The Fubra Blog
CatN.com blog highlights
With the continuous growth of the CatN guide section, and numerous additions to the blog reel, I felt it would be a good time to summarise the highlights of the CatN blog over the last couple of months, just in-case you missed anything!
Benefits of Cloud computing
Published June 30th 2010
Cloud computing can now be considered an established technology, with its adoption by giants like Google.
Storage Improvements
It’s been a very busy bank holiday weekend at Fubra following an intermittent backplane failure on one of our storage arrays. With the help of our storage vendor, Coraid, we’ve managed to stabilise the failing unit as a temporary measure while we move all of the storage to our other array.
This is taking us quite some time however, as it contains hundreds of gigabytes of production storage. We hope to get this process completed later today.
CatN vCluster for free!
CatN is a new hosting service that provides clustered php hosting, while offering levels of control similar to a dedicated hosting solution.
Why clustered hosting?
Clustered hosting has many benefits:
- Load is spread across numerous servers, reducing the reliance one machine, and avoiding bottlenecks.
- Your site will be spread across all parts of vCluster, so if one server goes down, the remaining servers will continue to host your site and keep it live.
- Different processes can be separated. We use a separate layer of servers for serving scripts to static content like images, which enables us to control resource use and guarantee performance of php scripts with dedicated resources.
- The nature of clustered hosting enables us to scale our super computer to meet any demands on capacity instantly. Experience no drops in performance when they receive a visitor spike, we simply add more servers to meet the new demands.
The importance of blogging
I wanted to write a quick blog post the importance of blogging as a company on the web. Fhoke – another local web company – recently wrote a blog directed at their clients on how important it is to make time to blog.
“Updating your site regularly gets you noticed, your competitors and clients may be watching, and when you update something it might get their attention and they’ll come look.”
They also listed a total of 19 tips on how to drive traffic to your blog, including these:
I would like to add one of my own tips to this list that I think is most important when blogging:
Data.gov.uk
I wrote last year about Gordon Brown’s announcement that the UK Government would be releasing a load of data for public consumption. Today the first step in that plan went live. Data.gov.uk is a repository of a whole load of data sources provided by the Government on everything from Council Tax rates through to local NHS dentists.
We here at Fubra have been part of the discussion surrounding the release of the data for the last few months, and are really pleased to see something coming to fruition. While the site is still in beta it really does show promise for those of us who just can’t get our hands on enough data.