Isn’t it a great feeling when you see new sales orders coming in, after you’ve spent countless hours and dollars on marketing? It’d be awesome if you can convert all of those orders into your actual customers.

However, many web hosts are forced to turn down a few orders because customers request un-supported software or custom server configuration.

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The average web host is often limited by what their web hosting control panel supports. For eg. Percona database (a high performance alternative for MySQL) is not supported in cPanel.

At a time when new technologies come out all the time (eg. HHVM, Node.Js, PHP 7, etc.), web hosts can ill afford to miss sales just because their control panels do not support them.

So, what’s the way out? This is where Platform As A Service (PaaS) technologies can be useful. For a webmaster, a PaaS system behaves just like a web control panel.

The webmaster uploads the site files, and updates the database, and the PaaS system will take care of site availability, updates, performance, and so on as per the subscribed package.

For a hosting owner, an open source PaaS system such as OpenShift Origin offers much more flexibility than a web control panel. The open source community builds new OpenShift add-ons (known as cartridges) as soon as a new technology is available, and the web host can use that to capitalize on a new technology trend.

Today, let’s take a look at how RedHat’s PaaS solution OpenShift Origin differs from traditional hosting systems, and how it can be used for web hosting.

But first, here’s a bare bones overview of OpenShift Origin.

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What is OpenShift Origin?

OpenShift Origin is RedHat’s open source PaaS solution, which is built using Docker light weight container technology, and Google’s Kubernetes orchestration system.

It provides a web interface to create various service containers known as “gears”. For eg., you can make a “small” gear with 1 GB RAM and 10 GB disk. This resource allocation is not hard isolated as in a Xen or KVM systems, meaning, you can oversell the resources.

Services such as “Apache” or “Nginx” or “MySQL” are packaged as something called “cartridges”. Once a customer is allocated a “gear”, they can add the services they want by choosing from a list of cartridges.

Popular apps such as WordPress can be pre-packaged as a group of cartridges and be made available for instant deployment (much like Softaculous in cPanel).

How is OpenShift different from web hosting control panels

1. Free and open source

Control panels use open source tools, but the control panel in itself is not free. OpenShift Origin on the other hand is an upstream open source project from which RedHat derives its “OpenShift Enterprise” features.

So, any feature that comes in the commercial version, first appears in OpenShift Origin.

It is gaining popularity, and there’s significant community contribution to the project. This means that, the features and external add-ons will continue to grow, and you’ll be able to offer the latest technologies in the industry.

Of course, there’s always the chance that some services may not be available in the community right away. But with an awareness of how OpenShift APIs work, it is possible to custom build cartridges, and custom compile apps.

2. Freedom to choose any software

Open source community is known to keep pace with emerging technologies. This means that you’ll be able to offer a new technology as soon as interest and demand develops for it.

For eg. OpenShift supports a fast PHP compiler called HHVM, which is not available in control panels such as Plesk or cPanel.

While the most popular services are likely to be available in the community repository, there might be a few services or apps specific to your market that may be absent. In such cases, you can build a custom cartridge (with a bit of programming knowledge) using OpenShift APIs.

3. Supports account customizations

There’s always a group of webmasters who want greater freedom to manage their web environment. For eg. they’d want shell access, or install a custom version of their software, etc.

OpenShift gives a way to accommodate such customers. Essentially each account is a light weight VPS, well insulated from others. So, you can give your customers full access to do whatever they want, without fear of affecting others.

Yes, it is possible that a spammer can use this freedom to send out millions of spam mails with a basic account. So, this freedom comes with a caveat that strong network level firewalls and/or gateways should be setup to protect IP reputation.

4. Better density than VPS hosting

Docker containers (which is what OpenShift uses) are known to achieve up to 5 times the server density of traditional VPS solutions such as Xen or KVM. This helps you put more customers per server, and thereby deliver app hosting instances almost at the same price as shared hosting.

However, Docker being a container virtualization technology, does not offer a strong resource isolation system like Xen or KVM. This means that high resource usage in one container could affect others.

So, it is important to monitor resource usage and fix performance bottlenecks before it can affect your customers.

5. Easy scalability

In a traditional control panel system such as cPanel or Plesk, the size of an account is limited by the free resources in that server. So, as a customer grows, that account may need to be migrated to a different server causing downtime.

OpenShift is built for scalability across multiple servers. It uses distributed file systems like Ceph to scale up storage, and uses multiple containers to serve just one account.

For eg. if an account cannot handle the traffic coming in, you can add one more “gear” that runs off a different physical server to handle the load. There’s no need for migrations.

The most critical component affecting scalability is the storage system. It is important to build the file systems and storage devices in such a way that new servers can be added to seamlessly extend the storage space of all accounts.

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Winning at web hosting with OpenShift Origin

As with any other business, the leaders often take the lion’s share of the business. It is not that opportunities only go to the leaders – no, opportunities present themselves to everyone equally, but leaders take the initiative to cash in on them.

Right now, web hosting companies have an opportunity to offer a wide range of technologies to support a vibrant web application market. But they are limited by traditional systems that take a long time to implement those technologies.

Systems such as OpenShift Origin makes it possible to tide over these limitations. Of course, as with any new technology, there will be a few growth pains.

Everything may not be available in the community, and some systems may need to be custom configured, but those are not insurmountable. But, the trade off would launch you into a market space which would otherwise be out of reach.

Bobcares helps web hosting companies deliver industry leading hosting features and reliability using tried and tested server architectures. If you’d like to know how to make your server infrastructure and technical support more efficient, we’d be happy to talk to you.