Articles tagged "Technical"

This weblog brings you news on Greenhost and recent developments in the areas of sustainability, privacy, web hosting, Internet and anything else we think is relevant.

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New release cycle PHP

As you might know, every year a new PHP-version is released. This year that was PHP 8.3. We try to offer this new version on our hosting platform as soon as a stable release is available.

Together with the adding of a new version, each year support for an older version was dropped. PHP developers no longer supported the older versions and, as a result, we could no longer securely offer these versions. This is why we removed these older PHP-versions for our customers at that point. This has resulted in problems, such as websites that were no longer functioning correctly, but in the trade-off...

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Get your Greenhost VPS prepared for upgrading to Debian 12 / Ubuntu 22.04

Planning to upgrade your Greenhost VPS? Great! Keeping a VPS's operating system up to date is important to make sure it keeps running smoothly and safely. OS updates bring new features, as well as security improvements, bug fixes, and resource-saving optimisations.

The latest versions of Debian and Ubuntu made a significant change in how some system files are stored. In some situations, you will need to do a quick and simple intervention before upgrading to Debian 12 Bookworm, releasing today (June 6th, 2023), or Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, as the upgrade will not work out of the box on a...

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Reason for Outage 26 August 2021

Incident summary

During routine maintenance, the movement of a network cable brought to light a dormant issue in one networking component, resulting in a degraded connection. Later, while trying to fix this issue, an unrelated network cable was accidentally disconnected for a few seconds. As our infrastructure is built redundantly, both incidents should have had no impact. However, a software malfunction prevented another connection to take over on both system. This put them into an unstable state that resulted in a partial unavailability of our services between 15:20 and 19:45 CEST.

Resolution...

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Greenhost VPSs now support cloud-init

It is now possible to use cloud-init with our VPS's. Cloud-init scripts define what needs to be done immediately after a VPS is started for the first time. These files can be used to automate the setup of a VPS. This can range from small tasks — like configuring the machine or adding more users — to more complex tasks like installing software.

Cloud-init is a technology that is supported by many cloud providers. In addition to cloud-init scripts that you might find anywhere on the internet, Greenhost offers a repository with scripts that you can use to automate certain steps in setting up...

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Reason for Outage 12 February 2018

What follows is a relatively detailed and technical description of the reasons for the outage. Because we understand not everyone wants or understands this much detail we added a simpler and shorter summary of the problem:

There was a problem with the devices (switches) that regulate the (redundant) internet (network) connections to our data centre. In trying to solve this isolated problem unfortunately a feedback loop occurred that clogged the multiple connections.

We have multiple connections going to the data centre to prevent losing access to our machines, however this issue managed to...

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Time line update severe CPU Intel bugs

As you may have read or heard, the Register announced several severe security problems with Intel processors, which are affecting nearly all computers with modern Intel processors (link below). This means an emergency maintenance window is scheduled from tomorrow onwards (January 4th), which can lead to downtime for your website or Virtual Private Server(s) outside the normal maintenance window. Please see below for more details.

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To cache or not to cache, that's the query

Everyone has had the experience, staring at a browser and wondering why a particular website was taking such a long time to load. What makes websites slow can depend on several factors. Is the code efficient? Is the webserver efficient? How efficient is the storage? As a hosting provider mindful of sustainability, we are always trying to improve performance on our side, while also keeping redundancy in place as much as possible. Recently, we noticed one of our SQL servers was getting slower over time for no apparent reason, so we dug a little deeper to see how we could improve its performance.

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Ceph and SSD: our new storage platform is ready.

We are proud to present our improved and more sustainable storage platform made with SSD drives and Ceph. As of today hosting at Greenhost will be faster, more resilient and scalable without downtime. It is the best new digital home for your websites, apps and projects.

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Multi-queue network interfaces with SMP on Linux

Building a router with Linux is a viable alternative to commercial products in many applications. In this article, we explore the process of optimising Linux for the best packet-forwarding performance by exploiting symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and Ethernet interfaces with multiple queues. We take advantage of the Linux kernel features known as Receive Packet Steering (RPS), Transmit Packet Steering (XPS), and IRQ affinity.

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