How to – Accelerate your business through cloud technology

17 06, 2024

Optimizing Linux Swappiness: Lessons from Upgrading to RHEL 8

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, How to|

As part of our continual improvement process we have been migrating our RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 and alternatives over the last few years. With version 7 being end of life by 30th of June 2024, the last machine running this version are being swapped for the more recent and actively maintained version 8. We will describe the roll-over of the various systems in some detail and focus on one particular topic that had us scratching our heads for a while.

Migrating always starts with a good plan

First step is to notify the customers that an upgrade to their server is needed.

07 11, 2022

Popular Web Hosting Tools show not to provide a full-native script experience yet

By Jan|Categories: How to|Tags: cpanel, ispconfig, plesk, UniversalAcceptance, utf8|

Web hosting tools enable people and organizations to have a website accessible on the Internet. They rely on web servers, email servers and backend databases to provide the building blocks of a website’s functionality in the digital world. The question is do they provide seamless experience for users using internationalized email or using a new localized top-level domain (TLD)?

Together, the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) and Nexperteam conducted a study to assess to what extend three of the most widely used web hosting tools, cPanel, Plesk, and ISPConfig offer the capacity for customers to build websites and host emails

26 02, 2021

GDPR, Cookie-policy, Whatever

By Jan|Categories: How to, Security|

By default, I try not to rant about things. I try to be as truthful and complete as possible. I try to be informed. I try to give sound advice based on the knowledge I have and be open for alternative idea.

Nevertheless, often whatever you do, you encounter something that is so mind-boggling bend you could just say what need to be said and be done.

Being European-based, GDRP is a hot topic. It is so hot that many opinions have formed and it feels like everyone with a legal background seems to have some solution and some problem that is

12 01, 2021

Performance and where it all can go wrong

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, How to, Security|Tags: performance troubleshooting, web app performance|

Modern web applications come with a complex set of underlying services. When the applications are not performing and the response time to deliver a page is high, the search to track the problem down starts.

In this article, we’ll go through performance on different levels of delivering a web page to the browser and we’ll provide an example of troubleshooting performance issues.

Performance on different levels

Understanding why a web page under-performs is seldom easy. Let’s have a look at what actually happens when things get slow. Understanding the full process of delivering a web

28 12, 2020

Creating happiness with a few lines of code

By Jan|Categories: How to|

We all love making people happy. And happiness sometimes comes with just that little bit of extra help. Recently we had a request for the simplest thing you could possibly imagine. One of our coworkers wanted something that converted a set of lines into an excel file. The import capabilities of excel are virtually limitless. But that doesn’t mean that the tools are always easy to use.

Let’s analyze the problem. So we have a list of lines where every line has to be in a separate excel cell. Good. And when does

03 12, 2020

How to deal with cloud databases and network latency

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, Cloud Migration, How to|Tags: cloud databases, cloud migration|

“We moved our database into the cloud and it was terrible”. Or wasn’t it?

When we started moving a large database into the cloud we drafted a migration scenario to minimize the downtime. Migrating from one type of database to another one is seldom an easy game. Combine this with the fact the there was a lot of data to be shipped and you can understand the raw complexity.

We managed to set up an incremental process that on the first run would take several days, the second run about a day and then

17 11, 2020

NTP Troubleshooting

By Jan|Categories: How to|Tags: infrastructure monitoring|

When it comes to our on-premise cloud infrastructure we are old school. We use a RedHat RHEV visualization stack and a GlusterFS storage stack. It’s a pretty nifty setup and one can hardly call it outdated. It has been up and running for several years now with little problems.

Monitoring the infrastructure and taking care of small errors when they occur will ensure that our infrastructure is resilient and stable.

In this post, we’ll share a few insights into how we troubleshoot an NTP issue which was undercover as a network stack issue.

NTP time service

To make sure that all our machines run

10 11, 2020

Databases and History Maintenance

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, How to|Tags: data auditory, database audit|

Most companies have a large set of structured data. That is why it is important to keep a close eye on the constancy of that data, to make sure you have good backups and the data is always accurate, available and actionable.

One of the most frustrating questions a support engineer faces is “but can you tell us what was there before?” Many people seem to think that structured data also implies that you can tell what the data was at any point in time. As admin wizards, we pull our backups, restore them quickly on a new machine and indicate

06 11, 2020

Monitoring your cloud infrastructure

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, How to|Tags: cloud infrastructure, cloud infrastructure monitoring|

While most cloud providers have a monitoring system in place, we prefer to run our own. The main reason is that if you drill down you want to be able to monitor the services that are relevant to your business. This often means you monitor very specific services or build your own plugins to scan whatever you find important.

What to use

There are many monitoring solutions out there that offer a multitude of plugins and add-ons. There are two aspects to consider. You need a collector and a system to get the information to the collector. Some systems have a server

27 10, 2020

A new perspective on cloud and data backups

By Jan|Categories: Best Practices, How to|Tags: cloud data backup|

Backing up critical business data is essential to ensuring business continuity in case of data breaches, system outages, cybercrime, or natural calamities.

While many service providers offer backup-as-a-service, we will not be talking about moving your personal data into the cloud.

In this paper, we will be focusing on your cloud infrastructure and how you can and must be taking care of backing up relevant data, as much as you would do when you run your own in-house infrastructure.

Noteworthy, the backup strategy differs based on the type of data. But how do we differentiate the data categories? A possible way to determine