One of the best parts about Joomla is that the core CMS is continually updated, retooled and improved, which benefits everyone. At CloudAccess.net, we strive to do the same. We’re always seeking new and innovative ways to improve every aspect of our platform, and that includes offering the best hosting environments possible.

The hosting layer of any online service provider is commonly referred to as “the invisible layer”. Many service providers don’t expose details about what type of equipment they use and many clients don’t know to ask questions about what’s under the hood - what’s powering their product. We use the best equipment available and our invisible layer is now completely visible and transparent. Part of that transparency is keeping our clients informed about platform upgrades and additions.

New Storage Area Network for our Hosting

We recently added several Dell R510 servers to the platform and we’re moving from dedicated machines to virtual dedicated machines. Each machine will be virtualized which means that there will be one more virtual machine per physical box. Each physical box has at least eight SaS 15K disks and additional SSD to speed up database access. Our new system will enable us to offer a storage area network (SAN) for shared hosting clients. The new distributed SAN allows us to save client content on separate disks and on separate servers.

Essentially, data is being copied from one hard drive to another in two different physical locations. In the event that one server experiences a hardware issue, we can migrate customers to a different physical machine which will minimize downtime. All of this helps us create high availability (HA) across multiple nodes.

More Memory for Everyone

All existing customers will also receive memory upgrades as we migrate over to the new platform. We’ll be adding 32GB of DDR3 RAM to each of our machines for a total of 64GB of RAM per machine. This new upgrade will allow us to be creative in how we store MySQL temp data and give clients more PHP horsepower for serving large scale Joomla sites.

More Uptime, Scalability and Availability

Our customers like to know what they’re paying for. They want to know what their application is running on and they care about processing speed, memory and reliable hardware. Joomla is open source software, and we are open about our infrastructure. Our clients have access to every piece of information concerning the physical hardware right down to PHP, Apache, and MySQL settings.