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