Category Archives: Web Hosting

BRI is Fully Green Powered (100% Renewable) — With Receipts

Web Hosting

Yes, really. Our annual energy report adds it up:

Solar + Renewables + RECs = 100% clean-powered websites.

Most web hosts make vague “green” claims. We actually show you the math. Every website we host runs on a mix of our own solar array, renewable grid power, and certified Renewable Energy Certificates — and we’ve got the receipts to prove it.

Clean Power Without the Compromise

You shouldn’t have to choose between fast, secure hosting and being environmentally responsible. Brownrice gives you both: performance-tuned servers, friendly U.S.–based support, and verified 100% clean power.

What Powers Our 100% Green Hosting

Here’s how we keep every site clean-powered:

  • On-site solar generation supplies about one-third of our annual electricity needs.
  • Renewable grid power from Kit Carson Electric/Guzman Energy provides another large share.
  • Certified Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) offset the rest — bringing us to 100% renewable on a net annual basis.

Inside Our Green Datacenter

Our New Mexico facility is designed from the ground up to be efficient and resilient:

  • A huge on-site solar array supplies a third of our annual energy needs.
  • Outside-air cooling keeps servers chill without air conditioners nine months of the year.
  • Triple-redundant fiber, generators and power supplies keep your site fast and online.
  • Clean-agent fire suppression protects equipment and the planet at the same time.

Real Green Hosting You Can Measure

Fast, secure, worry-free hosting that scales with you and keeps the planet a little cleaner. With Brownrice, you get transparent numbers, annual energy reports, and renewable receipts — not marketing fluff.

Show Me the Receipts: How Brownrice Powers 100 % Green Hosting »

How do I clone my website to another site, like a development site?

Programming, Web Development, Web Hosting
The Clone!

It’s easy to clone a website (including its files, database and all settings) from a live site to a development via the Brownrice Dashboard.  Or you can do the opposite and clone a development website and/or database to your live site when you want to move development changes live.  Or you can clone a site to a totally different site!  

Continue reading How do I clone my website to another site, like a development site? →

Proxmox Mail Gateway

Systems Administration, Web Hosting

Proxmox Mail GatewayWe’re converting our first-layer of spam protection from straight spamassassin gateways to Proxmox Mail Gateways and I’ve gotta say, the conversion has been magically easy and results have fantastically pleasing. We use these gateways to pre-scan all incoming email for spam and viruses before passing those emails on to our email customers.

Proxmox Mail Gateway uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam mail. Here is a short list of used filtering methods:

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Email hosting price to increase on June 1st, 2022

Web Hosting

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, 2022 →

A little something extra

Web Hosting

We’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:

How many simultaneous connections can a server handle?

Systems Administration, Web Development, Web Hosting

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’s inside a Brownrice SmartVPS?

Datacenters, Systems Administration, Web Hosting

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

Datacenters, Web Development, Web Hosting

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.