Regarding user retention and conversion, website performance is one of the most critical variables. Numerous case studies demonstrate how the responsiveness of your website can affect your customers’ experiences and, more specifically, your business because it would result in fewer conversions. Due to Google’s inclusion of page speed as a ranking criterion, an initial server response time of less than 100ms is now considered poor.
This leads many to believe that the shared hosting sector will eventually go the way of the dinosaurs, isn’t that right? Not so fast, shared web hosting reigns supreme when operating your website most straightforwardly and affordably. Second, the shared web hosting sector greatly improved due to these new “container” technologies. Maintaining a reliable shared web hosting node in the early days of the internet was tricky. Before 2010, system administrators were regularly tasked with managing issues like abrupt resource spikes brought on by problematic Joomla plugins or abusive clients or fending off hacker attacks that infected every user on the node. It was well acknowledged that if another client on the same node installed a malicious Joomla plugin, your website could go down or be hacked because not all web hosting firms could manage such situations.
A technology that revolutionized the shared hosting sector, CloudLinux is an RHEL-based OS with a significantly modified Linux kernel and additional tools that enable shared hosting providers to isolate the web hosting users (tenants) of a single shared node between them and, more importantly, limit the usage of the hardware resources. Who knows how? Continue reading to learn more.
One of the main elements of CloudLinux is CloudLinux LVE, Tame the Untamed Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE). This allows the shared hosting companies to split each tenant into its own “container,” providing them complete control over how hardware resources like CPU, IO, RAM, and network are used. LVE accomplishes this by mainly relying on Linux kernel control groups (groups), the precise resource management technique used by Docker and all Linux container technologies. LVE aims to ensure that only some tenants can take down the entire shared hosting node, or more specifically, to ensure that the node’s hardware resources are divided equally among the tenants.
The stability of shared hosting has significantly increased thanks to this technology, and when appropriately configured, tenants won’t even know that they have noisy neighbours.
Protect the Unprotected
The situation can become even more convoluted regarding security in a shared hosting environment. The truth is that no matter how many resources you devote to safety, you can only secure some tenants. Some websites will eventually become vulnerable owing to an out-of-your-control outdated plugin, or even worse, a zero-day vulnerability will be exploited. Additionally, not all threats will originate from outside your node. A compromised shared hosting node is more likely to come from an active tenant than an outsider. An assault from within makes perfect sense from the attacker’s perspective if you consider the monthly cost of a shared Web Hosting in Pakistan account.
Churchill was spot on when he said that you could not be injured by enemies from without if you have no enemies inside.
Each tenant is contained in a separate cage or container using a virtual filesystem called CageFS. Each tenant has a different filesystem and a unique set of tools for use. In addition, tenants do not have access to anything outside their filesystem, so they cannot see one another or, worse yet, view a private server configuration. Additionally, CageFS virtualizes the /proc filesystem to provide shared node tenants with even stronger isolation, for example:
• limiting the tenants’ ability to view just their running processes
• deleting private host data, including mounted devices, hardware settings, system memory, etc.
Beyond the realm of security Due to the LVE and the opening provided by CageFS, running any binary in a safe mode is now possible. As a result, it was only natural for the shared hosting software stack to diverge from the traditional LAMP stack, and even PHP from LAMP received an upgrade.
Control the Uncontrolled
One essential element needs to be added to the shared hosting nodes’ solutions, even though LVE and CageFS address many problems. And that would be the LAMP stack’s M (which stands for MySQL), which manages and stores all of the tenant’s database data. According to our observations, MySQL is to blame for excessive use and shares a similar reputation with DNS.
A program called MySQL Governor, which tracks and limits MySQL usage on a shared hosting node, is another way that CloudLinux resolves this vexing problem.
Abusive tenants might be constrained to their LVE limits using MySQL Governor to reduce their adverse effects on the entire system’s MySQL consumption. MySQL Governor can be set up to impose additional CPU utilization restrictions or disc read and write operations as needed. It makes shared hosting nodes even more reliable and effective, bringing us to this post’s primary topic.
What’s the process?
Yes, all of our shared hosting nodes run CloudLinux as their OS of choice. It is a no-brainer, given that it offers all of these security and stability features and benefits right out of the box. It enabled us to develop and expand our shared hosting platform to a degree we had not anticipated. You can now run your Node.JS, Ruby on Rails, and even Python projects on cheap and reasonable hosting, so it’s no longer just for PHP projects. Additionally, we support legacy scripts that use PHP versions older than 5.6 and keep our PHP stack up to date with the most recent PHP versions, such as PHP 8.1.
We can level the playing field for all our clients because of the cutting-edge technologies discussed above. Everyone now receives more in times of need than what they paid for. Yes, that is true; each website may experience brief renown when a particular issue becomes popular online or elsewhere. As a result, our nodes are set up to handle such abrupt shifts in traffic bursts when resources are available instead of adhering to rigid restrictions and slowing down valuable traffic. Because we manage our nodes’ utilization at roughly 70%, 99.99% of cases exist.
But our work still needs to be done; we also want to deliver responses in less than 100 milliseconds, which is a complex undertaking considering the variety of impacting factors in a shared hosting environment. The hardware of our nodes takes a lot of time and work to design and construct, even though software solutions like CloudLinux are fantastic. We are now transitioning to the 4th generation of our hardware, which offers incredible speeds and advancements over the 3rd generation. However, it is safe to say that almost 90% of fleer is powered by AMD EPYC Rome and Milan processors, which offer incredible performance and CPU density per node and allow us to fully utilize our datacenter-grade NVMe over PCIe 4.0 interface connected in RAID10 array. These are exciting times, to put it simply.
Final Thoughts:
This, along with our policy on unmetered bandwidth, makes for a great starting place for any new project or small business. It is a low-cost, reliable, and high-performance shared web host. But don’t take my word for it; feel free to test out one of our Unmetered Shared Web Hosting in Karachi packages. If you’re unsatisfied, we’ll promptly refund your money, no questions asked.
