Many thanks to Lynn Cadet and the hostingadvice.com team for the excellent article that they wrote about us. View the article here. Lynn hit up our Director of Security, Nathan Kappen, for an interview on our commitment to green practices. The article highlights the issue of energy consumption in the hosting industry and what we do to slash carbon emissions while delivering top-notch hosting services.
Update: All of our Gen7 SmartVPSs now have the option of running PHP 8.2 on any site, at any time.
One-click PHP upgrade instructions are here: https://support.brownrice.com/content/2/283/en/how-do-i-upgrade-my-php-and-mysql-versions.html
At $1 per email account per month we’ve always lost a lot of money on the email hosting side of our business. In fact most hosting businesses of our size long ago abandoned email hosting altogether because it’s so hard to do well and is such a money loser. And nearly all of the huge providers – Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc – simply do not provide phone support for email. Why? When done right there is simply no other hosting service which requires anywhere close to the amount of support, knowledge, and hardware that email hosting requires.
Here are are few of the things that go into hosting email:
Continue reading Email hosting price to increase on June 1st, 2022We’ve decided to add an extra 10GB’s of disk space to all our SmartVPS SSD hosting customer’s plans. So if you have a 10GB SSD disk space server, when you login to your server you’ll see that it actually has 20GB’s disk space.
And that makes for some nice line movement in your performance graphs:
Well, it depends on quite a few things, but let’s start by looking at some server settings and example web applications.
Arguably the two most important settings that govern how much simultaneous traffic a Linux server running the LAMP stack can handle are the Apache MaxClients setting and the MySQL/Mariadb max_connections setting. From here on I’ll refer to both of these settings as your max connection settings. If set too high your web and database software can consume all of a server’s available memory and crash it, which can be very painful. If set too low your web server will slow incoming traffic unnecessarily.
For example, if your application is streamlined and doesn’t use much RAM to render web pages then your max connections settings can be set very high, allowing hundreds of simultaneous users to your site on a small VPS with, say, 2GB RAM. However, a WordPress site with tons of plugins – some poorly coded with non-optimized MySQL queries – can use so much RAM that the max connections settings should be set very low, in order to prevent RAM swapping and server crashes.
Continue reading How many simultaneous connections can a server handle?
What goes into the Brownrice SmartVPS? First off, we use OpenVZ as our virtualization software. OpenVZ container virtualization is by far the best solution for our customers because 1) Its wicked fast and 2) We can configure it so that our custom AutoTune, AutoScale, and Server Management scripts can enter your container seamlessly to monitor and ensure that things are always finely optimized without you having to do anything.
We love all Linux distros but we’ve been running and configuring CentOS since the early 2000’s so we know it really well. So that’s what we use for our container OS’s. CentOS also has a huge user community and is a rock-solid server distribution. It just works. Always.
Inside your container we use the Apache web server and MySQL database server. Both are always monitored and automatically tuned. Our scripts also custom-compile PHP to whichever version you want – which enables us to provide lots of extra goodies inside of PHP for you. And we run both memcached and Redis for you so that your applications can connect to either if you want the caching speed boosts that both offer.
From the server management side we back up the entire container OS every night and keep copies in two data centers (ours and another that is 120 miles away) and keep those backups for 3 months.
And of course we automatically install free SSL certificates for every site that you have on a SmartVPS.
There’s about 1,000 other things we do for these SmartVPS’s to ensure that they are super-fast and easy for you and your developer to work with them, but I won’t bore you with those.
Questions?
Thank you!
~ Oban
Hosting web sites on a 4xSSD Brownrice SmartVPS is so fast it’ll make even the slowest sites rip!
After extensive testing we’ve super-charged our SmartVPS platform so that every new SmartVPS ($7.95 per month, 2GB RAM, 1 CPU core, 10GB 4xSSD disk) comes with the fastest disk IO currently on the hosting market. These SSD’s are powered by LSI RAID cards in a RAID-10 configuration, which means that they are twice as fast as normal SSD disk systems, and four times as reliable.
Keep in mind that our 4xSSD SmartVPSs already come loaded with our revolutionary AutoTune service that constantly monitors 30 performance metrics and fine tunes Apache and MySQL to take advantage of your servers memory, CPU and traffic loads.
And on top of all of this every web site and subdomain that you host with us automatically receives free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, which goes like this: Make site live, wait 20 minutes, get free SSL certificate. No clicks, no email verification, no money.
So contact us and we’ll move your site from its current slow-hosting to a Brownrice SmartVPS. We’re migration specialists and do this for free. Then sit back and enjoy your happy customers and watch your Google rankings climb.
We’ve doubled the amount of RAM our SmartVPS customers now receive. So for just $9.95 you’ll get a managed VPS that can AutoScale, tunes itself, and come with 2GB’s RAM and 40Gb’s of disk space. You can host a lot of sites or handle a lot of traffic with these bad-boys!
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve fully automated our LetsEncrypt SSL installation process for all of our Managed VPS customers.
What does this mean? This means that every Brownrice Managed VPS customer receives UNLIMITED FREE SSL certificates for every web site on any Managed Brownrice VPS. Forever!
And the other great thing about this is that our SSL process is 100% seamless and 100% automated. How seamless and automated you ask?
Repeat above steps 2 through 3 for as many sites and subdomains as you like. Zero additional charges.
No hands SSL!
By the way this SSL certificate will be renewed every three months, automatically, without you touching a thing.
Want to start? Sign up here and we’ll have your VPS up and running in minutes!
(More questions? See our SSL FAQ.)
After a full year in development and testing Brownrice Internet has just released our revolutionary VPS Auto-Tune Service.
What is VPS Auto-Tune and why do you need it?
One of the secrets of hosting companies and systems administrators world-wide is that web and database servers that are left in their default configurations run horribly slow.