When we launched our Cloud Infrastructure back in April 2008, one of our core requirements was to not only provide Linux distributions, but also Windows Servers in the cloud. We offered Windows Server 2003 immediately and a few months later added Windows Server 2008 to the mix.
We continue to provide Windows Servers in the cloud license-free meaning that you do not pay an additional surcharge on top of your cloud infrastructure costs. The only exceptions to this are for Windows Servers that have Microsoft SQL Server included.
It’s important to note that there is no longer an 8-core limitation on cloud servers. We now provide the same core allocations as we do with our Linux cloud servers, specifically:
XX-Large Cloud Servers with 16 GB RAM now come with 16-cores
XXX-Large Cloud Servers with 24 GB RAM now come with 24-cores
Security studies strongly demonstrate that most systems will be attacked within 5 hours after becoming publicly accessible—in some cases, in less than 2 hours. The sources of the attacks are often unsuspecting users whose systems have been compromised by malware and are in turn being used to attack and infect other systems. The majority of attacks target two common threats:
A combination of commonly used system accounts (e.g., the root account) with weak, dictionary-based passwords
Systems that are missing critical or high-security vulnerabilities
Solution
This article provides GoGrid’s security recommendations for Cloud Servers running Linux. Perform these 4 steps in sequential order immediately after provisioning new GoGrid Cloud Servers to maintain the security (confidentiality + integrity + availability) of your system. (more…) «Security Basics: 4 Steps to Tighten up Linux Security»
In this blog post, I’m going to discuss disaster recovery. After superstorm Sandy on the East Coast, there were people without power weeks after the storm. Data centers were affected by the storm as well. And although GoGrid’s East Coast data center didn’t experience an outage, some providers did. So it is timely to consider geographically redundant solutions rather than wait for the next superstorm.
Geographic Redundancy
There are three basic strategies you can implement today on GoGrid to make your application better able to recover from a data center outage: cold standby, warm standby, and full geographic-redundancy with multiple active data centers. Let’s start off with a definition:
Redundancy: (noun) the ability of an application or system to resist the failure of one or more constituent parts, or recover quickly from such failure.
Systems administration and IT management boils down to that proverbial 3:00am phone call. Your application is down. How do you respond? Having the proper plan and appropriate recovery assets in place is the key to surviving this all-too-real scenario. How current are your backups? Do you have standby servers already in place? If not, how quickly can you bring new ones online?
It’s pretty standard to have offsite backups. If the offsite backups are in a secondary data center, they can be used to springboard reconstituting your application. GoGrid offers two products that make this process easy to implement: (more…) «You Don’t Need a Superstorm: Disaster Recovery Basics»
Everybody wants to be successful. Although we can often learn from our mistakes, we can also avoid pitfalls and hurdles by doing a little bit of research and even some trial and error in advance. Part of being successful is choosing the right team, the right tools, and the right partner for your project. And when it comes to building out your company’s infrastructure, any solution or partner you choose should be cost-effective and helpful so you absolutely don’t compromise on reliability or performance.
In order to be successful, your infrastructure should be ready for this success. Here are three things to think about when scaling your business and its infrastructure:
Plan for success – Don’t think about just 1 week or 1 month down the road. Look at your historical information. Look at your competitor’s traffic. Is your industry seasonal? Figure out where those peaks and valleys are and plan for them.
Do some testing – Don’t just hypothesize on how well your infrastructure will perform. Do some real world testing. There are many 3rd party software and SaaS solutions that can simulate load on your site. Test some various scenarios with and without extra infrastructure. Test your scaling, manual or automated.
Plan also for failure – What if something doesn’t go as expected, are you ready for that? Part of developing a scalability strategy is also working on those less-than-positive scenarios. Planning for success is fun, but planning for failures is just as important.
How GoGrid can help
For more than 10 years, GoGrid has been delivering compelling infrastructure solutions worldwide. We believe in a consultative approach because we understand that every business needs solutions that fit their unique requirements. When it comes to success, cookie-cutter approaches simply don’t work.
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