLV and other formats directly into your website.
FLV Streaming
Combined with ffmpeg encoding you can convert your various media formats into h.264 FLV files that can be streamed through lighttpd. This allows you to integrate video into your websites directly and with lighttpd provide FLV streaming without the added cost of Adobe's Flash Media Server. Additionally combined with mod_secdownload we are able to provide protection for your video files to prevent hotlinking and lighttpd has internal support for seek and immediate playback. Click here for more about media streaming »
ImageMagick
ImageMagick is an industry standard library and tool set that allows you to create graphic files with text on the fly. It's used to add watermarks to images, grab screenshots of videos along with ffmpeg encoding services, and also to provide text capture authorization to decrease spam. It is installed on all servers by default.