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Web Hosting goes the Grid way

Thanks to Developer who posted on ForumPostersUnion about this topic.

Introducing: Mediatemple.net’s Grid-Server plan

gridserver

Here’s a write-up:
(mt) Media Temple’s Grid-Server is a completely new hosting platform that replaces yesterday’s obsolete shared server technology. We’ve eliminated roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email.

The Grid’s on-demand scalability means you’ll always be ready for intense bursts of traffic and the growing audience resulting from your online success.

All of this power, controlled through our brand new AccountCenter, is available today for a price point unmatched by any competing service.

The Grid-Server service certainly looks attractive, judging by its specifications:

  • 100 GBs of premium storage
  • 1 TB of short-path bandwidth
  • Host up to 100 individual sites
  • 1000 email accounts
  • 64 MB Ruby/Mongrel container

for $20 a month.

Domains are handled in a pretty interesting manner too. At an affordable $5 per year, the domains are registered and associated with your hosting account. Domains can be modified at any time using the online AccountCenter system.

So far it sounds interesting.

The upshot of this is that you can gain access to the distributed computing power typically associated with large scale web services typically associated with the likes of MySpace, Hotmail and Google.

Here’s a comparison between Grid vs. Shared Hosting:

The fundamental architecture of Shared Hosting systems like our previous (ss) Shared-Server 4.0 rely on placing many clients on a single piece of shared server hardware.

Clients hosted on these shared platforms have become accustomed to inconsistent performance commonly known as the “bad neighbor effect”. If other clients sharing your sever begin experiencing large surges of traffic or take other actions to increase the load of the server everyone hosted on that machine instantly experiences degrading performance as the single server becomes overloaded with requests.

The distributed nature of the Grid Server eliminates the “bad neighbor effect” by dynamically spreading increases in load among several servers at once. You’ll never outgrow the Grid Server because new hardware can be added at anytime to increase hosting capacity.

Downtime resulting from lack of redundancy is another common pitfall in shared hosting environments. If the single server where your sites are located experiences a hardware or software failure downtime is inevitable.

The Grid Server has been designed to withstand numerous hardware and software failures without impacting any aspect of your online operations. When a piece of hardware or software fails on a Grid node the other identically configured nodes instantly pick up the workload and continue serving your sites without interruption. This same level of redundancy extends beyond the Grid to include the network running the Grid and power supplied to the data center housing the Grid. Whenever a software, hardware, network or power problem arises you won’t notice a thing because we engineered and continuously test redundancy at all levels of our hosting operations.

Sounds perfect and ideally suitable for Internet Marketing activities where product launches or similar campaigns can generate massive spikes in server resource usage.

That and the capacity to host 100 domains is a definite plus.

It’ll be something that I’ll be watching closely.

2 comments on Web Hosting goes the Grid way

  1. Ridzuan
    October 29, 2006 at 2:58 am (17 years ago)

    Hmmm…isn’t it just one of the RAID configurations for the servers?

  2. Andrew Wee
    October 29, 2006 at 5:06 am (17 years ago)

    Ridz,
    I was looking at the Wiki entry for RAID:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

    As I understand RAID’s more data-storage driven.

    As I read the documentation, I get the understanding that it’s distributed computing across a server farm.

    You can look at the documentation at the Mediatemple website.

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