SOPA / PIPA & The Way We Do Business

Posted on January 23, 2012 by jeadeh

If you are reading this blog post or host a site with us, you have more than likely heard about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP act (PIPA). There is so much information circulating regarding these two pieces of legislation. Some of it is true, some of it false, regardless, amongst the plethora of information, there is one reality, if SOPA or PIPA pass, the Internet will never be the same.

Most of this week’s news coverage is revolved around the “Great Wiki-Blackout of 2012” and their public demonstration against, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, being rammed through the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate this past year. The intent of both bills is to stop any and all copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, while opposition groups of the bill claim, both bills attempt to prevent online piracy in a way that actually infringes on free expression while harming the Internet.
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Nexcess Announces UK WordPress Hosting Services

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Corey

Nexcess Announces UK WordPress Hosting Services
Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A., January 16, 2011 – Nexcess, a United States-based managed web hosting company with specialized services in WordPress web hosting, has announced a new line of UK WordPress hosting solutions to be made available effective immediately.  This decision was made with the intent of better serving bloggers that desired lower latency to European and Asian audiences.

“In recent years, it’s become very important to us to make sure that our friends across the pond are given the same high caliber of web hosting solutions that we provide here in Dearborn, Michigan,” commented Chris Wells, President & CEO of Nexcess, “We’re very happy to be bringing this new WordPress hosting solution that our engineers worked so hard on developing, and are confident that it will be as popular in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe as we have already seen in the states.”
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Choosing a Load Balancing Solution

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Brad

Choosing a Load Balancing Solution

When a website reaches the point where a single web server can no longer handle the amount of traffic to the content or services it provides you must find a way to reliably distribute its load over two or more individual web servers. This type of service is called load balancing which is where a specific device or service accepts connections, processes them using a balancing algorithm, then directs that incoming request out to an available server of many servers to handle the request. To perform load balancing, there are a few options you can choose from. DNS load balancing is possible, but not widely used. Software based load balancing where software performs the balancing of requests on a linux server is a powerful and reliable method of distributing load. Hardware load balancing where you have a dedicated hardware device handles the load balancing can be used for advanced applications and needs.

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Ack is Better Than Grep

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Mark

Ack is Better Than Grep

In my last blog posting I wrote about some basic features of grep. If you already use grep a lot, it was probably a pretty boring post. One problem I used to have is when running grep, I’d get a lot of unwanted files that would match. For example I might try searching for the string ‘foobar’ to find where that appears in some code but there’s a DB dump in the directory too and the .sql file has the word ‘foobar’ in it somewhere. And when it does, it will be on one line that has 300 characters on it which fills my screen with its long line, making things hard to skim through.

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Installing Apache Solr on CentOS

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Alex

Installing Apache Solr on CentOS
Apache’s Solr search platform is a common solution for more flexible and better performing searches on sites that have outgrown their database’s built-in search facilities. Here at Nexcess, the most common use is by clients with Magento Enterprise Edition (the only version with built-in support for Solr). In this post I will walk through setting up Solr for general use, with some comments on setting it up for use the Magento EE.

Solr runs as a Java servlet, so the first thing needed is a way to run Java servlets. We’ll be using the OpenJDK and Tomcat from the JPackage repo, so we need to install the repo with:

wget http://jpackage.org/jpackage50.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/jpackage50.repo

Then install tomcat and java:

yum install -y java-1.6.0-openjdk tomcat6

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Debugging Apache Rewrites and Redirects

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Sean

Debugging Apache Rewrites and Redirects
Apache’s mod_rewrite and mod_alias can be very useful, but they can also be a huge pain to debug when a problem arises. Luckily, there are a few things that can help, and since you’re probably not the first person attempting to rewrite or redirect something in a specific way, you’ll likely be able to find the answer by just searching around intelligently once you understand the basics.

The first resource that I use would be the Apache mod_rewrite and mod_alias documentation. It might seem tedious, but Apache HTTP Server actually has some of the best documentation in the industry. If you spend 10 minutes reading the actual documentation and give understanding it a shot, you’ll probably find the majority of your questions answered. Make sure you check out the section of the mod_rewrite docs that covers the RewriteLog directive, since having a log turns guesswork into something debuggable.
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Features of Grep

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Mark

Features of grep

In my last blog posting I wrote about features of the less pager. Its one of those very common Linux utilities that everyone uses but no one reads the man page to learn about features. Just like less, everyone uses grep, but there’s a lot of features you’re missing out on if you haven’t read the man page.

grep is a very very old command, its name comes from the command that was run through the ed editor. If you wanted to print out the lines of a file that matched a regular expression (re) you’d run ‘g/re/p’ in ed which stood for globally search for a regular expression and print the matching lines. vi and sed users might recognize the syntax and other basic ed commands since they both adopted a lot from ed.

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Faking Magento Speed Test Results

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Ben

Faking Magento Speed Test Results

Web hosting is a competitive industry. Hosting companies can often find success by differentiating themselves through specialization. To that end, companies specializing in hosting certain popular web applications such as WordPress or Magento have been able to compete against the bigger players. Yet even within these niches, the fundamentals of support and performance end up being the deciding factors for most customers.

In the realm of Magento hosting — an application notorious for its performance challenges — the hosts that can demonstrate their ability to run faster sites find themselves in a stronger market position than their competitors. As such, Magento hosting companies like to use comparison benchmarking sites like Magento Speed Test in their marketing as evidence of their Magento optimization prowess. Unfortunately this (premature?) emphasis on performance can stimulate a surreptitious inclination to rig the tests in one’s favor.

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How to Fix the WordPress Admin Upgrade Loop

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Will

How to Fix the WordPress Admin Upgrade Loop
WordPress is typically great about taking care of itself and dealing with upgrades elegantly. However, sometimes it gets stuck in a rut. One common issue we’ve seen is the upgrade loop, which presents you with a page in wp-admin explaining that you need to upgrade your database, and upon clicking the button to do so, you’re looped back to the same page.

It’s important to understand what this is doing. Automattic (the developers of WordPress) knew that they might need to change around the database schema in future versions of WordPress. WordPress has a simple equality check to determine if the database version matches the version specified in the files. If these two versions don’t match, WordPress assumes that the database is out of date and needs to be updated.
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Nexcess Announces New WordPress Hosting Platform

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Corey

Nexcess Announces New WordPress Hosting Platform
Ann Arbor, Michigan, November 10, 2011 – Nexcess, a web hosting provider with data center facilities in Dearborn and Southfield, Michigan, has announced the release of a new web hosting platform that is designed specifically for hosting WordPress web sites.

While many web hosting companies tend to carry a very generic focus in their product lineups, Nexcess has spent their 10+ years in the web hosting industry focusing on being very good at providing hosting for just a few scripts.  This is shown very clearly in the company’s relationship with eBay-owned Magento, with which Nexcess maintains a gold level partnership, a title held by only four other companies.  As with Nexcess’ popular Magento MAG-SIP hosting plans (which stands for Secure Isolated Platform), the new WordPress web hosting options (similarly titled WP-OBP, or “WordPress Optimized Blog Platform”), are a unique and isolated web hosting environment that has been specially optimized for the best possible web hosting experience for a WordPress site.
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