LiteSpeed Web Server

Overview: LiteSpeed Web Server is a highly-efficient web server daemon engineered to deliver the maximum performance for today's web 2.0 applications and beyond. MediaLayer is one of the first web hosts to establish a partnership with LiteSpeed, and in doing so, we offer LiteSpeed to all of our application hosting customers. LiteSpeed delivers over 50% better performance for PHP applications, up to 600% for static content, and double the SSL performance. Furthermore, LiteSpeed is fully compatible with Apache configuration, including popular modules such as mod_rewrite.

Key Advantages

Resilience to Denial of Service Attacks: In this day and age, denial of service (DoS) attacks are some of the most popular threats on the web. LiteSpeed offers built-in protection to automatically mitigate such attacks and perform throttling to preserve system resources.

Request Filter: LiteSpeed has developed a module known as Request Filter to offer full compatibility for mod_security rulesets, and does so in a very efficient manner, to reduce impact on performance and resource usage. MediaLayer utilizes the Request Filter feature to protect hosted applications from popular exploitations and vulnerabilities.

Zero Downtime Graceful Restart: LiteSpeed allows MediaLayer to maximize web server uptime by making no interruption to service when restarted - whether that is for a simple configuration change, or a core software update.

PHPSUEXEC Without Bottlenecks: Using the highly optimized LSAPI for PHP, MediaLayer runs phpsuexec on all servers without the typical performance bottleneck it introduces on Apache based systems. This provides an added layer of security by allowing all PHP scripts to run as the username of the account they are on, which negates the need for unsecure file permissions. Furthermore, it is possible to perform automatic upgrades of applications such as WordPress as a result of this as well.

Percona MySQL Server

Overview: Percona Server with XtraDB is a backwards-compatible replacement for MySQL that is much faster and more scalable, easier to monitor and tune, and has features to make operational tasks easier. Percona's releases are based upon recent versions of the MySQL server source code. It is fully compatible with standard MySQL, and simply provides performance benefits to customers within MediaLayer's hosting environment without any drawbacks. Improvements in handling of innoDB based databases provide noticeable benefits for popular applications such as Magento Commerce.

Optimization: MediaLayer consistently evaluates and optimizes MySQL configuration on all servers in order to ensure the best performance by making the most effective use of query caching and other facilities available to the MySQL server.

eAccelerator

Overview: eAccelerator is an open-source PHP accelerator & optimizer. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.

Methodology: eAccelerator stores compiled PHP scripts in shared memory and executes code directly from it. It creates locks only for a short time, while searching for a compiled PHP script in the cache, so one script can be executed simultaneously by several engines. Files that can't fit in shared memory are cached on disk only.

Compatibility: As one of the first web hosts to deploy it, and having used eAccelerator for several years, we hvae found it to have the fewest amount of compatibility issues with common applications. In our unique configuration, we not only run eAccelerator but also Zend Optimizer and ionCube loaders in order to allow virtually all popular encoded scripts to function.

Scalability

CPU/RAM Scaling: With a simple reboot of your cloud server, we are able to scale your resources from 1 core and 2GB RAM all the way to 6 cores and 12GB RAM. The reboot can be scheduled to an off-peak time, and typically only takes about 90 seconds.

Flat-Rate Bandwidth: Above the standard allocations on cloud servers, additional bandwidth is simply billed based on your usage at a flat rate, as described on our Application Intensive page.

Simple Transition: Whether you're moving from a standard application hosting account to a cloud server, or from a cloud server to a dedicated server, we will make the transition as simple as possible. All of our services use the DirectAdmin control panel, which allows for simple migrations between different platforms.

Reliability

Redundant SAN Architecture: Using a custom SAN architecture comprising of enterprise-grade hard disks and an SSD (solid state drive) caching layer, our SAN achieves the highest level of performance and reliability--a rarity in the cloud server market. Many companies cut costs in this area, but we believe it to be crucial to providing a high level of service and therefore our SAN comprises of nothing but the best hardware and is very closely monitored for failure of any component.

Dell Blade Servers: Utilizing Dell Blade server technology as our hardware nodes, we are able to leverage consistent hardware configurations to create a fully fail-safe solution. Should a node fail, your virtual server can be brought up on another node with identical hardware configuration.