Shared hosting and virtual servers

The best place to host the thing somebody is going to open on a telephone.

Accounts on machines in two rooms we can walk to, with PHP 5.3.3, MySQL 5.1 and Apache 2.2.17 on all of them. The second room was taken in March. Everything in it is a copy of something in the first.

100% network uptime, measured at our own routers. The guarantee is on the network. Nobody has ever offered you one on the code.

Room one, room two, and the copy that goes between them every night. There is a cloud in the drawing because there is a cloud in all of the drawings this year.

Two ways to have a server

The difference is how much of the machine is yours.

Shared hosting

cPanel 11.30 with the x3 theme
PHP 5.3.3, Perl 5.12, Python 2.7
MySQL 5.1.52, as many databases as you make
Apache 2.2.17 and a virtual host of your own
Nightly copies, written to the other room

The x3 theme is the one your last host had. That is the whole argument for it and it has never lost.

Virtual servers root

Your own kernel, and your own reboot at half past two
nginx 0.8.53 and Varnish 2.1 in front of whatever you run
PostgreSQL 9.0, with the replication in the box this time
Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.0 on Passenger 3
Redis and memcached, and Node.js 0.2 if you ask

Node.js 0.2 changes shape between point releases, which is more enjoyable on a machine where the consequences stay yours.

It is going to be opened on a telephone

A tablet arrived in April and a telephone whose pixels you cannot find arrived in June, and between them they changed what a page is judged on before it is read. This one carries a media query at 480 pixels, and underneath it the columns stop being columns.

The uploader in the control panel has been rewritten without the movie in it. The reasons were published in April by a man who does not run a hosting company and were already in our ticket queue.

There are in fact two media queries in this file. The second was added the same afternoon by the person who had said one would be enough.

On the machines this morning

Web and languages

Apache 2.2.17 on every plan
nginx 0.8.53 in front of it on premium plans
Varnish 2.1 on virtual servers
PHP 5.3.3, Perl 5.12, Python 2.7
Django 1.2, Rails 3.0 on Passenger 3

PHP 5.2 takes its last security fix upstream and goes out of support in January. 5.3.3 is the default here already, and the selector stays until the last account has moved.

Databases and caching

MySQL 5.1.52 on the shared machines
MariaDB on request: the same commands, a different company
PostgreSQL 9.0, streaming replication and a hot standby
Redis and memcached, one pool per account

MySQL 5.5 goes final this month. It goes on your machine once somebody other than us has run it in anger for a quarter, which is what we printed about 5.1 and meant.

Panels and systems

cPanel 11.30 with the x3 theme
Plesk 10 and its Customer & Business Manager, off unless you resell
CentOS 5.5, or Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
Console, ours, for accounts opened before 2000

The SOAP endpoint from the enterprise pilot remains available. The enterprise pilot does not.

From the status blog

6 DecemberRoom two ran on its own generator for an hour on Sunday morning, on purpose. Nothing in it noticed.
12 NovemberThe screen by the door is showing our own network graph again. From April to July it was showing something else, and so was everybody's.

How we compare

	SlopHost	Office Live Small Business	Homestead	Bravenet	Freewebs
Runs code you wrote yourself	PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby	Their tools	Their tools	Some	Their tools
A database you may connect to	MySQL 5.1, PostgreSQL 9.0	No	No	MySQL	No
Advertising of ours on your pages	None, printed here every year since 2004	None	None	On the free plan	On the free plan
Still trading under the name in this table	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No. Renamed in 2008

Compiled from published material in November. Freewebs is in the table under the name people still write to us with, two years after it stopped being it. Two of those columns are free, and we have never worked out how to compete with free.