SpeedySparrow

We’re Now CloudFlare Accredited

SpeedySparrow has officially become an official CloudFlare Certified Partner:

As one of the earliest “Beta Testers”, today we officially became a certified partner to the worlds fastest growing content delivery network known as “CloudFlare”. With it’s intuitive approach to it’s design and deployment we can only say we are proud to be partnered with CloudFlare, really bringing a wide scale change to the web hosting industry with more than (10 Billion page views) and when powered by CloudFlare it really has risen to the challenge of “doing what it is designed to do”…

Here is a snap from the companies blog:

We’re ending the week on a high. About an hour ago we crossed 10 billion page views having been powered by CloudFlare over the last 30 days. Those pages were served to about 250 million unique visitors. To put it in perspective, that means more than 13% of worldwide Internet visitors passed through our network at least once in the last month. That’s almost 100 million more unique visitors than Twitter, and more than 3 billion more page views than Wikipedia, over the same period. It’s also a lot more than we were doing just a month ago ourselves. We’re now averaging over 25,000 requests per second. All I can say is: Wow. Great job team!

CloudFlare and there team have really lived up to their expectations, and what can I say I am really proud of what they have produced. We have hundreds of customers that are slowly merging on to the use of the content delivery service slowly but surely people are moving across to the new technology and we have had nothing but praises both in terms of performance and setup. Whoever though that CloudFlare could make the changes through CNAMES so easy?

See how CloudFlare compares to other services:

With there ever growing popularity it has come to see a lot of new and old providers on the market take up the popularity of their services, some providers were a little hesitant at the beginning but have pulled together to give CloudFlare the ultimate challenge of giving them a chance at seeing at what potential the company really has.

I have had the most perfect support by Michelle and her team at CloudFlare over the last 7 months since their official launch of their service and I must say they are one in a million to work with – for 100 million unique visitors over 7 months it has really gone to show that they are really offering something that is expected to change the industry forever.

Sure they may constantly be attacked for their attribution to a unique service, but they surely overcome them with resilience and the power of motivation. You must admit that from their startup till now they have taken on a lot of challeneges, a lot of customer feedback as well as customer interactions.

We also wish to thank CloudFlare for their FREE T-Shirts that they had sent out to our team, we have surely promoted their service and it may of just helped them gain that upper hand at reaching those 100 million hits (you never know, right?).

We are proud to be included in the list of service providers and we wish to thank everyone at CloudFlare not just for their awesome support but their quirkiness as well.

Kudos CloudFlare

SpeedySparrow Partners with OnAPP Cloud.

Dear Members,

Feeling a little empowered to get onto new technology?
SpeedySparrow Pty Ltd is making this all a reality, within the next few weeks we will be launching our newest platforms powered by OnAPP Solutions – A powerful and yet productive management system to utilize in the deployment of our Cloud VPS Systems, these Virtual Systems will enhance you in your websites growth and performance from your typical shared hosting environment. Our Private Cloud Hosting Services will allow you to expand and dream on things you never thought were possible, are we in competition with other providers – the clear answer is yes, during our testing phase and testing with a lot of other services we have found many to oversell, overuse, and overpower their virtual environments which in our eyes is seen as detrimental to the way the services operate.

In one example, we tested a service that is high in profile, highly advanced, has extreme pleasure in pushing as many clients onto one server dedicated to one cloud that has made things a little more detrimental in terms of performance and for hypervisors to constantly have issues. This provider is well liked but we feel is progressing too fast for their own benefits and at the current rate they will continue to see more consumer complaints as well as more side-affects to their constant attribute to packing as many virtual accounts into one powerful unit.

SpeedySparrow has taken the milder approach, packing only 15 servers per any unit to empower the performance that you would expect to see in a dedicated virtual product. OnAPP will empower us on our journey, though, you may ask what is OnAPP and how does it benefit SpeedySparrow, how does it work, can it have side affects and so on! We have listed quite a few FAQ’s below for you to read through before considering choosing SpeedySparrow as your next provider for Virtual Private Systems:

OnAPP Faqs:

So, what exactly is OnAPP?

OnApp is a software tool for hosting providers. It enables hosts, and other service providers, to set up and manage public and private clouds on their existing infrastructure, using commodity hardware. They can then launch cloud-based services to their clients, with easy deployment of virtual machines running different operating systems (and their applications) on the same hardware at the same time; bill per hour for the cloud resources used; and easily scale resources to meet the changing demands of their users and/or customers.

What can hosts do with OnAPP?

With OnApp, hosts can set up private or public clouds in minutes, using libraries of pre-configured, customizable virtual machine templates; host multiple virtual machines with different operating systems in complete isolation from each other; customize virtual machines, resources, templates, users, billing and more, through an intuitive control panel; migrate virtual machines near-instantly to maximize use of server resources, and minimize downtime for users; and scale to match demand and minimize cost: save energy and make best use of available hardware. See how OnApp works for more information.

What are OnAPP templates?

OnApp templates are fully pre-configured operating system images that are used to build virtual machines. Using templates can result in a significant reduction in the installation, configuration and maintenance costs associated with cloud management. You can rapidly provision new virtual machines by using libraries of pre-configured templates, or create your own templates for future deployment of virtual machines.

Can I create my own templates?

Yes. With OnApp you can create your own custom templates from pre-configured Virtual Machines. It’s a simple process: configure a virtual machine as required, back it up, and convert the backup to a template in just a few clicks.

What virtualization technology does OnAPP use?

OnApp is designed to support multi-hypervisor technology. We currently support Xen and KVM. We will introduce Hyper-V and VMware support in the near future, as well as support for OS-based virtualization for VPS services.

What operating systems does OnAPP Support?

The OnApp Control Panel and hypervisor servers run CentOS. For virtual machines running on OnApp, we support a broad range of operating systems: see the list of OnApp templates for details.

Architecture:

OnAPP Architecture?

OnApp is designed to optimize cloud scalability, resilience, ease of use and ease of maintenance. It is a true cloud system with self-healing and automatic failover; multi-hypervisor support; dynamic resource allocation; and multi-layered security.

High Availability, Self-Healing, & Automatic Failover

OnApp features extremely robust failover mechanisms, with intelligent monitoring of cloud services and nodes, and automatic service restoration in case of failure. If a hypervisor fails, OnApp will automatically relocate its virtual machines and reroute application data. OnApp also enables automatic periodic data backup, as well as emergency backup, as part of a disaster recovery system. OnApp controls the physical and virtual routing of SANs, which enables seamless SAN failover management. This ensures system reliability and enterprise-class resilience for your cloud hosting service.

Multi Hyper-Visor Design

OnApp’s multi-hypervisor design enables you to set up and manage clouds based on different virtualization platforms. OnApp currently supports Xen and KVM hypervisors: Hyper-V and VMware support will be added in the future.

Virtual Machines

OnApp enables multiple flavors or 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux virtual machines to be hosted simultaneously. VMs have their own root accounts which can be controlled, configured and managed by their owners, and can be deployed in seconds using OnApp templates.

Layered Management Capabilities

Services and resources can be managed at a high level, or in detail for specific virtual machines. This enables virtual machines to be individually switched on and off, resized, redeployed, migrated and much more. You can offer end users access to these functions , or control them yourself.

Dynamic, Intelligent Resource Management

OnApp deploys virtual machines across available hypervisors intelligently, to maximize hardware utilization. Dynamic resource management enables resources to be allocated to virtual machines instantly.

CIM Firewall

OnApp implements a Customer Isolation Module on hypervisors, in addition to the hypervisor’s own security features. This anti-spoof/anti-sniff firewall ensures you can host thousands of virtual machines in complete isolation.

Third Party Integration: Comprehensive API

The OnApp API provides access to all OnApp functionality, for integration with HostBill, WHMCS, Ubersmith, and other third party applications.
OnAPP has a major improvement boost over many other platforms, this is why SpeedySparrow has taken this wide open approach to partner with OnAPP to bring the most fun and excitement from a word leader is Cloud Hosting Solutions and Performance!

Thank you.

SpeedySparrow Partners with CloudFlare CDN!

Dear Members,

Today SpeedySparrow officially reins it’s partnership with CloudFlare LLC a renound new and innovative Content Delivery Network Provider. To give you more information about CloudFlare’s Service, I have provided some pretty short and sharp information below:

CloudFlare CloudFlare accelerates and protects any website online. On average, a website on CloudFlare:

• Loads 30% faster
• Uses 60% less bandwidth
• Has 65% fewer requests
• And, is way more secure.

Advantages of the CloudFlare system:

• Site Performance Improvement: CloudFlare has proxy servers located throughout the world. Proxy servers are located closer to your visitors, which means they will see page load speed improvements as the cached content is delivered from the closest caching box instead of directly off our server. There is a lot of research that shows that a faster a site, the longer a visitor stays.
• Bot and Threat Protection: CloudFlare uses data from Project Honey Pot and other third party sources, as well as the data from its community, to identify malicious threats online and stop the attacks before they even get to your site. You can see which threats are being stopped through your CloudFlare dashboard here.
• Spam Comments Protection: CloudFlare leverages data from third party resources to reduce the number of spam comments on your site
• Alerting Visitors of Infected Computers: CloudFlare alerts human visitors that have an infected computer that they need to take action to clean up the malware or virus on their machine. The visitor can enter a CAPTCHA to gain access to your site.
• Always Online Mode: In the event that our server is unavailable, visitors should still be able to access your site since CloudFlare serves the visitor a page from its cache.
• Lower CPU Usage: As fewer requests hit our server, this lowers the overall CPU usage of your account.
• New Statistics Stats: CloudFlare’s system keeps statistics on each hit and offers insight into search engine crawlers and threats.

Limitations of the CloudFlare system:

• Currently, requests must be directed to www.$domain instead of $domain.
• CloudFlare may affect internal statistic programs that read directly from Apache logs. (CloudFlare will not affect web-based analytic programs that use JavaScript like Google Analytics.) While your logs will reflect fewer requests to your server and therefore lower load, the experience to your visitors should be unaffected.
• CloudFlare caches static content from your site. While this reduces the load on your server, it means that if you make a change to an existing static file, like an image, there may be a delay before the change appears. While you are updating your site, you can put CloudFlare in ‘Development Mode’ so changes appear immediately.

Who can use CloudFlare:

• CloudFlare is suitable for all websites, including dynamic websites. Signing up takes less than two minutes. If you do not like the service, it takes even less time to un-signup.
• Note: This service is a beta collaboration between CloudFlare and SpeedySparrow. We encourage you to send any bug reports to support@cloudflare.com.

As part of our partnership SpeedySparrow has provided it’s version of CloudFlare’s cPanel Plugin into our services. Simply login to your cPanel account and setup your very own account with CloudFlare, it is absolutely free to get started and all we ask in return is your input to the setup, overall performance, your ideas for improvements and other content you feel might assist us in making the service more enjoyable for you.