Server for mobile feed app (like Instagram, Twitter...)? - mysql

I've made a mobile native app with a feed system like Instagram/Twitter. In development mode I was just running a PHP/MySQL Apache local server, but now I need to publish the app and work with a real server. Which kind of server do I need? I just need to send http requests (JSON), loads of them!
Do I just need a hosting server like 1and1? (http://www.1and1.com/linux-web-hosting?__lf=Static)
But this one, it only has 1GB MySQL databases... not enough
Is there any kind of app/server whatever? Which kind of server does Instagram use?

These days lots of users are moving to the cloud.
Check out Amazon EC2: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
You can setup a micro instance server and it is very cheap to run tests on and get off the ground. Then if you like how it's running, you can simply upgrade to a more powerful server without having to re-install everything.
It also allows you to scale if your application gets really popular by just cloning the server.
Really worth checking out.

Related

Architecture - Code locally (GIT), Database in the Cloud

We are a small team of developer who are looking for the ideal working environment.
Our current setup:
Everyone is developing locally on his machine. Code is managed/shared with git (bitbucket). We have a small mysql server in our local network where we all share the same database throughout the projects. If we want to share something with a client, we have a remote server where we move the code and database to.
Our preferred setup:
Code stays where it is. But we would like to move the SQL databases into the cloud to a remote server which we can access locally.
What we've tried:
Amazon RDS (free tier) which uses the smallest instance. This was horribly slow. Question here is, does it get really fast for a bigger instance? Page loads can't take 5 seconds for only the database requests. What instance do we theoretically need in order to have a really good performance?
Google SQL was honestly also too slow. I actually tested a bigger instance which was a lot better than Amazon but still not useful for our usecase.
Do you know any other services which provide such functionality? (MySQL remotely accessible)
Do you have any suggestions how we maybe can rethink our whole process of developing?

how to configure shared web hosting on ubuntu server?

i am planning to open a shared web hosting company. before opening i am configuring and checking that all things are up and running or not.
i had tried webmin, virtualmin and ajenti as web hosting manager on ubuntu server but i am not satisfied with them. is there any alternative to them which have secure administrator and client side control panel and easier to manager client account and hosts.
i am using apache2 as web server and mysql as database serve.
Thank You
Try ZPanel, it is cross-platform and has a great looking control panel. They also provide an installer which installs Apache, PHP, MySQL, and ZPanel, all pre-configured to run a shared hosting service.
Link
Getting shared hosting right isn't an easy thing to do especially if you want to allow your clients to use scripting languages like PHP. By default, PHP runs under the same userid regardless of which of customer the files belong to. So they will be able to see the files (including config files with database passwords) of the other customers.
There are ways around this problem, but most of them are either inconvenient for the customer or they bring other problems (like having to run the Apache as root).
Besides the shared hosting market is quite full with existing companies which have huge data centers and therefore can offer much more service at lower costs.
So my suggestion would be: Look at new services that you can provide. Docker Hosting or LXC Hosting isn't that common yet and you can better compete there.
If you really want to do simple shared hosting, and are in search of an admin tool: Try ISPCONFIG3

How best to deploy this multi-tier app?

We currently have an application that runs on one dedicated server. I'd like to move it to OpenShift. It has:
A public-facing web app written in PhP
A Java app for administrators running on Wildfly
A Mysql database
A filesystem containing lots of images and documents that must be accessible to both the Java and PhP apps. A third party ftp's a data file to the server every day, and a perl script loads that into the db and the file system.
A perl script occasionally runs ffmpeg to generate videos, reading images from and writing videos to the filesystem.
Is Openshift a good solution for this, or would it be better to use AWS directly instead (for instance because they have dedicated file system components?)
Thanks
Michael Davis
Ottawa
The shared file system will definitely be the biggest issue here. You could get around it by setting up your applications to use Amazon S3 or some other shared Cloud file system though fairly easily.
As for the rest of the application, if I were setting this up I would:
Setup a scaled PHP application, even if you set the scaling to just use 1 gear this will allow you to put the MySQL database on it's own gear, and even choose a different size for it, such as having medium web gears (that run php) and a large gear that runs the MySQL database. This will also allow your wildfly gear to access the database since it will have a FQDN (fully qualified domain name) that any of your applications on your account can reach. However, keep in mind that it will use a non-standard port instead of 3306.
Then you can setup your WildFly server as whatever size you want, but, keep in mind that the MySQL connection variables will not be there, you will have to put them into your java application manually.
As for the perl script, depending on how intensive it is, you could run it on it's own whatever sized gear with some extra storage, or you could co-locate it with either the php or java application as a cron job. You can have it store the files on Amazon S3 and pull them down/upload them as it does the ffmpeg operations on them. Since OpenShift is also hosted on Amazon (In the US-EAST region) these operations should be pretty fast, as long as you also put your S3 bucket in the US-EAST region.
Those are my thoughts, hope it helps. Feel free to ask questions if you have them. You can also visit http://help.openshift.com and under "Contact Us" click on "Submit a request" and make sure you reference this StackOverflow question so I know what you are talking about, you can ask any questions you might have and we can discuss solutions for them.

Moving XAMPP project to real server

I'm a college student and an amateur in web development. I've been working on a query system to query some foxpro database tables for this company I am interning in. I was asked to implement my project in their local server (running on Windows Server 2003) and I am not sure where to begin since this will be my first time working with a real server and I have almost zero knowledge about it.
The project was done with PHP, Javascript, mySQL and JQuery and is developed in XAMPP. It will be accessed by everyone on the office intranet. I need to set up mySQL database for the login as well.
1) Would it be better to do this on IIS or Apache?
2) I am aware that XAMPP is Apache, but if I implement my project on IIS, will there be any difference or will I need to change my codes?
Any advice is greatly appreciated!
The answer to this question is governed by
the tech your project uses.
your need to coexist with the other services on that company W2003 server.
If your project happens to be the first web app to be served from that server, just set up XAMPP, move your files and database to the server, and be done with it.
But it's unlikely. You need to talk to whomever set up the last web app on that server. It's possible to set up a server so some web pages are served by IIS and others by Apache, but then those pages need different port numbers. That will make things more confusing and less convenient for your users.
php/MySQL/odbc works fine on IIS if that's what you need to use. You may have to monkey around with protections and so forth to get it tweaked out. But it will perform just fine.
The take-home lesson for you as you develop this small scale web app is to build things like that to fit the intended production deployment environment. XAMPP is a popular and successful development setup PRECISELY BECAUSE there are approximately Avogadro's Number of $4-per-month Linux-Apache-MySQL-php hosting services in the world that are entirely compatible with it. But that's not your deployment target this time.

ExpressionEngine : git : local development : remote database

To those of you that are trying to be good little developers and version control their ExpressionEngine sites with git, how do you handle your database?
In my limited experience with multiple developers working on one ExpressionEngine site, we've had to all run off of a single MySQL development database running on a remote web server. For those of you that have tried this, it is PAINFULLY slow. Page loads can easily take 5-10 seconds making development extremely difficult. It would be quicker to work off of a remote development server. I am trying to steer away from working off of a remote MySQL server in order to be able to work from anywhere and not depend on Internet connection speed/quality.
Just wondering how others handle their MySQL databases.
Do all of your developers run off of one central database? Have you dealt with slowness issues like we have?
Do you keep your database under version control? How do you handle export/imports among multiple developers and multiple branches?
With one developer I can import/export/commit the database very easily but as soon as you add another developer to the mix, it gets very VERY muddy. Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts on this mammoth topic.
Thanks!
It seems there is a lot of time lost on failing DNS requests, with a remote database.
Start your MySQL server with start mysqld with --skip-name-resolve. (More information on this topic can be found here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/host-cache.html)
Having a remote database still seems to be the best way for us to work on a project with multiple developers.
I almost always use a central database for development. Depending which host you use, the speed difference may not be huge.
Obviously, if you're not making changes to the database, i.e. only doing template development, keeping the database in sync is not as needed, so you could potentially bring up a local copy of the database. You just have to remember to repeat any database changes, if you do end up making some.
As far as version control, I keep a copy of my base EE install's SQL file in my base repository. Other than that I don't usually keep copies of the database in Git, so I don't do a lot of importing/exporting, etc.
Have you looked at the EE Profiler recently? You'll probably notice in the neighborhood of 20-80 queries on your home page depending on it's complexity.
The problem is that, for each query, MySQL must execute a remote request for data, download the response, and then present ExpressionEngine it's data. The 20-80 round trips to the database is what's causing your delay and I don't think there is much you can do about it. When using a remote (outside our network) database, I get the same delay as you.
When MySQL is running on your machine or the production server, it doesn't have the added network requests causing latency in it's requests for data. This is the difference.
As for fixes, all you can do is move to a database hosted on your internal network. We have a Linux machine that mimics our production environment that we use for staging. Since it's on our network, we can use the local IP address in our database.php file. This is much faster.
The problem that we still have is the issue of channels/fields/entries. When a developer is working on a new section, they'll likely need to create a new channel and fields and/or new entries. When we're ready to push that functionality to production, we have to manually make those changes on the production server as there is no way to reliably export them. I am hopeful of this addon though---we'll see.
In my company (4 developers) we each run our own DB locally. But recently I tested Rackspace Cloud Databases (but there are other cloud db providers) for a heavy DB that could become difficult to run on a little laptop. It's relatively less expensive than running our own db server, and it can be setup or deleted in the minute.