Below is the continuation of the previous article: Frequently Used Terms in Web Hosting Industry : Part 1

MS SQL
It is a database management system which is a Microsoft product. MS SQL databases are offered only with Windows Web Hosting packages.

MySQL
MySQL is a database server.It is most commonly used with PHP.MySQL can be availed with Linux Web Hosting packages as well as Windows Hosting packages.

Perl
Perl is preferred and renowned scripting or programming language.It is considered to be one of the most powerful languages used for scripting. It is most commonly used for CGI scripts. With Perl building and testing of programs get simplified.

PHP
PHP is an Open source, server side HTML embedded scripting language that is typically used for creating dynamic web pages. Since it is released under Open source GNU, it is freely downloadable. Web masters prefer to use it on Linux/Unix Servers.

POP3: Post Office Protocol
It is a type of protocol that  is used for receiving E-mails. When using an E-mail client to retrieve email messages, the client communicates with the mail server via POP3.

Primary DNS : Primary Domain Name Server
It is the Primary domain name server for the customer domains. These are the DNS IP numbers often preceeded as ns1.domain.com and ns2.domain.com.

Root Server
Its a machine thats loaded with softwares and data that is required to locate the name servers which contain authoritative data for the top level domains.

SMTP : Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
This is main protocol that is used to send  and receive e-mails over the Internet.

SSL : Secure Socket Layer
It is a protocol designed to enable encrypted and authenticated communications across the World Wide Web.SSL is usually used for secure communication between web browser and the servers. The URL that starts with “https” indicates that the website is secured with SSL.SSL Certificates are installed on the domains of websites that involve online transactions.

TCP/IP
TCP/IP is a protocol that defines the Internet. It indicates how data can be transmitted between hosts. It is most widely used standard of communication. This set of communication protocols to connect to host servers over the Internet.

Telnet
It is a program that is used to login from and Internet site to the other. It is actually a protocol used to access machines placed at remote remote locations. You can connect to any server over the Internet that has telnet server.

TLD : Top Level Domains
It is the suffix of the domain name for example .co., .org , .gov, .net etc. It is the highest level in the hierarchy of doman extensions.

Tomcat
Tomcat is a Java based web server software created to run Java Server Pages (JSP) in the web applications.

Unix
Unix is an operating system that is used on business class computers often known as servers. It is a similar operating system to DOS and MacOS. It is one of the most common operating systems used on servers.

Virtual Server
A virtual server is nothing but a web server that shares its resources with multiple users hosted on a single physical server. In this, users get to experience dedicated server like environment.You are provided with complete admin access of the server.As a matter of fact, a VPS Hosting package is one of the most preferred type of web hosting solution.

Web Server
A web server is nothing but a computer that delivers web pages.It is important that the server is connected to the World Wide Web inorder to deliver webpages upon request.

Web Site Traffic
Website traffic refers to the volume of visitors visiting a website. The tool that measures the traffic is referred as the website traffic reporting tool.

XML : eXtensible Markup Language.
XML is a programming language which allows designers to create their own tags to indicate specific information. W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is a widely used standard which facilitates the interchange of data across computer applications. It is similar to the language used for Web pages HTML.

Bookmark To:

Cluster is usually useful to reduce the load on a particular server.

Basically, clustering can be defined as the use of more than one computer/ server that can work together. In this type of architecture, multiple servers are liked to one another and has the capability of handling workloads. It helps to offer continued working and offer 100% uptime. All the machines in a cluster are involved in the operations at any given point of time. The cluster of servers offer fault tolerance. It is also termed as Load Balancing.

There are two types of clustering architectures offered by Web Hosting services providers.

A) Failover Cluster Server:

Multiple servers are involved in Failover Cluster. Failover clustering is different from Load Balancing servers. The term itself gives a little hint of what it is. Servers are placed in a cluster to offer high availability, though there is an hardware or software failure. If a hardware or software fails, a counter action is taken by the cluster itself and the resources are fetched from other servers to continue with the operations. There is a constant monitoring always active in the cluster to monitor the resources. A practical failover of software as well as hardware including the current status of applications can be achieved by fault tolerant fail over cluster.

Below is a pictoral description of Failover Cluster Server.

B) Web Server Load Balancing:

The basic intention of a load balancing architecture is to distribute the load among the servers in the cluster. A cluster can have more than one servers. You can keep adding servers to the cluster. These servers are set up in such a way that the traffic is distributed among all the servers. Its due to such an architecture that the network load gets re-distributed and is not focused on a single server. This helps in offering better reliability and gaining much improved performance.

There are common set of hardware that is required which is two server nodes in the cluster. Both the servers are connected to the network, both having their individual operating systems. Among the nodes, only one node is kept active at a given point of time. This is also termed as the “Active/Passive” solution. The resources of the cluster is utilized by the active server or the node and the data is written onto Shared Disks. Just incase if a node fails, the other node takes its place. To check if all the nodes are working properly, a signal known as ‘Heartbeat’ is sent across the network of the servers. If the active server fails to respond, the passive server gets triggered and starts functioning as an active server. The resources of the cluster are diverted to the passive server which is operating as the main active server.

Below are the Steps to Install a SQL Server in a cluster

It is important that the cluster is operational before you Install a SQL Server into the cluster.

a) You require Windows Server edition with a support to MSCS on every server.

b) One must get assured about every server in the cluster to be connected to the private network.

c) You must set up a different network and mind that you do not connect them to this network, it must only be used for sending the heartbeat signals.

d) You need to create a user account for the service accounts for the cluster to operate under this account in the domain. You also need to add every administrators group of every server.

e) Now you can connect the shared hard disks to the server then shut the servers off and switch on the node number one of the cluster.

f) Now you can install Microsoft Cluster and then configure it through the control panel.

g) Now, you must provide a name to the cluster and assign an IP address with the resources of the Shared Disk.

h) After all the above mentioned steps are followed, now you must turn ON the second node in the cluster and move to the Fist node, only when the second comes online.

This concludes the set-up of the cluster. You can refer the below guidelines to Install SQL server in the cluster.

a) You need to insert the CD SQL Server Enterprize edition, you may or may not have to do the installation manually.

b) Now you can choose the Virtual Server on the on the computer name screen and enter the name that you wish to have the Clustered referred as.

c) You need to now create a service account to run SQL web server that you provide administration rights on each node on the cluster.

d) You can allocate an IP address, Shared Resources and a service account to the SQL Server at the time of installation.

Bookmark To: