Here at Anchor we really love our virtualization. Our virtualization platform of choice, KVM, lets us provide a variety of different VPS products to meet our customers’ requirements. Our KVM hosting platform has evolved considerably over the six years it’s been in operation, and we’re always looking at ways we can improve it. One important […]
We just received a shipment from Dell, it’s our new VPS hardware! Even the once-mighty leviathan is feeling rather humble these days. She’s got a pair of hyperthreaded octo-core Xeons (32 logical cores, rawr!), 384GiB RAM and 15.6TB of bare disk capacity! Team that with a pair of 10Gbps network ports, a pair of 1Gbps […]
We’ve been looking at Ceph recently, it’s basically a fault-tolerant distributed clustered filesystem. If it works, that’s like a nirvana for shared storage: you have many servers, each one pitches in a few disks, and the there’s a filesystem that sits on top that visible to all servers in the cluster. If a disk fails, […]
Good news, everyone! Anchor’s US hosting infrastructure is ready for business. We’re not so brazen/naïve as to think that it’s perfect, but we’re pretty damned confident that it’s ready to go. This is where you come in. Starting in the first week of December, we want to give you a free VPS for three months […]
It’s not really any big secret that we’ve gradually been doing more and more work throughout North America. Nor should it really come as any surprise that we’ve been around doing this web hosting thing for quite a while now and are always looking at ways that we can improve our offerings to our valued […]
At anchor, we loves us some LVM. It makes managing storage a breeze. Now, we’ve got one more reason to love it. Because now we have lvmsync. Like most modern hosting companies, we run a lot of VPSes, and sometimes the chunk of storage they’re on isn’t where it needs to be, so we have […]
I’ve been working in this industry for a while now and naturally spend a lot of time using Linux on a daily basis. This gives lots of exposure to various Linux commands and tools. That said, I am sometimes surprised when I see, often very experienced system administrators, using somewhat convoluted commands to do something […]
An emerging trend nowadays is that a lot of businesses have trouble differentiating themselves from their competitors. At this point they usually need to innovate, so they have a “novel” product to sell, or change the way they do business to make themselves more appealing to customers (of course another option is to start slashing […]
Reducing the memory usage in your VPS/VM can be a great way to free up some resources to handle more requests, users or some other metric of win. By default at Anchor we provision our Red Hat & Cent OS VPS servers with a trim memory usage profile by disabling a lot of unneeded services […]
Knowing the state of your disk IO latency in VMware ESX can help you pre-empt performance & capacity issues before the occur. There are a few guidelines you should keep in mind. These notes are directed towards people using directly attached storage. Write latency should be 0, because you have that fancy battery backed controller […]