I was just reading Liam Eagle’s blogpost on SWSoft and Parallels. Apparently, Parallels, the developer of the Parallels Desktop — a hardware virtualization software on Windows, Linux and Mac — has actually been under a new management for three years. Who is the new owner? SWsoft, home of popular virtualization (Virtuozzo) and server automation (Plesk) software.

Domain name resolution is a very important building block of the Internet today. It translates domain/host names into IP addresses, so your browser would know how to reach this page (okay, I know it is more complicated than that, but…)

At the same time, a slow or broken DNS system can be very frustrating, even when you are just hosting a service. Little did I realise that how much a typical hosting server depends on domain name services. If you are on a Linux/Unix box, try to remove /etc/resolv.conf from your server for 5 minutes, and see how it can cope.

Media Temple, home of the Grid Server which I wrote about here, has just posted an excellent post on their blog, titled Anatomy of MySQL on the Grid Server. It

1. Acknowledge MySQL issues in the current grid server platform.
2. Talk about their old load balancing system for MySQL, and why it did not work.
3. Discuss their new VPS based MySQL solution that will be switched on in March.

What do you do when you have regular traffic spike? Say, for once a month, traffic increases 3 fold for 12 hours after your company sent out the monthly news letter? Your current web server barely copes with regular load. Do you go out to buy 2 more dedicated servers just for that 12 hours in a month? That wouldn’t be too economical paying 2 extra servers sitting there idling most of the time, wouldn’t it?

Judd Vinet of ArchLinux (one of my favourite, btw) has recently written an article to solve this very issue, Web clustering with Amazon EC2, where extra servers are hired from Amazon EC2 on part-time basis to serve surge in traffic. A semi-automated system has been built to make the task of “summoning new servers” much easier, and has been discussed in the article.

First of all, my previous post on Nginx vs. Lighttpd for a small VPS seems to be a “hit”. Thanks to Glenn for submitting it to programming.reddit.com, which got picked up by a few bloggers. Got around 1,000 unique visitors on the day where the post went live, which I guess is pretty good for this one-post-a-week site of mine.

Since I have briefly touched on the “URL rewrite-ability” of Nginx and Lighttpd in my previous post, I think it might actually be useful to have some examples showing how rewrite rules are written on these web servers to support clean URLs. I will take the open source CMS Drupal for example, as it is what Hosting Fu runs on. Btw, Drupal 5.0 has just been released and it rocks.

I have been using Lighttpd for almost a year and Nginx for a month on my servers. I know that they were created to be massively scalable, solving the C10k problem. However their asynchronised-IO model and small memory foot-print also make them suitable as alternative HTTP servers for memory-limited VPS. Alternative = Anything but the current defacto Apache.

I will be writing more about Lighttpd and Nginx later during the year, but will try to use this post to draw some comparison between Nginx, the new darling of these light-weight web servers, and Lighttpd, many Web 2.0 developers’ all time favourite.

I have been an almost-daily user of lookupCrap.com, and I have previously written a short review about it almost 5 months ago. Since then, Josh of lookupCrap.com contacted me about their update, so I think I shall write another short review about it.