Alright, so as we all know IPv4 is reaching the point of exhaustion and its time to start getting ready for IPv6. This can be very important for those of us who host web servers as many hosting providers will also be switching to assigning IPv6 addresses or NAT based Private IP’s in the Class A space 10.0.0.0/8 for IPv4 or fc00::/7 for IPv6 (Unique Local Address “ULA”). With that in mind how are you going to host your website on IPv6 address space? There are many web servers available as free Open Source software such as nginx, apache (httpd), and lighthttpd. For the context of this...

What you need to know: 1. Familiar with linux text editors 2. Have a basic understanding of load balancing 3. Familiarity with Apache, MySQL, and rsync 4. The ability to create at least 4 virtual machines What does this set-up provide? This set-up will provide you with some very basic failover at the web servers by using a load balancer. Keep in mind I will not be discussing HA at the load balancer level so you will still have a single point of failure with this guide, as it is only intended to provide some fundamental knowledge on how to set-up a replicated and load balanced pair of web...

Today’s downtime was unfortunately caused by memcached being overloaded. After tracking down the issue I figured that my configuration could use a slight overhaul in order to prevent future issues like today’s. The basic resolution was to simply restart the service which brought the site back online. Simple enough, however I feel that if memcached cant handle the current load then there is probably a reason and it should be revised. Initial Configuration: Database Server - MySQL 5.0.77 - Memcached 1.4.5 Memcached(defaults): 64MB Cache 1024 Max Connections Listening on private IP As you...

This article is a follow up to my original called “Coding for the Cloud” which focused on a broad range of topics and provided a high level overview of how to use the cloud by scaling your application in a linear fashion rather than relying on heavy duty hardware to power your servers. This article is going to focus on figuring out if your application is a good fit for the cloud or if it should remain on a dedicated hardware solution such as Co-location, Managed Dedicated Servers, or Unmanaged Dedicated Server. So.. Is your application a good fit for the cloud? Here are a few questions you...