Backups have traditionally constituted one of the most wasteful tasks in history of computing. Every day thousands of System Administrators worldwide spend valuable time performing and restoring backups.
While developing Leanservers we experienced the same exact issue. So we thought of creating one of our less known and coolest features: backups.
Behind that naive name a killer feature is hiding:
Before building the production-ready environment that we run today, we had to become virtualization experts. We actually didn’t know back then but I can assure you that knowing virtualization allows you to reduce risks and automate tasks significantly.
Here at Leanservers we have extensive experience with VMware, Xen/Citrix, VirtualBox and OpenVZ; but our favorite beast is undoubtedly OpenVZ.
After having to turn a number of clients down because they all wanted to enjoy our high quality shared hosting in Asia, we thought that it would make lots of sense to have the possibility of providing hosting in the region. After a few weeks of evaluation we think we finally found another good place where we will be deploying more Leanservers.
It was a tough decision because although we found several other places very well suited for Leanservers we had to pick just one. So we finally did.
The new facilities are located in Hong Kong. A very interesting city-state, quoting from Wikipedia:
As one of the world’s leading international financial centres, Hong Kong has a major capitalist service economy characterized by low taxation and free trade, and the currency, Hong Kong dollar, is the eighth most traded currency in the world.[30] The lack of space caused demand for denser constructions, which developed the city to a centre for modern architecture and the world’s most vertical city.[31][32] The dense space also led to a highly developed transportation network with public transport travelling rate exceeding 90 percent,[33] the highest in the world.[34] Hong Kong has numerous high international rankings in various aspects. For instance, its economic freedom, financial and economic competitiveness, quality of life, corruption perception, Human Development Index, etc., are all ranked highly. Citation.
After several months of full dedication we have been able to pull together a major milestone for the Leanservers project.
We engaged a design studio that sat and talked to us; they understood what our product is about and the philosophy of the company. Then they designed.
The results are substantial; the new look and feel is slicker and leaner. Text can be read comfortably and the images fit perfectly. Everything has been thoroughly thought. Nothing is random.
Our new slider provides an overview of our differentiators: affordability, quality, no-contracts and modularity. This slider has been easily implemented thanks to Drupal’s versatility and robustness. It’s a pleasure to develop new features with such an advanced framework.
Two years ago I was hired by a startup company in Singapore as an external consultant to test thoroughly a combination of proposed settings for NGINX. They wanted to release their product having a rock-solid and well performing system. Well, who doesn’t?
Soon after I started with my assignment I was able to understand that NGINX is a web server on steroids. I would say that its main functionality is serving static files via http or https protocols but it has a bunch of other amazing features which make it unique because of the incredible performance that it is able to pull off.
That is the time when I absolutely fell in love with NGINX. Some of the results from my tests showed NGINX consuming several thousand time less memory than the world’s most popular web server to date: Apache.
A few weeks after I realized how beneficial NGINX would be for a web hosting provider where resource utilization is absolutely key. A system that is able to carry thousands of times more load would be just fantastic. It is important to understand as well that this is not just better for the provider; it also is a great advantage for the client. Today’s hosting provider scene is packed with companies that base their offer in quantity, not quality. Keeping similar users per machine ratios as any other traditional hosting should be thousands times faster. So let’s assume that it is only a few times faster since the world is not perfect.
So I began looking for NGINX based shared web hosting providers. But I did not find any. That is the time we started conceptualizing Leanservers.
Today Leanservers is truly a fast and reliable NGINX based web hosting. Just the way we thought it should be. We had an idea and removed the fat.
One of our most most promising creations is Leanservers, an NGINX-based web hosting platform developed completely from scratch on top of best-of-breed open source applications. Detailed feature descriptions can be found on its site and will be covered further on this blog.
Today I would like to focus on the most outstanding features of its Control Panel. Why? Well, it has been specifically developed for its platform so there is nothing superfluous. No fat. Everything is absolutely lean and centered on usability and performance, taking on average 2 seconds to completely render any page.
At the time this post is being written, Leanservers’ Control Panel features the following pages: My Account, My Details, My Usage and My Backups.
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