Top 4 reasons to cluster your shared hosting

A possible setup with Atomia Cloud Hosting Platform

Atomia strives to provide the best and most profitable hosting experience on the market today. Fully automated processes (no more error prone manual handling!) and easy-to-use control panels is what we are known for, and yet we cannot stress enough the importance of a good IT infrastructure setup.

With Atomia, you can cluster your shared hosting setup, not only web servers but also FTP and mail servers, which gives you a reliable and highly available hosting service.

The shared storage in the picture above also lets you do platform agnostic hosting where your customers can manage Linux and Windows websites side-by-side in the same control panel (as you might have seen in some of our videos).

Let’s have a look at four main reasons to cluster your shared hosting.

1. High availability

Say goodbye to announcing maintenance windows and expected downtime. With clustered web servers you can take them out one by one and do whatever maintenance you need. Your customers’ websites will still be available via other cluster nodes. If you spread your clusters over multiple servers or even multiple datacenters, you will also gain redundancy in case of hardware failure.

2. Scalability

Whenever you need more power for a specific service you can simply add new nodes and after a while you can add completely new clusters. Atomia also allows you to automatically provision nodes during peaks in load and remove them once they are no longer needed. We call this auto-scaling.

3. Security

Say your web server gets compromised and someone gains root access to it. The more services the hacker gets access to, the bigger the problem. In our proposed model you have one service per server, meaning that if a web server gets compromised it can be taken out of service while other services, such as e-mail, will be running safe and sound. The isolation of services also leads us to the fourth and last bullet:

4. Better hardware utilization

The drawback to running databases, a web server, a mail server and more on one server is that you will not be able to use the server for other purposes once a service, most likely a database, hits the roof even though you might have CPU, RAM or disk to spare. On the other hand, using virtual machines specific for each service allows you not only to configure each server individually, but also to fill it to the max without other services interfering with the capacity of the server.

Wrap-up

While initial hardware costs may be a bit higher if you are starting from scratch, clustered shared hosting brings many benefits to the table. You will have lower operating costs (better hardware utilization and less support) and a more reliable and secure shared hosting platform, which make life a lot easier in general.