Mullenweg went on to say he viewed WordPress.com’s use of Amazon’s S3 storage system “a failure” because it represented a lack of an open source alternative. “When I have to go to the cloud, I consider that a failure. The thing that’s been most exciting to me is how the open source tools have evolved.” The summary, for those who would like to learn from the experience of running one of the most highly trafficked, multi-user blog sites on the internet? Use leased servers rather than investing in your own data center, that way you can keep on the latest and most up to date boxes without having to cover the cost of the perpetual upgrades, management staff for the data center, and infrastructure / backup facilities.

Month to month leasing also keeps open the negotiation options for a large hosting account like WordPress when dealing with service providers, rather than getting locked into a long term contract or HR staffing issue. This makes a lot of sense. For example, I recently looked into opening a data center in India based around Virident Eco Ram servers, 4 at around $5000 each. Add office space in an Indian IT Park ($400-$500 p/month), backup power supply and power synchronizers ($5000), cooling system ($2500), 24 hour sys admin staff ($36-$40,000 p/year), internet backbone connection ($1250-$2000 p/year?), utilities ($100-$150 p/month), etc. and the total quickly adds up. Granted you likely do not need 24 hour sys admin for 4 servers, but how to maintain a data center without on-site security and maintenance? Compare this total cost to what you would receive over a similar time period with leased servers. Easy math.

This is why Mullenweg ended up advising start-ups, small development companies, and media groups not to try to compete with what the major tech companies are doing with web infrastructure. “My challenge to everyone competing with Amazon, Google and Microsoft is to remember that you’re competing with Amazon, Google and Microsoft,” he said. “These are strong technology companies, and if you’re going to compete with them, open source is the only way to do that. Otherwise, you have no leverage.”

What then is the “open source equivalent” of a cloud server, when one of the main aspects to the cloud is “utility banks” of grid servers that can expand and contract around the traffic needs of an individual site? With shared, leased, or dedicated servers you are renting a fixed amount of disk space or a set number of machines. It is the ability to scale to meet the highest peak demand, digg-effect, etc. that the cloud is delivering through mass, corporate data banks. Unless someone develops a “distributed computing” model of sharing cpu resources across a network to freely scale in times of peak traffic, and many “open source” servers joined together to share resources in this way, I don’t see an exact “open source equivalent” to the grid. Maybe it is Bittorrent, LimeWire P2P networks, but the performance there is a lot different from Akamai or RackSpace.

Mullenweg recommended the nginx web server for load balancing:

“nginx has been running for more than four years on many heavily loaded Russian sites including Rambler (RamblerMedia.com).
In March 2007 about 20% of all Russian virtual hosts were served or proxied by nginx.
According to Google Online Security Blog year ago nginx served or proxied about 4% of all Internet virtual hosts.
2 of Alexa US Top100 sites use nginx.
According to Netcraft in December 2008 nginx served or proxied 3.5 millions virtual hosts. And now it is on 3rd place (not counting in-house Google server) and ahead of lighttpd.
According to Netcraft in March 2009 nginx served or proxied 3.06% busiest sites.
According to Netcraft in May 2009 nginx served or proxied 3.25% busiest sites.
Here are some of success stories: FastMail.FM, WordPress.com.”

Source: http://nginx.net/

Optimizing a dedicated server for a high traffic site and “cloud hosting” are very different undertakings. An open source alternative to this aspect of “the cloud” would involve users sharing their CPU cycles with other users around the world or locally on the same network during peak traffic or spinning off virtual clones of the site during overflow to another machine to handle the load. There would seem to be a number of security issues that would arise, and ultimately, somewhere there has to be charity – people giving up their processing power and bandwidth when it is not being used, sharing empty, allocated disk space – entire websites at the end of a torrent, mirrored on different servers. Right now it is basically the SETI Screensaver as a model of the open cloud.

If you have your own data center or dedicated cluster, Apache Hadoop is an open source distributed option: http://hadoop.apache.org/core/

Related: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00193ED1V01Y200905CAC006

Read the full Article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/06/25/mullenweg-open-source-trumps-the-cloud/

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Mullenweg: Biggest WordPress.com Mistake – “Buying Servers”

Use caution when moving to Mosso or the Rackspace Cloud. Everything was great at first, but things went downhill quickly. We started having lots of “No suitable nodes are available to serve your request” errors, which relate to their MySQL servers. Please test thoroughly before using for anything important.

***Warning!***

You may have seen the announcement on twitter (if not then shame on you, you should be following us). WebDevNews has moved to new hosting. As Xavisys Web Development (the company that owns/operates this site) has been growing, we’ve been trying to find just the right company to partner with in order to offer high quality hosting to our clients. Rackspace Cloud Hosting is that company. We tried quite a few ranging from Bluehost to Host Gator to Rackspace. We were not looking for cheap hosting, we were looking for the best hosting we could find for our specific needs. While some were better than others, RackSpace Cloud Hosting was the best.

In order to test out the hosting, we moved a couple sites to the Rackspace Cloud. We didn’t want to move any really big complex sites, but didn’t exactly want to test with my wife’s blog either. Instead, we moved both WebDevNews and Attackr. Both are WordPress (database driven) sites, and combined they average about 650 pageviews a day. While it’s not a lot of traffic, we thought it would give us a good idea of how Rackspace Cloud Hosting would perform.

We hit a few snags along the way. The architecture of the Rackspace Cloud caused WP-Super-Cache (a popular WordPress plugin) to fail. Believe it or not, I was pretty happy about that. See, sometimes you go months without any problems on a host and by the time you have a problem you’re already pretty committed to using them (all your sites are there, etc). The truth is, you will eventually have problems, and I wanted to see how they handled it. I contacted them via the live support chat link in my admin section and got a person within seconds (this seems to be pretty average there). A ticket was filed and they went to work on it. I worked with them, testing, allowing them to modify my .htaccess, etc. As it turned out, there were actually a couple problems. The first was a problem with the rewrite rules and the second was a problem with cleaning up the files. Both are now fixed, and the technicians really went above and beyond in order to fix the problem. I even got calls from them with updates!

While the two sites aren’t huge, they aren’t small either. According to the statistics I could host roughly 18 similar sites for the base rate of $100/month before I would need to start paying overages. Considering the network they offer and the quality of their service, that’s an amazing price!

Sounds like it’s all roses right? Well, there are some drawbacks. For one, they don’t offer Java/Tomcat or ColdFusion. I don’t use those, so that didn’t bother me at all (and they do offer Windows or Linux, PHP, ASP, .Net, Perl, Python, etc). However, I use SSH constantly, and they don’t offer that. I’m adjusting. The best things about SSH is that I could use wget to pull files directly to the server and then uncompress them quickly. For now I’m settling for uploading the file via FTP and uncompressing with their admin panel. Now if they could just find a way to let me use wget!

So in the end, why did we choose them? First and foremost is their service. Of all the companies we tried, Rackspace and Rackspace Cloud (previously called Mosso) had the best service by far. With Rackspace a human answers the phone and immediately puts you through to a knowledgeable technician. With the Rackspace Cloud, you get a recording and have to press 1 to get a technician. While I’d rather have a human answer the phone, at least you can get through to a knowledgeable person in seconds.

Second, they have great reliability. I’ve worked with Rackspace for a while now, and I know their data-centers are extremely reliable. Since their cloud offerings use those same data-centers, they get the same great reliability and connectivity.

Additionally, they scale very easily. With Rackspace, you need to scale in chunks, adding a new server each time. With the Rackspace Cloud we can scale smoothly, which is more cost-effective.

Lastly, they offer some nice little extras. For a little extra per customer per month, they will extend their 24×7 support to my clients. We don’t want to be a hosting company, we just want to be able offer reliable hosting to our clients that need it. Additionally, if you aren’t set up to take recurring payments (or maybe you don’t even accept credit card?!?), they will bill your clients and deposit the money into your account.

If you’re looking for high-quality hosting, either for your sites or to offer to your clients, take a look at Rackspace Cloud Hosting. If you enter the code REF-XAVISYS when you sign up, you’ll get a $25 rebate off your first month!

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Cloud hosting with the Rackspace Cloud