The Daily Star: A Managed Hosting Case Study

If you are looking for fast Fully Managed Dedicated Servers and a great experience to go along with it, you’ll love our Dedicated Managed Hosting at InMotion Hosting. We are proud to present The Daily Star as a case study on how InMotion can deliver a highly optimized and reliable Dedicated Hosting solution.

The Daily Star is the number one online newspaper in Bangladesh, and their web site receives millions of hits per hour. Their previous hosting company was unable to provide a comprehensive Managed Hosting solution, so they decided to switch to InMotion Hosting.

The Custom Managed Hosting Solution

InMotion Hosting Managed Hosting specialists went through many steps to optimize The Daily Star‘s WordPress site. We employed several proven solutions to create a rock-solid hosting platform built on our Commercial Class Dedicated Servers. We set up two servers- a web server and a database server. Check out the following specifications.

Varnish Caching

Varnish Cache (also known as caching HTTP reverse proxy) is a web application accelerator designed to optimize HTTP requests. Varnish is installed on the front end of the server to cache the Website contents. The performance of Varnish Cache is exceptional. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 – 1000x, depending on your architecture bringing the server load down.

NginX Web Server

Nginx is an Open Source Web Server and a Reverse Proxy Server. HTTP, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP protocols are optimized to run high concurrent processes with low memory usage. Instead of using a process driven server model, Nginx uses an asynchronous event model to handle requests. This allows higher performance under high server loads.

Apache DSO and mod_ruid2

Apache DSO is Dynamic Shared Objects (DSO) is a PHP handler that speeds up the server using opcode caches. The APache module mod_ruid2 is a suexec module for Apache that causes forked Apache processes to be run as a particular user. This allows for PHP to be run in DSO mode without the typical security problems of running PHP as DSO in an environment shared by multiple users.

Alternative PHP Cache (APC)

The PHP PECL module APC is Alternative PHP Cache. This allows the interpretation of PHP scripts to caches opcode. The cache can cache objects like database objects and full page views. Websites will speed up PHP with APC and perform even faster.

Commercial Class #1 for Databases

To optimized the databases for The Daily Star, we set them up on Commercial class Dedicated hosting. The database server uses a Commercial Class #1 server with the following specifications (Server specifications are subject to change).

• Intel® Xeon® E5-2430 Turbo 2.2GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI
• 6-Cores / 12-Threads
• RAM: 16GB
• Storage: 600GB SAS 15K (2 x 600GB)
• RAID-1, 512MB NVCache Controller

Commercial Class #2 for Website

The website is set up on a Commercial Class #2 dedicated server. To reach maximum performance of the website, the files are all stored separate from the database server. This dedicated server has following specifications (Server specifications are subject to change).

• Dual Intel® Xeon® E5-2430 Turbo 2.2GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s
• 12-Cores / 24-Threads
• RAM: 32GB
• Storage: 1200GB SAS 15K (3 x 600GB)
• RAID-5, 512MB NVCache Controller

Managed Dedicated Hosting

The entire server set up was done by our Managed Hosting technicians. Our Managed Hosting support team is capable of providing complete solutions, even for the most high-traffic or problematic server-side situations. Each server can have different levels of support. The Daily Star trusts InMotion Hosting to manage their high performance hosting environment, so why shouldn’t you? Learn More about our Managed Hosting.