The result of 2 years intense development, the High Availability Server Architecture (HASA) is specifically designed for the cPanel based shared hosting product. Cpanel is the worlds most popular control panel for shared hosting accounts, largely due to its flexibility and feature rich environment. It is intended that the HASA will be applied to all Webcity Professional Hosting plans. Webcity COO Bennett Oprysa commented “With the current pricing structure of our Professional Hosting plans ranging from $6.95 to $12.95 per month, we are aiming at providing this solution to site owners for less than $100 per year.” Webcity commented “Market trends are seeing a downward pressure on pricing for web hosting, however, as the market are also expecting high reliability, it’s important that any improvements and innovation are in line with that expectation.” The HASA not only increases reliability in terms of providing real time redundancy in the case of any potentially problem server and it’s software, but it also minimises the time needed for scheduled outages.
Traditional clustering models often focus on providing redundant network and server hardware. Other models aim at increasing software stability by separating various applications amongst different servers, but this has a number of limitations, and is particularly problematic in regards to cPanel.
The Webcity HASA includes full redundancy of all server and networking hardware there is no single point of failure. Whilst each cPanel server is at any point in time running from one dedicated physical server, this can be changed very easily and quickly, allowing for the replacement of a problem server. The HASA structure also allows for software redundancy. This is done by switching between multiple instances of the same server software, in the case that an issue on the live server is software related rather than hardware related.Oprysa commented “All of this adds up to a solution that provides the ultimate in High Availability hosting, and is far superior to anything else on offer within the Australian Shared Hosting market. Combined with our ultra competitive pricing, the HASA makes webcity Professional Hosting services the clear choice for Australian small businesses.”
As of January 2008 all new customers on Webcity’s Pro Hosting plans are hosted using the new server architecture. Existing customers will have the opportunity to migrate across to the new structure if they wish. Details on how to do this will be made available on www.webcity.com.auArticle Link at http://www.itwire.com/content/view/16486/545/
