Category Archives: Hosting Lab

Oct 18

Multiple PHP versions available in your cPanel now

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While our marketing team is working on more great partnerships, as previously announced, our technical support team and system administrators were busy adding some great new features to the cPanel. We will be presenting them over the next week and we are in a hurry to present the first one of them now.

During the years, the web hosting market has emerged and changed quite a lot. Not only that, but it changes at a rapid pace as you are even reading this post. The key word to this market, if you ask seasoned people working at it, is flexibility. This, combined with the ability to adapt were always a success recipe for us at TMDHosting.

Over the years, not only the market changed, but also the environment and the applications running on it. This is why, we are glad to provide you with a great flexibility tool, namely to change your account’s PHP version on demand. There are, already, number of applications that require PHP 5.3. Still, however, there are greater number that are not yet ready to shift from PHP 5.2. There will be, someday, such a situation when PHP 5.4 become more mature. Until now, we have been keeping different servers, each of them using different PHP versions and, where needed, transferred accounts between them.

Realizing that this is not rational, we have developed a cPanel plugin, which will allow you to choose between PHP 5.2 (which we stick to by default, due the large application demand), PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4 (which is still beta and not mature enough). You can find it in your cPanel, under the Software/Services section:

To add even more flexibility to this, we have also created a mechanism to set different folders to use completely different PHP versions. This is not yet included in the cPanel plugin, however, in its second version it will be. Currently, you can reach out to our technical support team and have them do this modification for you. Until then, on your own, you can change only the global version of the PHP interpreter for your account.

We are currently piloting this feature on selected number of servers. Next week we will have it available on each and every server of ours. In the meantime, if you need to take advantage of this feature, just get in touch with our friendly technical support staff – they will be glad to assist you and are on your disposal 24/7.

We hope that you will enjoy this feature and will take advantage of it. There are more cool things that we are currently perfecting and will start releasing very soon from the lab. Stay tuned!

Feb 24

TMDHosting is officially running Cloud Linux now

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It is now official – we are running Cloud Linux on all our production boxes and we can confirm that we are out of its beta stage. Given that, it seems appropriate to describe what are our impressions with this software suite.

The first impression that Cloud Linux leaves is related to the astonishing easiness that things happen with. In its essence, Cloud Linux is actually a super-modified Linux kernel and upgrading your Linux kernel has never been easier. It literally takes couple of shell commands executed in consequence, a quick reboot and you are ready to go. The couple of shell commands install the Linux kernel, set it up to boot on next startup and also enable a very fancy statistics module available to all users in the cPanel.

As soon as the server gets back online with the Cloud Linux kernel, the first thing which even a non-seasoned system administrator will notice is the load average changed forever. If you used to see numbers greater than 10-15, with Cloud Linux kernel it would be a real disaster if you see numbers above 6-7. In most time, the load will not climb up higher than 3. In normal operation states, it will remain between 1 and 3.

The philosophy that Cloud Linux preaches, stands for equal resources usage by every single user on the server. A state of mind that the entire shared hosting industry has been seeking for years is now accomplished. Achieving that is now easier  thanks to LVE – the essential component that Cloud Linux steps on, in order to divide system resources effectively between users.

We have all heard (and seen in practice) the story how a single website, totally unsuitable for shared hosting, due to resource demands, consumes all the available CPU, IO, memory resources, web server child processes, etc. Here LVE (Limited Virtual Environment) comes handy – it is the layer between the request to virtual host (website, in practice) and the system that serves it (the kernel). Mediating between these two fundamental layers, LVE makes sure that a certain website will abide to the policies predefined by the system administrator and will not run the entire server out of resources. Think of LVE as a separate server in the main one, in which your website operates. Your LVE includes your own CPU, memory and processes boundaries, so does the other LVEs. This is a great leap towards avoiding the case where a very heavy website is exceeding these boundaries and affects other ones hosted on the same server, only the heavy website will slow down, without causing latency issues to other customers that shared the same physical server and its resources.

Cloud Linux is software appliance that is created from experts in the web hosting industry for this very industry. The team that worked initially on this project and continue to develop it in time, has a long time experience in the web hosting fields and, as it seems, knows what a web hosting company needs to make Customer experience better. Definitely it is a great improvement in terms of performance and allows every company that uses it, including TMDHosting provide better service. Last, but not least Cloud Linux comes handy with a great statistics plugin that is accessible directly from cPanel and allows a non-techie Customer to see their LVE usage at a glance, including where, how and why boundaries are being hit.

This article is part of the upcoming Cloud Linux series, which will continue to develop and will be published at the TMDHosting blog. Hopefully you have enjoyed it. Stay tuned for more.

Oct 26

TomatoCart V1.1 vs. Prestashop V1.3.1.1

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Preface:

Prestashop is a free open source shopping cart developed in France. The exquisite interface and powerful functionality make it renowned outside the hometown. The design of Prestashop, blended with the France romanticism, is fascinated. Likewise, TomatoCart is developed based on osCommerce which should be considered as the origin of open source shopping cart. Robust foundation, all-out innovation and incomparably comprehensive functionality enable TomatoCart become one of the most promising shopping cart software.

This article is written for those who are not familiar with TomatoCart or those who can’t make a decision when facing the two eCommerce solutions. Focusing on functionality comparison, the content of the article is objective with no discrimination.

Essentials:

Both carts are quick to install and easy to learn. The requirements of two carts indicate low cost on hosting. However, different from the interface of Prestashop, TomatoCart applies the modern web 2.0 technology such as RIA (Rich Internet Application), Ajax, which provides a familiar windows operation environment and boosts the operation efficiency.

Admin Panel of Prestashop

Admin panel of TomatoCart:

Site Management:

Site management, generally speaking, should include all the basic tools to organize your sites and it decides the performance of your sites and the flexibility of your site settings. In addition to those basic site management tools, TomatoCart has created its unique tools such as separate mail system, in which case you needn’t worry about missing any emails..

CMS:

CMS, simplifying your publication of web content, is a special and indispensable part of shopping cart software. If you wanna make your site attractive, impressive and distinctive, you should turn to help of CMS. Ranging from simple article to indicative video, high-end CMS is capable of doing nearly anything you comes up with. But it doesn’t absolutely indicate the more, the better. It’s up to your demand. Never be too greedy, which always run counters to your desire.

Catalog Management:

As a proverb says, effort doubled, result halved. I do believe a clear catalog layout makes your work simple! Compared with TomatoCart, Prestashop’s product management seems a little simpler without individual upcoming product and featured product management system.

Product Management:

TomatoCart is featured with a sleek experience of adding new products. Different from TomatoCart, Prestashop hold all the steps to add a product, no matter upcoming or featured product in one page, which seems a little complicated and messy.

Customer Management:

How to manage your customers? Treat them all the same? Definitely not! Different treatment is needed here to boost your online sales. For example, you can divide them into several customer groups and give them different discounts according to their order records. In a word, a perfect customer management is also a powerful marketing tool.

Order Management:

Sometimes, orders will be taken by phone, which requires the shopping cart system with a manual order-adding functionality. Sometimes, customers may return a product. And sometimes… There are a lot of exceptions you have to take into consideration. Let’s see whether your shopping cart software has thought of the exceptions in advance!

Promotional Tools and SEO:

Nowadays, Marketing is considered as a key to popularity and success. Without exception, it is also a significant part of shopping cart software. Built-in promotional tools not only cut down on the cost but also boost your revenue. Aside from promotional tools, SEO brings you a good result when customers are searching store or product via search engines.

Checkout:

Checkout determines the sales conversion. Customers will be bothered by complex check out processes and limited choices.

Payment Gateways:

People all around the world definitely have different favored payment methods. What if they can’t find the gateway they are looking for or there is no other alternative payment gateway? What a frustrating shopping experience! Consequently, multiple choices of payment methods should be prepared to satisfy all kinds of need.

Furthermore, you can check the frequently updated list of TomatoCart’s supported payment gateways here.

May 19

Lightning fast hosting service. Period!

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When we have discovered and adopted nginx in the late autumn of 2009, we thought we have reached the maximum speed one can squeeze from a single server in terms of website loading speed (without being in a cluster or into a load balanced pair).

Driven by the nearly insane will to make our service faster and faster, we have researched and implemented memcached shortly after nginx became our favorite web serving tool. So far – so good. Combining these lovely two gave us more than 30% improvement on dynamic and more than 50% in static content pages load times.

This is quite good, but in demanding industry like the Internet and, specifically, the web hosting, being good is just not enough. You either provide the best or you do not count in. We have been successfully providing nginx and memcached on our dedicated and virtual private servers since then, however cPanel specific trammels prevented us from implementing it on our shared machines.

We put plenty of time in tests and modifications, but still nginx was not able to perform as we needed. Even with integration scripts that were generously contributed by cPanel forum’s member blargman, things were not as smooth as we wanted. Integration was a great success but, we admit, it required a plenty of modifications from our system administrators to fit in our work-flow scenario, but still we had to cope with couple of compromises, which is not exactly our best.

The search for a fast, secure, scalable and, in the same time, compatible with cPanel web serving tool is something, which is nearly a mission impossible, gave positive results in early spring 2010. It, in fact, was out there for long period of time, though it was not as stable as we needed it to be.

The first time when our System administrators did public demonstration in one of our offices of how LiteSpeed loads pages as opposed to Apache and nginx, we were unable to blink even once in a page load. Seriously, it was lightning fast. The first doubts came from the Technical support team, which is taught never to believe a single occurrence of an instance, until they see it scaled. Especially when the occurrence is in local environment, especially in our tech lab. They were demanding to see this in production and so it is.

When the system administrators and technical support first converted a server from Apache to LiteSpeed, the first three things that were easy to notice were:

- Average system load quickly dropped with between 60 and 70%
- Heavy websites (meaning Magentos with thousands of products, for example) started loading with between 40 and 50% faster.
- Static websites started loading within a half a blink of an eye.

After a few days of monitoring, slight peaks were noticed only during the time when daily backups are being taken. Websites’ whose traffic was suffering the “Digg effect” were no longer a problem, but the opposite — LiteSpeed handled them and their traffic in a manner that Apache was never able to.

Where Apache was not able to gear up and utilize the server’s memory and put it in speed effect, LiteSpeed was. Where Apache was incapable of building its own dynamic storage cache, LiteSpeed was. Where Apache had problems with KeepAlive and other dummy, non-mature code stuff, LiteSpeed had not.

Now, here is how LiteSpeed performs, as opposed to couple of other servers, including Apache:

A test conducted with a small, static file without KeepAlive:

Respectively, a test with a small, static file, but with KeepAlive enabled:

For more thorough benchmarking results, you can check up with the LiteSpeed tech labs here.

In both graphics above, hopefully, you are noticing the orange line, which raises high above the others, right? Well, this is LiteSpeed 2.1 Enterprise with dual client setup. The web serving agent, which TMDHosting officially uses as of today. We have officially ended our trial on LiteSpeed and are launching it officially, couple of minutes after you complete reading this post.

Some of our highest peaking and latest production servers are already converted, the rest are already scheduled for this and the upcoming weekend.

As of today, we dare say that we do provide lightning speed hosting services!

More to come out from the labs in the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned for the news.