Via Hacker News, here is a blog post from cloudkick — Three sysadmin mistakes start-ups make.
While being a start-up with scaling issues is a sign that things are going well, sometimes such a small team does not have the expertise to make sure all their servers are in order. We wanted to share a couple pitfalls that we have helped diagnose in hopes to prevent other start-ups from doing the same thing.
It pointed out that
- Switching out your Apache with an alternative when you are in trouble is bad.
- Don’t use SQLite in production.
fork(2) is one of the most expensive system calls (for some operating systems), and should not be used on every request.
The emphasis is mine, because I actually do not agree entirely on the argument.
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I have been using CouchDB recently to build some of my new projects. It’s a new schema-less, document-modelled, highly concurrent, Erlang powered “database” where you wrote map reduce functions in design views to create queries and indices. It is also very neat to bootstrap a project when you have not worked out the relational model of your database yet, due to its schema-less nature. I am still getting my head around it (coming from 15 years of SQL experience), but so far so good.
I guess one issue with CouchDB is that it’s HTTP-based interface is still not fixed, and there are quite a few differences between versions. Nor is there any upgrade utilities to convert database created in an older version to the current one, although it’s trivial to write one. Debian 5, which is my current distro of choice, is still stuck at 0.8.0 for CouchDB, when most documentation online have moved to 0.9.0. I can’t seem to be able to find ready-made CouchDB-0.9.0 Debian packages for Lenny, so I made my own from Squeeze source.
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Looking at my history of past reviews and found that I have not done a hosting review for the last 8 months! Meanwhile, I probably have used half a dozen different hosting providers since my last review (my review on Gandi.net’s Xen VPS, which I will hopefully write about them again sometime soon). So, it’s the last day of August, and let me do a quick review on one of the VPS hosting company that I have been using for the last 3 months and are quite happy with — Fivebean Media.
I first came across Fivebean Media on LowEndBox.com of their $5/month VPS deal (which I do not think is currently on offer). According to the about page, the company started as a “technology/web consulting company” back in 2004 (XlogicGroup, a service/consulting company), and Fivebean Media was created in 2008 to offer web hosting. It is still a relatively young company, and it has a weird name for a hosting company, but I do like their clean design :)
Update November 2009
If you find this review helpful and wish to sign up with VPS products from Fivebean Media, feel free to use my referral code (if there’s no better discount currently available). Here’s my referral link:
fivebean.com/account/aff.php?aff=067
You can also quote the coupon code FB20 to get 20% recurring discount — although you can usually find better discount on their website (40-60% off VPS products).
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After the FsckVPS fiasco and tragic involving KT Ligesh two months ago, I blogged about the potential future of products of LxLabs. More specifically — whether HyperVM and Kloxo are going to be open sourced. A lot of development has been happening over the last two months. A “consortium” has been created, and a new website LxCenter has been set up (and currently hosted at DMEHosting) to further the discussion. Although most of the talks are still happening at the forums.
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I know I have been abandoning this blog for the last month and half due to stress at work (very busy preparing for the new version at the end of this month), and one nut case involving cyber-stalking, threatening emails and abusing phone calls (still on-going but hopefully the justice system will deal with it). Now I am coming back with some spammy blog posts :)
One of my alter ego is running probably one of the biggest bargain sharing sites in Australia (working on it like 1-2 hours a day, hosted with none other than the great Linode serving 2.5-3 million pages a month). One of pages that I recently put it on is…
Cheap .au domain names — list of registrars and resellers offering .com.au for under AUD$30/2 years.
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Via Hacker News — Updated YC Company Hosting Stats. A Ruby script was used to extract out all the startups that Y Combinator invested in, get their IP addresses, and then do a WHOIS to find out who owns the IP block. Interesting result:
Then the whole HN discussion turns into SliceHost vs. Linode, as there is only 1 YC funded startup on the list that’s hosted on Linode. I am more surprised that there are more start ups using GoDaddy than Linode.
A lot of news surrounding LxLabs and HyperVM after last week’s FsckVPS fiasco. Via this discussion thread on WebHostingTalk, where an LxLabs employee talks about the future of company and its software:
lxbhargava said
Today I had discussion with Ligesh’s family. From the discussion it is appears that Lxlabs will not continue to run the business.
They are considering, releasing the software Kloxo and Hypervm under an Opensource license.
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Here is probably one of the biggest/fasting growing outage thread on WebHostingTalk — started by someone reporting FsckVPS connectivity issue yesterday morning. When I went to bed last night there was around 50+ pages of discussions, and now it has grown to 80+ pages. FsckVPS, one of the VAServ companies, was offering low-cost full-automated OpenVZ VPS with instant activation. And it turns out that HyperVM, a virtualization control panel for both OpenVZ and Xen developed by LxLabs, has some serious vulnerabilities. Someone could exploit it and gain super user privilege on the physical node, including performing highly malicious operations. It appears to be the case with FsckVPS and someone managed to exploit HyperVM and wiped out data for 100,000 websites (according to The Register).
“We were hit by a zero-day exploit” in version 2.0.7992 of the application, he (Rus Foster of VAServ) said. “I’ve heard from other people they’ve been hit by the same thing.”
Because of unmanaged nature of FsckVPS, they do not actually carry any backup of their clients’ VPS (which is a fair call from a providers’ point of view). Many might not actually have offsite backup anywhere — and now that’s pretty bad.
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Just to share another script that I hacked together to monitor my sites. Nginx is a great web server software and since I last wrote about it more than 2 years ago, I have since pretty much converted all my sites to Nginx (sorry Lighttpd).
Nginx came with this HTTP stub status module that you can get the current server status in a HTML page. However it’s not pretty comparing to Lighttpd’s and Apache’s. Moreover, the information it provides is a bit cryptic.
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