Our Servers
We’ve invested a lot of resources to increase the speed, stability, and reliability of our servers.
For redundancy and speed, we custom build all of our servers with high power Dual Quad Core Intel Xeon processors with 24GB RAM and multi-tiered RAID1.
We also use a custom server configuration that surpasses the majority of shared web hosting providers—before we roll out new a server, we perform over 200 tweaks to the operating system, file system, and control panel.
Plus, we use CloudLinux for our operating system and LiteSpeed for our web server: by combining these premium applications, we’re able to offer speed and reliability you won’t find with traditional web hosting providers.
CloudLinux for a Virtualised Shared Hosting Environment
For increased speed and stability, we use CloudLinux, a premium operating system.
With traditional shared hosting, a number of customers are placed on a server with very few (if any) limitations on the processing power they can use. Without limitations on processing power, a single user can monopolize an entire shared server, resulting in slow load times and decreased stability for other users.
At Evohosting, we use CloudLinux, a premium operating system, which prevents a single user from using more than their fair share of a server’s CPU/RAM.
CloudLinux provides every customer with their own Lightweight Virtual Environment (or LVE)—an LVE allocates a certain amount of CPU/RAM for each hosting account, so no one user can impact the performance of other accounts due to excessive CPU/RAM usage.
LiteSpeed Web Server
For better speed and reliability, we use LiteSpeed, a premium web server application.
Apache, a free web server, is the industry standard for traditional shared web hosting, but it is by no means the fastest web server available. Unfortunately, Apache is easily overloaded, resulting in slow and unstable performance.
At Evohosting, we use LiteSpeed, a premium web server application capable of processing requests up to 6 times faster than Apache. LiteSpeed includes multiple layers of protection you just won’t find with Apache, making LiteSpeed a faster and more robust web server.
By combining LiteSpeed with CloudLinux, we provide every customer with their own Lightweight Virtual Environment and access to a web server that is up to 6 times faster than Apache.
Multi-Tiered RAID1
For increased speed and reliability, our servers run multi-tiered RAID1.
The majority of shared hosting companies set up a server with a single RAID1 or RAID10 array, which means a user’s files, databases, server logs, etc. are on the same RAID array. This configuration can result in slow load times and performance: if someone is searching a database while another user is downloading a file, the server’s hard disks must constantly seek different parts of the drive, as files and databases are stored on the same hard disk.
At Evohosting, our servers run multi-tiered RAID1 (multiple drive mirroring), which means databases, files, operating system, backups, OS/logs, etc. are all stored on different arrays. If someone searches a database while another user downloads a file, then one drive will handle the database query, while another drive will immediately serve the requested file.
Hard disks are the bottleneck of a server: to provide maximum throughput, we ensure all sections of the server are independent of each other. To optimise this further we have implemented RAID1 SSD arrays on the MySQL partition and main server partition on all new servers since mid 2012. This has massively sped up MySQL database access as well as access to necessary system file.
Reading and Writing
For better speed, we mount all hard disks in NOATIME mode.
Traditionally, when a file is read from a hard disk, a ‘last accessed’ time is written to the file so the server knows when a file was last accessed. Writing to a file takes 3 times the resources and time of reading a file, which means a busy webpage can unnecessarily impact the speed and performance of a site and server. While this practice hinders performance and serves no real purpose, most web hosts leave this feature enabled.
At Evohosting, we mount our drives in NOATIME mode, so a file isn’t written to every time it’s read. This practice improves server and site performance, because the file system should be able to handle three times the number of read files as a traditional file system with another hosting company. This simple practice significantly improves speed, yet it hasn’t been embraced by a lot of web hosting providers.
