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How Solid State Drives (SSDs) effects your business

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As you might know, a website should be fully equipped with many powerful features to turn a visitor into a returning visitor or even a potential customer. It should be user-friendly and offer a good looking interface to visitors. Also recently, being fully responsive for both Mobile and Desktop systems has been turning into a must. However, any of the above will not be taken into account if your website takes a lot of time to load and it will destroy all of your hard work that you have done to create your website.
The studies have shown us that over 60% of people abandon a website after waiting for “3” seconds for that site to load. That clears out the fact that your visitors are not patient, they will abandon your website and get what they want from other websites which they do not need to wait for it to load. So websites performance plays a very important role in getting new visitors and converts them into returning ones. This is where the SSD comes into play.
HDDs have been the primary storage for all of the systems for a long time now, As SSDs provides much higher speed compared to HDDs, The IT professionals named it as the “Best Performance Upgrade Ever”.
HDD is a technology that uses the magnetism to store data on a rotating platter. The floating R/W head regularly spin at 10000 RPM to read and write data, this means that the faster the rotating platter spins, the quicker HDD performs. SSDs (Solid State Drives) are not relying on moving parts. Instead, data is stored in Microchips, They are so much faster, more reliable and not depending on mechanical parts to fetch information.

It’s not just the Speed

SSDs are using less power compared to HDDs as they work only on the electronic level and as there are no mechanical parts, SSDs generates less noise.
SSDs access time is about 35-100 microseconds and it’s a ridiculously high performance compared to 5000-10000 microseconds of HDD. This will ultimately allow you to run programs quicker this performance boost will make users load programs from your server quickly.

Conclusion

Nothing can heal the negative impact that left by an unsatisfied visitor who abandoned your website after waiting for it to load.
We at HugeServer Networks, know that customers need powerful resources to deploy their website and web applications to achieve high performance at an efficient cost. SSDs are available for all our services including Dedicated and Virtual servers which ultimately results in more rapid load time and better performance.

Node.JS 8 Moves is now Long Term Support

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Node.JS 8 is graduated to Long Term Support (LTS) so it can reach the needed stability for enterprise development and deployments. Also, this new lineup for Node.JS 8 will make Node.JS 9 to take place at the “Current” release line.

Node.JS 8 Features

With the LTS release of this popular server-side JavaScript Runtime, the focus is on security and stability and Node.JS foundation will maintain LTS for 18 months, Below are some of the important features of the Node.JS 8.x line:

  • The Google V8 version 6.1 JavaScript engine
  • The NPM 5.0.0 Client
  • Over 20% better performance than the previous Node.JS 6 LTS in typical web applications
  • N-API which is an API for creating native add-ons (Experimental)
  • HTTP/2 (Experimental)
What about Node.JS 9

For Node.JS 9, most changes centered on the removal of APIs and moving the code-base to a completely new error system, this will allow error messages to be changed without being considered as breaking changes. Below are some of the main features of Node.JS 9:

  • Async hooks module that provides an API for registering callbacks to track asynchronous resources within an application
  • The Google V8 version 6.2 JavaScript engine
  • Support for HTTP/2 and N-API which are available for use without a command line flag but are still experimental
Conclusion

With all of this, Node.JS foundation is recommending users of Node.JS 6 and 4 to start testing and migrating to Node.JS 8 so they can get the latest updates to improve security and stability of their JavaScript Web Applications.

Facebook’s HHVM completely switches to Hack instead of PHP

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The next long-term support release of HHVM which will be released in early 2018 is going to be the last version that commits to PHP 5.

Facebook’s Hip-Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM) is a speedy engine for PHP, will not target the most recent major release of PHP (PHP7) and instead will focus on Hack language which is a PHP spinoff.

As trying to support both PHP 7 and Hack would lead the HHVM team to undesirable compromises on both fronts they decided to separate themselves from PHP so they can evolve Hack without having to face all of the oldest and darkest concerns of the PHP’s design.

PHP 7 is representing a substantive departure from PHP 5, it has changed many behaviors which some of them is not backward-compatible, Consequently, HHVM will not aim to target PHP 7 the HHVM development team believes that they have a clear path toward making Hack a fantastic language for web development, untethered from its PHP origins.
Facebook has used HHVM for many years to almost exclusively to run Hack. They said: The Hack language had addressed many of PHP 5’s shortcomings which some of them are fixed by PHP 7 as well and by cutting loose from PHP we are hoping to provide a higher performance experience with HHVM and Hack which can be achieved by creating many features, libraries, and performance opportunities.

Some of the planned improvements of Hack are below:

  • Completing Hack arrays, with array-like data structures that are easier to type-check
  • Eliminating destructors and references
  • Using garbage collection to produce measurable performance improvement.
Conclusion

Hack was born in the PHP ecosystem so Facebook has plans to make HHVM compatible with major PHP tools such as Composer and PHPUnit, but the main goal for Hack is to have its own ecosystem and can act as a core of frameworks.

HugeServer announces it’s new brand – Cyanode.com

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On 1 September, HugeServer announced its new Virtual and Cloud service providing company called Cyanode. It offers cloud hosting plans including virtual private servers (VPS).

Using HugeServer’s infrastructure, experience and technology we aim to target the special segment of the market that has different requirements which are simplicity and affordable services. We didn’t reinvent the wheel, but we have made the life easier for system administrators and developers by creating useful and pre-configured templates such as OpenVPN, WordPress, etc.

Cyanode is simple and flexible and it has been our concern to be since the first day. We highly focus on end-user experience and simplicity of use. Clients can easily choose how many resources do they need and save money. Services can be easily scaled or migrated In the blink of an eye.

Cyanode allows clients to choose between different Linux distributions or our own pre-configured templates.

Visit Cyanode.com

Nginx is going to Launch it’s own Application Platform

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Nginx is one of the most popular Load balancers, reverse proxies, and, web servers which comes in both Commercial and Open-source forms. and it has recently gone beyond the server roots and launches its own Application Platform.

currently that the way developers writing and deploying of applications is changing very quickly, The company announced at Developer Conference in Portland a couple of days ago, that it’s launching the Nginx Application Platform to give developers a one-stop platform for developing or modernizing their applications with DevOps, the cloud, containers and micro services in mind.

As you might guess the core of the Nginx’s new Platform is Nginx Plus, The commercial version of Nginx that adds a good amount of enterprise features to the open-source version. Plus the company is going to add the Nginx Controller and Nginx Unit which provides a central management and control panel for your Applications.

The development team says that the Controller is a bridge between Nginx Plus and the traditional applications that people run on top of it. Nginx Controller will launch in closed beta in October but Unit is already available.

The existing Nginx Web Application Firewall rounds out the platform. Pricing for the full platform remains untold while Controller is still in closed beta.

It’s also odd because the Nginx Unit is going to be open-source while Nginx Controller is a closed-source project.

Intel’s 1 Petabyte Ruler SSD

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intelpetabytessd

Can you place one petabyte of data into a single unit of a rack? Apparently, Intel can.

As the usage of SSDs is growing every day, still a lot of living data on the cloud is stored in the spinning drives, which is available in larger capacities with lower price, Intel is trying to change that with a new form factor for SSDs that could push server capacities into the petabyte range and it’s called the “Ruler” form factor.

Clearly, Intel’s new SSDs in the Ruler form factor is shaped like a ruler. As you know a hard drive (HDD) needs to make room for the spinning platters and other mechanical components which Solid State Drives (SSD) don’t. So Intel built the Ruler SSDs to literally fit in 1 unit server rack!

Intel is being very conservative about offering specifics on capacity and interface but it says that slotting a Ruler SSD in your server rack can get you 1 petabyte of space for engaging a single unit! It’s a very good trade for a single rack, And it sounds better when you thinking to do that with 10TB hard drives would require 4 unit server rack with 100 drive slots!

Ruler SSDs will be available with standard 3D NAND storage or Intel’s new “Optane” memory technology for improved speeds and efficiency.

Conclusion

Intel’s new ruler SSDs can be a significant improvement when it comes to space and power efficiency and Intel hopes that the new SSD form factor can encourage data center operators to upgrade to what is sure to be a more expensive hardware.

Intel has not actually released any pricing or availability details yet, All we know is that the new drives are rolling out in the near future.

Meet The Intel 8th Generation

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What Happened?!

As promised Intel has formally introduced its new family of 8th generation processors on August 21st exactly at the time of the solar eclipse!

What is Intel Actually revealed?

If you are going to buy a new Laptop before the start of 2018 Intel has good news for you! according to the Intel’s official announcement, 4 chips of the 8th generation U-series is gonna be on 80 Laptops that release before the start of 2018. Intel promised that the new chips are 40% faster than the previous generations.
The U-series are the most common chips on the Ultra thin Laptops and light notebooks, but what makes Intel say that they are 40% faster than their equivalent models in the last generation?

As you might know, the last generation U-series has the dual-core architecture, In the 8th gen Intel has doubled the number of cores and introduced the Quad-core chips for U-series. But there are more parameters than just number of the cores, The U-series chips tend to be low-power processors.

The first new chips will be running on a refined version of Intel’s previous generation architecture called the “Kaby Lake”, This tells a part of the story. As you can see in the following picture while there are 2 more cores in the new chips the base clock speed is much lower than the equivalents in the previous generation! For example, the Core i7-7600U started at 2.8GHz while the new i7-8650U can run as low as 1.9GHz, and that makes sense because Intel added 2 cores to a chip with the same thermal design power (TDP) as the last generation, This means that some of the cores will not be running with their potential all the time.

Compare 7th to 8th generation

For now, we can just guess that the new Laptops has better performance at handling multiple tasks at the same time. In the following picture you can see all of the information that officially released from Intel about the 4 new chips:

8thinfo

Coffee Lake Desktop Chips

We don’t have much information about the details of the 8th generation desktop chips code name “Coffee Lake”. Intel will launch its 12-core processor later this month and you can buy it with 1200$, And it will keep releasing 14-core, 16-core, and 18-core processors within the few remaining months of 2017 with the price of 1400$, 1700$, and 2000$. The 8th generation processors will require the Intel’s large “LGA 2066” processor socket so if you are thinking to buy one you may consider buying a new motherboard as well.

Security vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows SMB Server MS17-010 – Critical

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Hello All,

This is a note about the newest security vulnerability in Windows Servers with the access to Internet. This security bug allows the hacker to access your server remotely and install a backdoor on your windows servers. This is why we recommend all of the windows users to update their servers to the latest version and install the patches which are provided by Microsoft Website.

For more information, please go to the following website and read more about this bug.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms17-010.aspx

Regards

How to enable iptables on CentOS 7

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Once you install CentOS 7, you will understand there are many differences between CentOS 6 and 7, but however, some technical and people want to use old programs like “iptables” on CentOS 7. One of the programs which are not common on CentOS 7 is “iptables”. CentOS 7 comes with another firewall installed in it called “firewalld” which is known by any customer.

You are able to disable this new firewall and enable old known iptables on CentOS 7 again.  Here I will show you how to do this.

We have to stop and disable firewalld service.

[root@test-lab ~]# systemctl stop firewalld
[root@test-lab ~]# systemctl mask firewalld

Then we should install iptables again on CentOS 7.

yum install -y iptables iptables-services

Once it is done, we have to enable and start it

systemctl enable iptables
systemctl start iptables

Now you are able to use old known iptables on CentOS 7 again, however, firewalld will give you more ability and better firewall options if you want to go professional.

How to install Apache 2.4 on CentOS 6 or 7

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Today we are going to install the latest version of Apache “Apache 2.4.23” on a new fresh updated CentOS 7. You can use this tutorial for CentOS 6 as well.

Make sure you have already installed following packages on your server.

yum install gcc
yum install make
yum install openssl-devel
yum install apr-devel
yum install apr-util-devel
yum install wget

Then, we will choose the latest version from Apache website. and download it.

An update: If you are using this article on CentOS 7, the APR version on yum won’t work for you, and you should compile the apr, and apr-util from source, so please remove it from your server if you installed it via yum, and try following:

cd /usr/src
wget http://mirror.lax.hugeserver.com/apache/apr/apr-1.5.2.tar.gz
wget http://mirror.lax.hugeserver.com/apache/apr/apr-util-1.5.4.tar.gz
tar xvfz apr-1.5.2.tar.gz
tar xvfz apr-util-1.5.4.tar.gz

cd apr-1.5.2
./configure --bindir=/usr/bin/
make && make install

cd ../apr-util-1.5.4
./configure --bindir=/usr/bin/ --with-apr=/usr/bin/apr-1-config
make && make install

Now you are able to continue with the rest of guide.

http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi#apache24

cd /usr/src
wget http://www-eu.apache.org/dist//httpd/httpd-2.4.23.tar.gz
tar xvfz httpd-2.4.23.tar.gz

Now we will start building Apache from source and install it on our server.

cd httpd-2.4.23
./configure --help

We have to know which module of apache we want to install and include them on the ./configure command. It is really easy, as you only need to know the module name and type it with “–enable-(module-name)”. For example, we want to install apache with SSL module, so we will type “–enable-ssl”

By default, Apache will install all its architecture-independent files in  “/usr/local/apache2”. If you want to change this directory we have to set the –prefix option in ./configure . I will use /etc/httpd/ for this option in this tutorial. But, make sure that you are not overwriting your old configuration if you already have installed apache before. I am also using “–sbindir” option to specify the directory where system administrator executables will be installed. Those are server programs like httpd, apachectl, suexec, etc. which are necessary to run the Apache HTTP Server.

mkdir /etc/httpd/

./configure --prefix=/etc/httpd/ --sbindir=/sbin/ --enable-ssl --enable-so
make
make install

Now we are ready to go, we can start Apache server and go ahead with configurations.

apachectl start

That’s it! should you have any question or problem regarding this post please leave a comment below.