Category Archives: Datacenters

What’s inside a Brownrice SmartVPS?

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

 

Quad SSD on RAID-10 hosting with free SSL

Quad SSD hosting

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.

 

 

Announcing VPS Auto-Tune!

Brownrice Internet
Brownrice Internet VPSs

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.

Continue reading Announcing VPS Auto-Tune!

Why trust your data to this small hosting company? (with video)

 

link_256Brownrice outperforms everyone.

We pride ourselves on our ability to match and surpass the big providers in speed, reliability, redundancy and support.  We’ve built our network and our data center from the ground up based on our years of hands-on experience.  We don’t use third-party data centers – only our own.  “We’re waiting for tech support to get back to us on that issue” is not a phrase we’ve ever used.

 

  • The Brownrice network is triple-redundant.  Our primary fiber connections peer in physically redundant locations; Albuquerque, NM and Denver, CO.
  • Our backup connections are via a large-capacity microwave link which uses the exact same technology that high speed financial traders use to beat the market.  This makes our network virtually unbreakable.  See it in action in this video (view the video full screen to see details):

Continue reading Why trust your data to this small hosting company? (with video)

How many visits can a virtual server handle?

 

There are a lot of variables that go into how many hits and visits a virtual server can handle; from how efficient the site’s code is, to how beefy the host server is, to how over-sold the host server is (among other things.)   Regardless, I still thought you might be interested in seeing some real numbers from a popular web site that we host on a virtual server:

Month Total Visitors Visitors per Day Unique Visitors Unique Ratio Pages Hits BW
April 2013 285,598 9,519.9 183,722 64% 3,521,151 31,729,312 1,149.2G

 

In April, on a 4GB RAM virtual server, this site served pages to 285,000 visitors and had 31.7 million hits.

Breaking this down further we might assume that a similarly coded web application could handle about 70,000 visitors on a 1GB RAM ($39.95 per month) virtual server and about 35,000 visitors on a 512MB RAM ($19.95 per month) Brownrice virtual server.

 

What security tools do we use?

Clamav
Clamav

 

What tools does Brownrice use to alert us to a compromised hosted web site or server?  Let me show you:

OSSECA great open source tool that constantly monitors server log files and file systems in real-time. OSSEC’s log monitoring helps with an important part of PCI Compliance, it can be configured to automatically block bad guys from doing bad things, and its a fantastic tool for post-mortem hack analysis.  We have OSSEC installed on all of our hosting servers, virtual servers, and managed customer servers.  It reports back to a mother-ship server so we can keep an eye on things from a central location.

Continue reading What security tools do we use?