ElasticHosts’ existing solutions provide flexible, pay-as-you-go, self-service cloud servers to organisations. With full admin access, customers log in, configure their software and adjust server capacity to match demand. By partnering with Hybrid Sites, ElasticHosts’s Cloud Sites provides scalable, redundant cloud web hosting for standard PHP/MySQL websites without the need for any server administration. Cloud Sites hosts files for the customer, giving them all the redundancy and scalability of the cloud without having to manage the underlying servers.

Richard Davies, CEO at ElasticHosts, explained: “Although some organisations need full admin access and control, many simply want to host web pages in the cloud and don’t need or want their own cloud servers. Similarly, others need more substantial hosting but don’t have the time or resources to manage their servers. We are opening our doors to both sets of customers. Cloud Sites provides easy cloud hosting: customers don’t need to run their own server. They simply send us their web pages and we host them. The aim is to make hosting something that happens seamlessly in the background: these new offerings are designed to make this happen.”

More and more, businesses are looking to move away from traditional managed hosting which locks them into inflexible contracts that don’t let them scale up or down easily. In an age where capacity requirements can change in a second, it’s important that all businesses are able to gain the elasticity and, ultimately, cost efficiency that cloud hosting offers. By expanding its portfolio, ElasticHosts ensures it has an offering to suit any business, no matter what its needs.

“Many ‘cloud hosting’ offerings are traditional hosting in disguise,” continued Richard Davies. “Customers find that the core benefits of cloud, flexibility and the PAYG model, are not there. The first rule of cloud is that it must be elastic and customisable to suit individual companies. In launching Cloud Sites and Managed Cloud Servers, we are ensuring that all businesses are catered for. It’s this kind of flexibility and choice that businesses sign up for with the cloud.”

To mark the launch of these new products, ElasticHosts is currently offering a free trial to businesses. Please visit http://www.elastichosts.com/cloud-hosting/cloud-sites for more information on Cloud Sites.

About ElasticHosts
ElasticHosts – www.elastichosts.com – is a cloud server provider which lets businesses configure its sophisticated cloud infrastructure to match the business’ needs with any web browser, providing an unmatched combination of instant flexibility, ease of use and cost efficiency.

About Hybrid Cluster
Hybrid Cluster – www.hybrid-cluster.com – is a software company providing solutions to three huge problems which everyone faces in the cloud or in the data centre: servers fail, and websites go offline; websites get spikes in traffic and need dedicated capacity on demand; and users make mistakes – and need the ability to roll back time. To find out more or to sign up for a 30 day trial of the cluster software, click here.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE TERMS OF THIS END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT SHALL GOVERN YOUR USE OF THE SOFTWARE, REGARDLESS OF ANY TERMS THAT MAY APPEAR DURING THE INSTALLATION OF THE SOFTWARE.

IMPORTANT – READ CAREFULLY:  BY DOWNLOADING, INSTALLING, OR USING THE SOFTWARE, YOU (THE INDIVIDUAL OR LEGAL ENTITY) AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT (“EULA”).  IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS EULA, YOU MUST NOT DOWNLOAD, INSTALL, OR USE THE SOFTWARE, AND YOU MUST DELETE OR RETURN THE UNUSED SOFTWARE TO THE VENDOR FROM WHICH YOU ACQUIRED IT WITHIN THIRTY (30) DAYS AND REQUEST A REFUND OF THE LICENSE FEE, IF ANY, THAT YOU PAID FOR THE SOFTWARE.

EVALUATION LICENSE.  If you are licensing the Software for evaluation purposes, your use of the Software is only permitted in a non-production environment and for the period limited by the Software License Key.  Notwithstanding any other provision in this EULA, an Evaluation License of the Software is provided “AS-IS” without support or warranty of any kind, expressed or implied.

1.      DEFINITIONS

1.1    “ Documentation” means, collectively, the operation instructions, release notes, user manuals and/or help files for the Software in electronic or written form.
1.3    “Software” means software products that are licensed to you under this EULA, including, but not limited to, any related components purchased or provided with the Software, Documentation, and any maintenance releases thereto.
1.4     “Software License Key” means a valid serial number issued to you to activate and use the Software.    
1.5    “Open Source Software” means various software components, including open source software, that may be part of the Software, each licensed to you under its own applicable license terms and conditions.

2.      GRANT AND USE RIGHTS FOR SOFTWARE
2.1    License Grant. The Software is licensed, not sold.  Subject to the terms of this EULA, Hybrid Logic grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable license, without rights to sublicense, to use the Software in the country where you are invoiced in accordance with the Documentation and the Hybrid Logic license model (per core) specified in Section 8 of this EULA for which you have paid the applicable license fees. If you were invoiced in the European Union for the Software, you may use that Software in any of the European Union member states.  You may allow third party consultants or contractors to access and use the Software on your behalf solely for your internal business operations, provided, they are bound by an agreement with you protecting Hybrid Logic’s intellectual property with terms no less stringent than this EULA and you ensure that such third party use of the Software complies with the terms of this EULA. You may make one backup, unmodified copy of the Software solely for archival purpose.  If you upgrade or exchange the Software from a previous validly licensed version, you must cease use of the prior version of that Software.  You agree to provide written certification of destruction of the previous version of the Software upon Hybrid Logic’s request.
2.2    Restrictions. Except as expressly permitted by this EULA or by applicable law, You may not (i) sell, lease, assign, license, sublicense, distribute or otherwise transfer in whole or in part the Software; (ii) permit any use of or access to the Software by any third party, (iii) operate the Software on behalf of or for the benefit of any third party, including the operation of any service that is accessed by a third party, except that, for the purposes of this Section 2.2(iii), you may use the Software to deliver hosted services to your affiliates that are directly or indirectly controlled by, or are under common control with you. “Control” in this Section 2.2(iii) means an ownership, voting or similar interest representing fifty percent (50%) or more of the total interests then outstanding of the relevant entity; (iv) decompile, disassemble, reverse engineer, or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Software; (v) modify or create derivative works based upon the Software; or (vi) create, develop, license, install, use, or deploy any software or services to circumvent, enable, modify or provide access, permissions or rights which violate the technical restrictions in the Software.  If you wish to exercise any rights to reverse engineer to ensure interoperability in accordance with applicable law, you must first provide Hybrid Logic with written notice and all reasonably requested information to team@hybrid-logic.co.uk within 30 days and permit Hybrid Logic to assess your claim and, at Hybrid Logic’s sole discretion, to make an offer to provide alternatives that reduce any adverse impact on Hybrid Logic’s intellectual property or other rights.
2.3    Benchmarking. You may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, the results of which only you may publish or publicly disseminate, provided that Hybrid Logic has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of your testing and studies.  Please contact Hybrid Logic at team@hybrid-logic.co.uk to request such review.
2.4    Third-party Software. You are responsible for separately obtaining and complying with any licenses necessary to operate third-party software, including but not limited to application programs which the Software enables you to run.
2.5    Data Collection and Privacy. You agree that Hybrid Logic may collect, use, store and transmit technical and related information about your use of the Software which may include internet protocol address, hardware identification, operating system, application software, peripheral hardware, and non-personally identifiable Software usage statistics (“ Collected Data”) to facilitate the provisioning of updates, support, invoicing or online services to You.  Collected Data is subject to Hybrid Logic’s Privacy Policy, available on request.

2.6    Audit Rights. During the term of this EULA and for two (2) years after termination or expiration of the EULA or support and subscription services for the applicable Software has expired, you agree to maintain accurate records as to your installation and use of the Software, sufficient to provide evidence of compliance with the terms of this EULA. Hybrid Logic, or an independent third party designated by Hybrid Logic, may audit, upon written notice to you, your books, records, and computing devices to determine your compliance with this EULA and your payment of the applicable license and support services fees, if any, for the Software. Hybrid Logic may conduct no more than one (1) audit in any twelve (12) month period. In the event that any such audit reveals an underpayment by you of more than five percent (5%) of the license amounts due to Hybrid Logic in the period being audited, or that you have breached any term of the EULA, then, in addition to paying to Hybrid Logic any underpayments for Software licenses and Support and Subscription fees and any other remedies Hybrid Logic may have, you will promptly pay to Hybrid Logic the audit costs incurred by Hybrid Logic.

3.      TITLE. Hybrid Logic retains all right, title, and interest in and to the Software, the Software License Key(s) and all related intellectual property rights. Hybrid Logic retains all rights not expressly granted to you in this EULA.
4.      SUPPORT AND SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES. Except as expressly specified in Section 8 of this EULA, Hybrid Logic does not provide any support or subscription services for the Software under this EULA.  You have no rights to any updates, upgrades or extensions or enhancements to the Software developed by Hybrid Logic unless you separately purchase Hybrid Logic support or subscription services.  These support or subscription services are subject to Hybrid Logic’s then-current Support and Subscription Contract Terms and Conditions.
5.      TERMINATION.  Hybrid Logic may terminate this EULA immediately upon notice if you fail to comply with any term of this EULA.  In the event of termination, you must remove and destroy all copies of the Software and Software License Key(s), including all backup copies, from the server and all computers and terminals you own, possess or control and on which the Software is installed.  Any obligations to pay fees incurred prior to termination and Sections 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7 of this EULA shall survive termination for any reason.

6.      LIMITED WARRANTY AND LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
6.1     Limited Warranty. Hybrid Logic warrants that (i) the physical media, if any, on which the Software is delivered will be free of defects in materials and workmanship; and (ii) that the Software will substantially conform to the functional description set forth in the standard Documentation accompanying the Software for a period of 90 days after the date of delivery of the Software License Key to You (“ Warranty Period”).  If the physical media is defective and is returned to Hybrid Logic within the Warranty Period, your exclusive remedy will be Hybrid Logic’s option to repair or replace the defective physical media.  To return the defective physical media, send an email to team@hybrid-logic.co.uk to request a return authorization number.  If during the Warranty Period the Software does not substantially conform to the functional description set forth in the Documentation, your exclusive remedy will be that Hybrid Logic shall, at its sole option, correct the defects in the Software or refund the license fees you paid, if any, for the Software provided that (i) the Software has been properly installed and used at all times and in accordance with the  Documentation; (ii) no modification, deletion or addition has been made to the Software by persons other than Hybrid Logic or its authorized representative; and (iii) Hybrid Logic receives written notice of the non-conformity within the Warranty Period. EXCEPT FOR THE PRECEDING EXPRESS LIMITED WARRANTY, TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT MANDATED BY LAW, HYBRID LOGIC AND ITS LICENSORS PROVIDE THE SOFTWARE WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR IN ANY OTHER PROVISION OF THIS EULA OR COMMUNICATION WITH YOU, AND HYBRID LOGIC AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.
6.2     LIMITATION OF LIABILITY. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT MANDATED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL HYBRID LOGIC AND ITS LICENSORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOST PROFITS OR BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES, LOSS OF USE, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, LOSS OF DATA, OR ANY OTHER INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES UNDER ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER BASED IN CONTRACT, TORT, NEGLIGENCE, PRODUCT LIABILITY, OR OTHERWISE.  BECAUSE SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF LIABILITY FOR CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, THE PRECEDING LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.  HYBRID LOGIC’S AND ITS LICENSORS’ LIABILITY UNDER THIS EULA WILL NOT, IN ANY EVENT, EXCEED THE LICENSE FEES YOU PAID FOR THE SOFTWARE, IF ANY. THE FOREGOING LIMITATIONS SHALL APPLY REGARDLESS OF WHETHER HYBRID LOGIC OR ITS LICENSORS HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES AND REGARDLESS OF WHETHER ANY REMEDY FAILS OF ITS ESSENTIAL PURPOSE.

7.      GENERAL
7.1    Entire Agreement. This EULA represents the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Software, and supersedes any prior or contemporaneous oral or written agreements concerning the subject matter contained herein.  
7.2    Headings. Headings under this EULA are intended only for convenience and shall not affect the interpretation of this EULA.
7.3    Waiver and Modification.  No failure of either party to exercise or enforce any of its rights under this EULA will act as a waiver of those rights.  This EULA may only be modified, or any rights under it waived, by a written agreement executed by the party against which it is asserted.
7.4    Severability. If any provision of this EULA is found illegal or unenforceable, it will be enforced to the maximum extent permissible, and the legality and enforceability of the other provisions of this EULA will not be affected.
7.5    Governing Law. This EULA is governed by the laws of the United Kingdom, unless mandated by other law. 
7.6    Contact Information. Please direct legal notices or other correspondence to Hybrid Logic Ltd, 29 Devizes Road, Swindon, Wiltshire, SN1 4BG.  If you have any questions concerning this EULA, please send an email to team@hybrid-logic.co.uk.

8.      SOFTWARE-SPECIFIC TERMS AND CONDITIONS. In addition to the above sections, the Software is subject to the following terms and conditions.  In the event of any conflict between the Software-specific terms and conditions and sections 1-7 of the EULA, the Software-specific terms and conditions shall control.

You may transfer the Software between your Servers, provided the same Software usage does not run concurrently.

Hybrid Logic grants you a nonexclusive, non-transferable license, without rights to sublicense, to use the Software for information processing and computing purposes to perform management operations on distributed Servers that are activated for management by the Software, provided that a validly licensed copy of a Hybrid Logic Cluster Management Software Product is installed on each such Server.

A condition of using the Software is that web based interfaces, such as Control Panels, which are powered by the Software shall bear the phrase “Powered by Hybrid Logic” hyperlinking back to http://www.hybrid-cluster.com/

I’m pleased to report that in our case it’s the latter

Hybrid Cluster has had an extraordinary year of development and we’re on the cusp of releasing some very exciting new features for the world to get to grips with. What we’ve done is nothing short of revolutionary — we’re changing the fundamental assumptions about how your servers can co-operate together, how applications and databases can scale, and how companies do business continuity planning across data centres.

In the “old world”, a server is seen as a single entity; one which has its own specific configuration, and which hosts a set of applications and databases. If you’re staying up-to-date with the industry, you’ll have virtualized that server and put its storage in a centralized storage system (a SAN, for example) — now that’s all very well, but the virtual server is still conceptually a single server and can still suffer from these three problems:

1. Hardware and networks fail
2. Servers get over-loaded when there are spikes in demand
3. Users make mistakes

At Hybrid Logic it’s our mission to solve all three of these problems for your existing LAMP applications, and our software — available for license today — solves them by employing a fundamental paradigm shift in industry thinking.

Individual servers and storage systems should not be the unit of concern for you, the developer or administrator. Applications, databases and mailboxes should be — the servers should look after themselves.

Now, if you look a little further down the road, this is the way the industry’s moving — in cloud, the move from IaaS to PaaS is exactly this — developers and sysadmins should not have to think about individual server instances ever again. Their servers should form a cognizant co-operative group on their own. This is exactly what our software does — it transforms a bunch of dumb, commodity machines, connected by slow and unreliable network connections, into a loosely-coupled distributed cluster where the failure of an individual server or even an entire data centre is automatically healed so that the cluster carries on working — keeping your applications, databases and mailboxes online even in the face of catastrophic failure of an entire region.

I’m Luke, the CTO here at Hybrid Logic, and in the next few blog posts I’m going to give you a bit of insight into how we do it

Happy New Year!

Cheers,
Luke

https://github.com/hybridlogic/txHybridCluster

http://www.hybrid-cluster.com/
http://www.hybrid-cluster.com/api/

The Hybrid Cluster API allows you to set up websites, databases, mailboxes, add SSL certificates, configure custom DNS, and more (over 100 API functions are documented).

More to come

The bulk of this code is courtesy of _habnabit (thank you!), we just added authentication support and fixed a couple of bugs which were stopping the MySQL protocol parser working.

This works well enough to .fetchall() basic results sets and .query() any other MySQL statements you care to run. See example.py.

Feel free to fork, tweak, fix, use, report issues, etc.

Since we thought this tool might be useful to other developers, both in developing their own APIs and to aid in performing integrations with 3rd party APIs – we decided to make the software and its source code available for free to anyone who wants to use it. The software is now available for download under the new BSD license, check the project website or its SourceForge page for more information.

Here’s a couple of screenshots so you can get an idea of how it works:

We’ve been working hard over the weekend and have some good core cluster stability and performance improvements to show for it, new internal performance testing tools and a sneak peek of our Hybrid Sites project:

First, a bug in Twisted which was causing the distributed proxying layer to sometimes stop accepting new requests has been worked around. This means you shouldn’t see database connection errors any more. If you do, please report them by posting on the forums!

Second, we’ve now got a new internal performance testing tool which shows us a scatter graph of a cluster’s response time and stability:

This plot shows, for example, an average response time of around 400ms for a WordPress blog and our Control Panel (the CP in red, WordPress in blue). The few outliers show latencies of up to 10 seconds when a server fails! Much better than the usual hours or days of downtime!!

Next, I’ve got a couple of sneak peaks of our Hybrid Sites website and Control Panel. This will be our flagship cloud web hosting platform, perfect for developers, designers and publishers alike.

And here’s the control panel, showing off our whitelabel features:

A massive amount of under-the-hood work has gone on with the Control Panel in readying our incredibly powerful reseller system for Hybrid Site’s go-live in a couple of weeks.

We are also happy to announce that Hybrid Sites will be launched in association with ElasticHosts, giving their customers access to powerful, simple cloud web hosting — a much easier option than setting up their own Linux box over SSH. Hybrid Sites will in fact be launched across multiple cloud providers, including CloudSigma, to provide impressive cross-cloud redundancy.

We also have a reseller API which presently has 35 commands and growing. This will allow you to set up reseller accounts, take payments, set up websites, databases and purchase domains all through a powerful REST API. This will come hand-in-hand with the WordPress plugin which runs our — or your — frontend web hosting company page. Hybrid Sites will be the first to prove this technology tool-chain

Lots more to come this week, but for now, please try to thrash the knackers off your beta clusters, and get in touch if you want to test drive it and you’re not on the beta yet!

Cheers!

Luke Marsden, CTO

Just before the kernel boots (which you have to be quick to catch with Flexiant’s VNC client) hit F6 on the bootloader and type:

set hw.clflush_disable=1
boot

This will allow you to boot even a GENERIC kernel. Once you’re booted, chuck hw.clflush_disable="1" into /boot/loader.conf to make this permanent.

You’ll then want to build your own kernel for paravirtualised network and disk drivers. Edit the XENHVM kernel config (see the FreeBSD handbook on compiling your own kernel) – comment out the MODULES_OVERRIDE line which disables building all the modules (assuming you want ZFS support) and also comment out the whole section about WITNESS and INVARIANT, as having this enabled will slow down your kernel quite significantly.

Then you’ll need to patch the network driver as per this post (manually, since the code has changed a bit), else you get a lot of dropped packets:

http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-xen@freebsd.org/msg00598.html

Then just (as root):

cd /usr/src
make buildkernel KERNCONF=XENHVM
make installkernel KERNCONF=XENHVM
shutdown -r now

And enjoy your speedy FreeBSD 8.1 VM in the cloud!