“What industry standard software underlies Hybrid Web Cluster?”

Hybrid Web Cluster is built upon the FreeBSD operating system

We chose FreeBSD as the core operating system for Hybrid Web Cluster for a number of reasons; we benchmarked ZFS, one of the key technologies that the cluster relies upon and found that it performed well on Solaris and FreeBSD, and less well on Linux. Much of the early development work on the cluster was done in Solaris, as this was the first operating system to offer ZFS support. However, when ZFS became available in FreeBSD, the switch away from Solaris was an easy decision to make. FreeBSD is tried-and-trusted in web hosting environments, it’s also much closer to Linux in its commands and directory stucture, to the point where most users will not be aware that what they are using is FreeBSD rather than Linux. This is much more difficult to achieve with Solaris as it has numerous subtle differences to the norm.

Although Hybrid Web Cluster is currently designed to run only on FreeBSD, future ports back to Solaris and forwards to Linux are both possible and likely. Nevertheless, even running on just FreeBSD, Hybrid Web Cluster is able to run pretty much every standard LAMP stack web application.

Hybrid Web Cluster provides a MySQL database server

On top of FreeBSD, Hybrid Web Cluster provides access to the industry standard MySQL database server – each website’s database is transparently load-balanced around the web cluster, you don’t have to worry about where your database is located, the cluster will ensure you can always access it, no matter which cluster node it is located on at any given time, or even as it moves from one node to another.

Hybrid Web Cluster runs the industry standard web server Apache

Websites are served via the standard Apache web server, with important modules like mod_rewrite available and the ability to set custom options via .htaccess files as you would expect. In a similar way to databases, each website is load balanced around the cluster and may move from one node to another at any time. Hybrid Web Cluster takes care of this for you so that it’s completely transparent, and you just see a normal instance of Apache.

Hybrid Web Cluster includes a standard version of PHP with all the bells and whistles enabled

On top of all this rock solid hosting software, Hybrid Web Cluster provides a normal installation of PHP in which scripts are executed as you, so you never experience permissions or security problems again. We ensure that PHP is configured with all the commonly used extensions, so you can just drop your standard LAMP application into the web cluster and it will perform as expected.

If you’d like to run standard LAMP stack applications on a fault-tolerant, highly scalable web cluster that runs equally well on real hardware and cloud server instances, you should try it today.