HEADLINE: Beta Testing Begins On A New Cloud Web Hosting Platform

SUMMARY: Hybrid Logic Ltd announce the start of beta testing for their PaaS (platform as a service) web cluster. Hybrid Web Cluster offers standard LAMP web hosting with the redundancy, fault tolerance and scalability of the cloud.

November 17, 2010 — Hybrid Logic Ltd, a United Kingdom-based company today announced the commencement of the first round of beta testing of their PaaS (platform-as-a-service) software product, Hybrid Web Cluster in partnership with CloudSigma AG of Zurich, Switzerland.

Hybrid Web Cluster is a cloud web hosting platform designed to run over any number of real physical servers, cloud server instances or a combination of the two. Due to recent advances in file system technology (ZFS) in combination with advances made by the software developers at Hybrid Logic Ltd; it is now possible to offer standard LAMP web hosting with a revolutionary level of redundancy, fault tolerance and scalability, at a price compatible with the commodity web hosting market.

ZFS is one of the key pieces of technology that enables Hybrid Web Cluster to offer near-instant data replication. This means that if any one of the nodes in your cluster goes down, some other nodes will always have a copy of every website hosted on the failed server no more than a few seconds old. The web cluster will automatically and instantly reorganise itself so that your websites never experience downtime – a failed server results in a slightly slow page load for a few seconds rather than hours of downtime.

Because ZFS support is crucial to the implementation of Hybrid Web Cluster, a cloud infrastructure provider willing to support the latest version of FreeBSD was essential – ZFS support is also available in Linux and Solaris, but both options have significant drawbacks; Solaris is too far from Linux to feel comfortable for most users, and Linux’s ZFS support is currently too slow to be usable in a production environment. It was therefore essential to find a suitable cloud infrastructure provider who would support the latest version of FreeBSD – The CloudSigma product with its support for FreeBSD 8.1 and ZFS provided the ideal infrastructure choice for Hybrid Web Cluster, and after talking to the friendly team at CloudSigma, a partnership agreement was reached which sees CloudSigma sponsoring the Hybrid Web Cluster beta testing programme.

Patrick Baillie CEO of CloudSigma commented “Hybrid Web Cluster is an exciting product and use of our cloud. It provides the potential to generate an additional revenue stream from our existing infrastructure investment. We see this product expanding our customer base by offering a more managed approach from our core offering. The white label support and sophisticated integrated billing and accounting system gives us the flexibility we require”.

Today the first round of beta testing began; 15 clusters have been provisioned and the first beta testers have each received login credentials for their very own test web cluster. Beta testers have full administrative control over their own cluster running on CloudSigma’s infrastructure – it is possible to set up real websites (including WordPress blogs), watch a live graphical visualisation of the load balancing and replication algorithms at work, pull the plug on a server and watch how the sites that are hosted on it stay live, it is also possible to generate load on individual websites and watch how the cluster’s load balancing algorithms respond. Beta testers can also explore our next-generation web hosting control panel which includes advanced ticketing and billing systems, automated domain registration, white label support and full internationalization.

If you would like to learn more about Hybrid Web Cluster, watch video demonstrations, or sign up for the next round of beta testing to try out your own web cluster, please visit hybrid-cluster.com.

About Hybrid Web Cluster
Hybrid Web Cluster is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) software product developed by Hybrid Logic Ltd, a company based in London, United Kingdom. The software provides commodity LAMP web hosting in a distributed and fault-tolerant manner across a cluster of servers. You can run a web cluster across multiple physical locations, using a mix of virtualised cloud infrastructure and physical hardware to build a true Hybrid Cloud.

About CloudSigma AG
CloudSigma AG, based in Zürich, Switzerland provides a pure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform offering high security, flexible cloud servers. Our innovative web console as well as API are designed to make cloud computing and cloud hosting straightforward. High availability redundant infrastructure is backed up by a generous Service Level Agreement that covers not only availability but also performance.

CloudSigma’s unique approach extends completely open software and networking layers to customers allowing them to run any operating system and applications they chose and to implement their own customised networking policies. CloudSigma bills by each raw resource (CPU, RAM, storage etc.) individually in a transparent, unbundled manner.

HEADLINE: New cloud web hosting platform looking for beta testers

Hybrid Web Cluster is a cloud web hosting platform designed to run either on real servers, cloud server instances or a combination of the two. Due to some key enabling technologies becoming available (particularly the ZFS filesystem) combined with technology advances made by the cluster development team, this new product is able to offer a number of features not previously seen in products of this type:

• A user-configurable level of replication redundancy — Near-live backups can be stored on any number of nodes in the cluster and in the event of a node failure, service is automatically and instantly restored from a backup no more than 10 seconds old. In the event of an accidental deletion, files can be quickly and easily recovered by “rolling back time” – a feature provided in the web hosting control panel.
• Complete fault tolerance and no single point of failure — Any node (or several nodes) can fail and the cluster will automatically repair itself. Hardware failures are no longer critical, replacements can be carried out as part of a maintenance schedule rather than as an emergency event.
• A high degree of scalability — Standard LAMP web applications can run unmodified and scale from zero resource usage to requiring two dedicated servers (one for database and one for web) this scaling happens automatically and instantly to cope with variations in demand. With minor modifications to the application code, next generation multi-master database technology allows the cluster to scale even beyond the 2 server-per-site limitation and be capable of handling extremely high traffic loads.

After several years in development this new web cluster system is due to begin the first round of beta testing in October 2010 and Hybrid Logic Ltd. is seeking interested parties to try the beta version for free, initially on cloud infrastructure, but later stand-alone distributions will be available. Beta testers will be offered a discount on the full price of the system after its launch date.

Well, I’ve just put the new logo live. I’ve also done some smaller images which won’t look out of place on CloudBook.

What do you think?

I’ve just received our new logo from a friend of mine who’s also an awesome designer in Bristol and I think it looks great!

The problem with our old logo (above) is that it looks like the ant has been dropped on top of the orb with no real context. But around a month ago someone I was talking to suggested that there should be ants holding the globe!

So here it is:

I’m excited about this because it means we’re starting to get a real corporate image, something we can put on business cards and letterheads!