Technical Details
We have compiled a list of technical details for those interested in the technologies behind HostDeploy.
Get in touch if you need to know more.
Data storage
On the back-end we provide each different site with its own Amazon EBS disk. These are designed to be highly available and reliable, as well as ten (10) times more reliable than typical commodity disk drives. You can read more technical details on the Amazon EBS infrastructure at http://aws.amazon.com/ebs.
Since our MySQL database instances are running on Amazon RDS (with Multi-AZ) you will have automatic fail-over including replication on your database. We will keep backups of all data up to the last five minutes, but these will only be used in the event of catastrophic failure of all websites. If you need to restore data for just your website this backup will not help you. Full technical details on Amazon RDS are available at: http://aws.amazon.com/rds.
Backups
Our backup system uses the Amazon EBS snapshot system to create instant copies of your volumes stored on super-reliable, Amazon S3. Since your databases are not stored on Amazon EBS (for performance reasons) we also run a simultaneous MySQL dump of your databases which will also be stored on Amazon S3. The Amazon S3 system is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability, and handle concurrent loss of data in two facilities. More details on Amazon S3 are available at http://aws.amazon.com/s3.
Software
We plan on offering multiple, unique, server configurations in the future, but for now our servers are running with the following setup:
| OS | Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) |
|---|---|
| Web | Apache 2.2 (mpm-itk) |
| Postfix & Dovecot | |
| PHP | PHP 5.3 [ /usr/bin/php ] Modules: apc, mysql, gd, imagick, tidy, curl, mcrypt, imap, geoip, sqlite |
| Perl | Perl 5.10 [ /usr/bin/perl ] |
Package specifications
The “Small” cloud hosting package is a shared website hosting environment with up to eighty (80) other small websites running on a small Amazon EC2 instance (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) – 1.7 GB memory, 1 CU.
The “Medium” cloud hosting package is similar to the “Small” package, but instead runs on a large Amazon EC2 instance – 7.5 GB memory, 4 CU.
The “Large” cloud hosting package runs on the large Amazon EC2 instance but shares the server with a maximum of thirty (30) other websites.
We will also offer packages that receive fully dedicated machines soon.
Note: These settings are estimates and are subject to change as we determine the most efficient configuration for your websites. Small websites should fit comfortably on our small package and will not cause much load on the server. Any websites consistently using more than their share of the system will be required to upgrade. We will be monitoring this closely in order to prevent bad neighbors.