Author: Michael McDonald

Introduction

Businesses looking to establish themselves online have numerous options. They can not only choose the providers, but the service they wish to receive. Cloud computing has become an extremely popular hosting method due to flexibility in price, features, and support/management. Within the concept of cloud computing, you are typically presented with three distinct categories of services offered: 

Introduction

In this article, we will compare the similarities and differences of a cloud server vs a physical server. Every business has similar and different approaches in how they operate. The differences often relate to what is essential for that specific business: the clientele, the need to process information/orders, and how quickly market adaptation changes are needed.

Introduction

All online businesses need to account for growth. As a business receives more visitors to its site, the underlying infrastructure needs to scale to provide the same level of performance that the visitors are accustomed to. Horizontal scaling, the addition of more servers rather than increasing the power of the existing servers, is an easy way to build our web servers' ability to handle a more significant amount of traffic and protect us against hardware failure. Ensuring that the additional web servers have the same files and data is a potentially time-consuming and challenging task. Automating that task using free, open-source software, such as lsyncd, is a way to ensure that we have a safe, secure, and repeatable method of copying files from one server to another.

Introduction

The servers that run our applications, our businesses, all depend on the stability and underlying features offered by the operating system (or OS) installed. As administrators, we have to plan ahead and think to the future of how our users will use the machines we oversee while simultaneously ensuring that those machines remain stable and online. There are numerous operating systems to choose from; however one of the most popular, most stable, and highly supported OSes is CentOS. A combination of excellent features, rock-solid performance stability, and the backing of enterprise-focused institutions such as Red Hat and Fedora have led to CentOS becoming a mainstay OS that administrators can count on.

When choosing a server operating system, there are a number of factors and choices that must be decided. An often talked about and referenced OS, Ubuntu, is a popular choice and offers great functionality with a vibrant and helpful community. However, if you’re unfamiliar with Ubuntu and have not worked with either the server or desktop versions, you may encounter differences in common tasks and functionality from previous operating systems you’ve worked with. Here are the top four lessons I’ve learned while running Ubuntu on a server.