In the past few days there has been alot of buzz about SingleHop offering CloudLinux as the first product in our Cascade cloud hosting lineup. So while many computer enthusiast get fascinated when one puts the word “cloud” and the world “linux” together, what does this innovating OS really offer you that is cloud like and linux like at the same time?

For starters, CloudLinux was designed with stability in mind. The promise of cloud hosting, whether it is done in a massive computer-grid scale, or it is done inside your own dedicated server, demands at its core that all VM’s running on it be as stable as possible. That one has astounding scalability is amazing and rewarding, but scalability means nothing without stability. CloudLinux was designed with a key technology called Lightweight Virtual Environment, or LVE. LVE  is simply a kernel level technology that allows you to control resources for group of processes. Such technology allows for application level virtualization, and especially beneficial for multi-tenant environments such as shared hosting. In shared hosting environment such limits make sure that no single site can slow down or take down a server.

In more basic words (not that you need them) LVE allows you to have your cake and eat it too! You can offer a cloud-hosting environment and minutely manage the resources that each environment is using with CloudLinux. Furthermore, it helps you ensure that the system’s performance is evenly distributed, or unevenly distributed as you may design it to be, between environments based on how much they pay or whatever other specifications you choose to apply.

So.. your interested. But, how accessible is CloudLinux to use? Well, with support for multiple control panels CloudLinux is in no way trying to re-invent the wheel. It simply giving you tools and resources to more intelligently and expertly manage your hardware resources in a shared hosting environment. CloudLinux supports the following control panels:

• cPanel
• DirectAdmin
• H-Sphere
• InterworX
• ISPManager
• Parallels Panel (Plesk)

So without much more ado, we are very excited to have CloudLinux as the very first product that is launched under our Cascade cloud hosting system.

Happy Hosting!

This is one of our last installments of MYSQL tips, and we have gotten some good feedback from this series. Database hosting is one of the most important aspects of any complex hosted solution, being able to troubleshoot it correctly can save webmasters much time, and angst!

In MySQL, ALTER TABLE statement allows you to modify an existing table in a number of ways, including adding, deleting, or modifying columns or constraints.  However, it is common to receive a duplicate-key error during alter table.  This is caused one of two ways:  either the new character sets map two keys to the same value, or the table is corrupted.  Either way, run REPAIR TABLE on the table in question.

ALTER TABLE works in the following way:

Create a new table named A-xxx with the requested structural changes.
Copy all rows from the original table to A-xxx.
Rename the original table to B-xxx.
Rename A-xxx to your original table name.
Delete B-xxx.

Because of this, you may also encounter the following Error Code:

Error on rename of ‘./database/name.frm’ to ‘./database/B-xxx.frm’ (Errcode: 17)

This happens when MySQL crashes during an earlier ALTER TABLE operation, and as a result, there is an old table named A-xxx or B-xxx in the directory.  This is an easy fix:  simply go to the MySQL data directory and delete all files that have names beginning with A- or B-, as they were just placeholders from the aborted ALTER TABLE operation (or, you may want to move them elsewhere instead of deleting them).  The default location of the data directory is /var/mysql.

More information is available at: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/alter-table-problems.html.

Happy hosting! And if you have any further questions or comments related to this, fell free to drop us a comment.

The SingleHop Team.

Hello everyone!

Today SingleHop announced a very exciting 5-year and $7.0-million-dollar deal to double the datacenter space of our second computing facility. Since we moved into this location in late May of 2009, we have experienced zero downtime, which is a testament to both the exceptional quality of the facility’s equipment as well as our world-class network engineering team.

While an expansion of this magnitude is exceptional all by itself, the fact that we did it less than 11 months after first opening this facility is truly noteworthy! It was only possible by the exceptional work of each SingleHop team member. You see, in spite of tremendous growth as a company, our employees’ constant dedication to excellence has ensured that our level of service, professionalism, and technological advancement has remained consistent, solid, and growing.  SingleHop is here to stay, and we are looking forward to investing over $20 million more in the next three years to ensure that our products and services remain the best in the industry.

So, apart from the large numbers and corporate excitement, what does SingleHop’s deal mean for you, our customer?

-First of all, it lets you know that SingleHop is financially stable, solid, and focused on maintaining and improving our already legendary facilities and network.

-Second, it assures you that our corporate philosophy on growth is NOT to simply squeeze in as many customers as possible and turn a quick profit by disregarding future investment in technology, speed and equipment. We have grown this fast because we have extremely high standards of quality and reliability, and we know that to continue growing we must continue sustaining and raising the bar of these standards.

-Lastly, it offers all SingleHop customers, regardless of which of our datacenters their dedicated servers are located in, a more powerful network to depend on:  a network that will support more products and services which can foster their own success. In fact, in this new space we will be further developing our upcoming Cascade cloud hosting system, which will revolutionize the possibilities of what dedicated server hosting can do.

Happy Hosting!

Sincerely,

The SingleHop Team

Hello again, a few days ago I published a post explaining two key differences in the new Google Caffeine algorithm change.

Here at SingleHop SEO is extremely important. While most of our dedicated server customers come to us from word-of-mouth, Google still is one of the key drivers of growth. Today I want to walk through some of the ways that webmasters can take advantage of these new changes and optimize their online SEO.

Apart from how Google ranks your page based on speed and age, there are a few other changes to Google’s new system:
-       Google is now faster as a spider, too. GoogleBot can spider more websites more frequently, and thus is able to provide more relevant results for current event queries. This fluidity in results will cause some ruffled feathers in the business world, as newer products may be ranked higher displacing older ones.

Naturally, never missing a beat, the marketing and webmaster teams at SingleHop have been hard at work trying to keep our rankings strong by making changes to our website. We’ve found that there are a number of things that webmasters can do to improve their search engine rankings. So without further ado, here are some of the things you can do to help your website under Google’s new algorithm:
-         Intelligently paralyze your resource URLs. By this, I mean pull all resources (images, CSS files, javascript, etc.) from their own hostnames. Move your images to, for example, images.yourdomain.com, and your CSS files to css.yourdomain.com. By using separate hostnames, you enable your browser to make additional simultaneous connections, increasing the speed at which your website is downloaded. However, be careful when doing this. Any javascript files that are loaded in your header tags need to be downloaded from your primary hostname, the same one your index file is in. That is because most web browsers will not start to render the website until they have executed
-         Minimize your CSS and JS. Do it for your HTML if possible. This will reduce the overall file size that you are sending and that will increase the speed at which your site is downloaded.
-         Avoid using duplicate URLs to pull the same content. If you downloaded an image from www.yoursite.com/blah.gif <http://www.yoursite.com/blah.gif> don’t call the same image later as yoursite.com/blah.gif <http://www.yoursite.com/blah.gif>  too… This will cause two duplicate requests when the browser has already downloaded it.
-         Enable mod_gzip or mod_decompress on your web server to further compress your files.
-         Enable caching on your web server as well as properly setting “last modified” tags and making them accessible to search engines via HTTP headers.
-         Use a CDN to host large images and cache them geographically. There are many inexpensive CDN options out there. If your site is graphic intensive, this will help.
So, I’m not the world most experienced SEO guy and I don’t understand all the details like some might, but from what I can tell; Google’s latest update offers a breath of enhancements for the end-user and some new challenges for businesses. A business now has to have a better optimized site (in terms of performance) than they did before. Rankings are no longer based on content and link structure alone, but also the longevity of the enterprise and domain name. Finally, the quality of content becomes much more important and keeping content up-to-date with regular news becomes more and more critical to ones rankings. PageRank is still largely a very-well kept secret, but with every update Google does shed some light on the changes made, and thus how it worked before.

Thanks for reading and I hope that you found this informative. And if you happen to be looking for world-class database hosting or any other kind of high-end hosting solution, give our sales chat a whirl, we promise it will be worth your while!

There has been a lot of hype in the SEO world surrounding Google’s new Caffeine search algorithm update. In all fairness, every time Google makes a chance, heads turn. It’s not a surprise that “how will this affect my rankings?” is the first question to pop into most webmasters heads the moment an algorithm change is announced by Google. Google’s primary metric, PageRank, is incomprehensibly complex and leaves a lot of webmasters entirely in the dark. A quick peek at the Wikipedia page, where some very smart people tried to reverse-engineer the algorithm, illustrates it deeply: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Google’s most recent update, Caffeine, which is rumored to be in roll-out phases right now, adds several additional layers of entanglement to the algorithm. First, it is rumored that the algorithm now takes into account both the age of a website (how long it has been online) and how quickly the website loads. This is in-line with Google’s mission of improving the overall user experience by recommending websites that load faster and have been around for a while.

What changes has Caffeine brought to the SEO game? Well, with articles on Mashable and Wikipedia being some of the sources of my information two key changes to the SEO game are that:

-         Caffeine increases the speed at which search results are generated by half. For example, a query that would bring 51 million results on the old algorithm would take .25 seconds, under the new algorithm it only takes 0.12 seconds. That’s blazing fast and will surely be appreciated by Google’s users.

-         Blended search results: Google will now include information from a variety of areas including images, news, press releases, etc. alongside traditional website results. Another improvement over the previous system.

So, despite of all these changes I think we can all agree that Google does provide the best search results, and at least part of their quality is attributed to their secrecy and their methodology in ranking sites. They stir things up regularly, but this often serves to boost an ailing business as it may dampen the success of a growing one. However, these changes amount to nothing short of a nightmare for many webmasters, SingleHop’s dedicated server business included.  Anyone who has ever seen a Google search results heat-map (http://tiny.cc/dc2px)  knows how important it is to be ranked well for your primary keywords. Unfortunately, because of the heavy proliferation of search engine optimization, and frequent changes to the way Google measures a sites rank, it is almost impossible to predict what position you will be in. The problem is further exasperated by Google’s secrecy, which, is for good reason. If everyone knew how it worked and exactly what it looked at, it would be easy to manipulate the results. Despite this fact, many good webmasters with good intentions are regularly penalized by Google’s algorithm, especially those who rely on being well ranked for their livelihood and have no other channels for business.

In part two of Google Caffeine, I will go into some of the things that webmasters can do to take advantage of Google’s recent changes.

Thanks!

More performance! When it comes to Mysql database hosting the issue of more speed and performance is always paramount. So,  as part of our series on database hosting issues we want to provide you  some tips for understanding the query cache and optimizing it based on your usage for the best database performance.

The query cache operates independently of storage engine type, and serves to store the complete results sets of your queries.  It’s periodically flushed:  if any of the tables in a given result set is changed, the entire cached result set is thrown out.  The default size is only 16 MB, which is not very large.  The query cache is also bound by another parameter, the maximum query result set size, which limits the results stored in the cache by size.

But is the query cache useful to you and your MySQL performance?  The answer is pretty intuitive:  if your data is static and doesn’t change often, then the query cache is a helpful tool; query results can be drawn correctly from the cache.  However, if your data is constantly being updated, and thus the query cache constantly flushed, it’s hindering performance—MySQL will be spending a lot of time checking the query cache and invalidating all the cached queries.  Your SELECT queries could be noticeably slowed.  In this case, assigning memory to the query cache would be a waste of resources.

MySQL offers two important statistics about the use of the query cache feature:

1.)  If all the queries you are performing are simple (such as selecting a row from a table with one row), but still differ so that the queries cannot be cached, the overhead for having the query cache active is 13%. This could be regarded as the worst case scenario. In real life, queries tend to be much more complicated, so the overhead normally is significantly lower.

2.)  Searches for a single row in a single-row table are 238% faster with the query cache than without it. This can be regarded as close to the minimum speedup to be expected for a query that is cached.

Is the query cache helping or hindering your database performance?  If it’s getting flushed out all the time by frequent INSERT and UPDATE statements, then probably hindering.  It would be more useful to assign the memory elsewhere.  If you decide that the query cache isn’t useful for your MySQL database, it’s simple to fix.  Edit your my.cnf configuration file and set the following values:

query_cache_size=0

query_cache_type=0

Happy hosting and if you are ever looking for high-performance database hosting, thats one of SingleHop’s best areas of expertise.

Hey guys, I’m Jim Schultz. I’m new to SingleHop as of this past March. I’m working in Data Center Operations as a technician. I like to think that I have a good amount of experience in the industry. I started up my own shared hosting firm in 2006 that is still running strong. I have a good amount of an IT associates degree completed, and am anxiously awaiting graduating next year with my bachelors of Information Science and IT.

Other than my shared hosting firm and working with dedicated servers here at SingleHop, I have done a lot of work at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. I have worked (and still do) as a systems administrator, teaching assistant, technician, and the head of data administration for a department on campus.

I know there is a raging debate on Windows vs. Linux (not to mention Mac!) but as for me, I’m more of a Microsoft guy with a fair amount of experience administering Linux based machines. I have worked with a lot of various enterprise products, such as Symantec Ghost, BackupExec, VMWare, Hyperion, cPanel, etc. I also do some web development in my free time and am familiar with the Adobe suite; I also am fluent in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL/Oracle, PHP, and ColdFusion.
When I’m not working, I like to crack open a book or research and play with new technologies. I’m excited to graduate next year and start graduate school.

Regardless of your opinion of Apple’s new iPad device, you must accept that Apple has gone out on the limb and created a unique device that redefines, or more accurately, blurs the line between mobile and desktop computing.

We believe that verdict on the iPad’s success is still unclear, however, Apple’s focus on bleeding-edge innovation and creativity is something that we deeply admire and respect. After all SingleHop has continually redefined what dedicated server customers should expect from their hosting company. We began by offering our customers the most advanced server management control panel which we call LEAP. We then added mobile options such that server management could be done anywhere, anytime with LEAP mobile. We continued our streak by adding revolutionary offerings to LEAP such as SnapShield, an enterprise class on-demand firewall, and Ksplice Uptrack, a powerful software that enables rebootless kernes and OS updates on your dedicated servers.

So when we first learned of the iPad our office had much heated discussions on the merits of the machine, however, always looking for ways to redefine how dedicated servers are used, we knew that releasing a version of LEAP for the iPad was a must. So today, alongside the release of the Apple iPad, we proudly announce that if you happen to have the newest device from Cupertino you can have full control over your server with LEAP iPad!

Our LEAPmobile system has been designed so you can control your server through any mobile device such as the Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone and today the iPad.

To use LEAP iPad, direct your newest device to SingleHop.mobi

Enjoy!

Wow Spring is finally here in the windy city and the frigid wind has turned into a stellar cool breeze.  The office doors are open and circulating cool air in and out of the entire office.  But there are more things flying out the door aside from the wind, for example we had a stellar sales in the last month.  Dedicated servers were flying out of Super Micro’s doors and into our Dupont Data Center.  This in addition to our reseller program has kept all of us Account Executives on our toes keeping up with the demand and bringing on some spectacular new clients.

Some bonus and perks from all of this new business is that we have all new servers of your favorite Xeons fully stocked and ready to be customized to your order specifications.  In addition we have recently partnered with R1 Soft!!!  So if you want a really awesome secure management feature, now is the time to jump on board and add the free backup R1Soft service to your solution. Most companies usually charge around $25 and up for this stellar software, we are giving it out for free, you only pay for the cost of the backup space you use.

Why am I so excited about the R1Soft backup system? Well, the system is rock-solid reliable and uses a minimal amount of space by recording the changes that occur in the data, not the entire data-set over and over. So if you only use 3GB of backup, you would spend $4.50 per month for stress-free and trouble-free reliability without even having to pay for the industrial-grade R1Soft Backup software, it is FREE!

So yes, great and amazing changes are coming to Singlehop.com and we are looking to add more perks to our reseller program and expand our services into SingleHop’s unique cloud computing platform, which we are calling Cascade, soon.  For more information and details message your Account Executive, and let the hot summer sales begin.