Web hosting is often provided as part of a general Internet access plan; there are many free and paid providers offering these services.

A customer needs to evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The webhosting client may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multi-media services for streaming media. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from PHP, Perl, and Python but may also use ASP .Net or Classic ASP. Web hosting packages often include a Web Content Management System, so the end-user doesn’t have to worry about the more technical aspects.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Web hosting service, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Zmanda Recovery Manager is a perl-based utility used to automate backup and recovery of MySQL databases. It is released under the GNU General Public License.

Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL is used by MySQL DBAs to do backup and recovery of live MySQL databases, which can be either local or remote. ZRM uses the most appropriate backup method based on the particular storage engine being used by MySQL, or the particular storage infrastructure being used (e.g. it can use snapshots for instant full backups if LVM, ZFS, NetApp or VxFS are being used).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Zmanda Recovery Manager, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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There are three major types of WCMS: offline processing, online processing, and hybrid systems. These terms describe the deployment pattern for the WCMS in terms of when presentation templates are applied to render Web pages from structured content.

Online processing (called “frying” systems)

These systems apply templates on-demand. HTML may be generated when a user visits the page, or pulled from a cache.

Most open source WCMSs have the capability to support add-ons, which provide extended capabilities including forums, blog, wiki, web-stores, photo-galleries, contact-management, etc. These are often called modules, nodes, widgets, add-ons or extensions. Add-ons may be based on an open-source or paid license model.

Different WCMSs have significantly different feature-sets and target audiences.

Hybrid systems

Some systems combine the offline and online approaches. Some systems write out executable code (e.g. JSP, ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, or Perl pages) rather than just static HTML, so that the CMS itself does not need to be deployed on every Web server. Other hybrids operate in either an online or offline mode.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Web content management system, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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SMX was designed to embed macros in HTML/XML pages. It originally shipped with the Internet Factory’s Commerce Builder software, a relatively popular web server in the early days of the Internet, due to the ease with which a developer could produce an e-commerce website.

Rather than re-implement websites in more popular languages, like Perl or PHP, a small group of SMX fans decided to re-implement the language itself as an Apache module.

A good example of a macro is %counter. This embeds a simple incremental counter on an HTML page. To include the results of a SQL query on a page, you can simply type %sql(,,%col(1)

) in the middle of an XHTML page.

Owing to the high-level nature of the language, SMX can greatly reduce the programming effort required to build dynamic or database-driven web sites.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article SMX (computer language), under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Xuheki is a web-based IMAP client written in Perl. It is completely build upon Ajax technology, i.e. there are no page reloads. Xuheki is released under the GNU General Public License but includes DynarchLIB which is not free software. It uses persistent IMAP connections. The IMAP operations are not handled by the webserver itself, but by a Perl daemon which maintains connection to the IMAP server.

Currently it supports only the Apache webserver and the installation script is written for Debian/Ubuntu based systems. It might nevertheless be easy to install it on every Linux system.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Xuheki, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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MachPanel Provisioning System is designed to accelerate services delivery in cloud, unify business processes and self-manage services. It helps service providers manage their cloud infrastructure, automate business processes, and streamline operations. MachPanel is designed as a complete unified solution for the hosting service providers to provision and bill both traditional and SaaS hosting services. MachPanel has built-in plan wizard to design hosting plans including Shared Hosting (Windows), Microsoft Exchange 2007 & 2010, MS SharePoint Services (including support for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 – Beta), BlackBerry Enterprise Services, Microsoft CRM, MS OCS, Hyper-V, Dedicated Servers, and VPS Servers, Domain Names and SSL certificates.

It includes management control panels for provider and self-service control panel for resellers and end customers.

MachPanel Control Panel for Windows supports Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 operating systems x64/x86 flavors. It manages various versions of Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL, Mail Servers (MailEnable, SmarterMail, Merak Mail Server, etc), Scripting (Microsoft .NET, ColdFusion, PHP, Perl), as well as Microsoft Exchange Server, Moss, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

MachPanel’s latest offering unleashes Exchange 2010 that provides complete automation solution and provisioning system for hosted Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. MachPanel Hosted Exchange Extension (HEE) is tightly integrated with Microsoft Exchange Server to deliver all the features service providers are required to deploy and manage Exchange Hosting. It provides a user-friendly interface that allows hosts to create and manage Mail Domains, Mailboxes, Distribution Lists and Public Folders in an organized manner alongside extending unlimited options for SaaS offerings comprising SharePoint, CRM 4.0 and providing mobile exchange automation to its value added clients.

Other key features of MachPanel include:

*…Billing System: MachPanel offers advanced billing system specifically designed for hosting service providers. It can bill wide range of services including shared hosting and SaaS hosting service.

*…Private label reseller: MachPanel offers support for private label reseller hosting.

*…Help desk: Built-in help desk supporting multiple departments, technicians, role based access, automatic email responders, and e-mail to ticket functionality that converts incoming email into support ticket.

*…Network monitoring: Network monitor for ports monitoring and alerts.

*…Online store: Online store to quickly carry out self-service ordering on service website.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article MachPanel, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Calling a command generally means the invocation of a newly created process. Starting up the process can take up much more time and memory than the actual work of generating the output, especially when the program still needs to be interpreted or compiled.

If the command is called often, the resulting workload can quickly overwhelm the web server.

The overhead involved in interpretation may be reduced by using compiled CGI programs, such as those in C/C++, rather than using Perl or other scripting languages. The overhead involved in process creation can be reduced by solutions such as FastCGI, or by running the application code entirely within the webserver using special extension modules.

Alternatives

Several approaches can be adopted for remedying this:

* The popular Web servers developed their own extension mechanisms that allows third-party software to run inside the web server itself, e.g. Apache modules, Netscape NSAPI plug-ins, IIS ISAPI plug-ins.

* Simple Common Gateway Interface or SCGI

* FastCGI allows a single, long-running process to handle more than one user request while keeping close to the CGI programming model, retaining the simplicity while eliminating much of the overhead CGI incurs by creating a new process for each request. Unlike converting an application to a web server plug-in, FastCGI applications remain independent of the web server.

* Replacement of the architecture for dynamic websites can also be used. This is the approach taken by solutions including Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (a.k.a. Java EE), which runs Java code in a Java servlet container in order to serve dynamic content and optionally static content. This approach replaces the overhead of generating and destroying processes with the much lower overhead of generating and destroying threads, and also exposes the programmer to the library that comes with Java Platform, Standard Edition that the version of Java EE in use is based on.

The optimal configuration for any web application depends on application-specific details, amount of traffic, and complexity of the transaction; these tradeoffs need to be analyzed to determine the best implementation for a given task and time budget.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Common Gateway Interface, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Since its beginnings OTRS has been implemented in the programming language Perl. The web interface is made more user-friendly by using JavaScript (which can be switched off for security reasons). Different functionalities are implemented as reusable backend modules, making it possible to create custom modules to extend the functionality of the OTRS system.

The web interface itself uses its own templating mechanism called DTL (Dynamic Template Language) to facilitate the display of the systems output data.

Originally, OTRS worked only on MySQL databases. Support has since been added for PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server. OTRS may be used on many UNIX or UNIX-like platforms (e.g. Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, etc.) as well as on MS Windows.

The scalability of OTRS systems may be increased by using mod_perl for the Apache Webserver or by separating the database and web server systems, allowing a large number of simultaneously working agents and high volumes of tickets.

In UNIX and UNIX-like environments OTRS works closely with system programs like the mail transfer agent Postfix or the mail filter procmail.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article OTRS, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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cPanel is a Unix based web hosting control panel that provides a graphical interface and automation tools designed to simplify the process of hosting a web site. cPanel utilizes a 3 tier structure that provides functionality for administrators, resellers, and end-user website owners to control the various aspects of website and server administration through a standard web browser.

In addition to the GUI interface cPanel also has command line and API based access that allows third party software vendors, web hosting organizations, and developers to automate standard system administration processes.

cPanel is designed to function either as a dedicated server or virtual private server and it supports CentOS, Red Hat Linux, and FreeBSD.

Application-based support includes Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postgres, Perl, and BIND (DNS). Email based support includes POP3, IMAP, SMTP services. cPanel is commonly accessed on port 2082, with an SSL-secured server operating on port 2083.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article CPanel, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Applications are usually broken into logical chunks called “tiers”, where every tier is assigned a role. Traditional applications consist only of 1 tier, which resides on the client machine, but web applications lend themselves to a n-tiered approach by nature. Though many variations are possible, the most common structure is the three-tiered application. In its most common form, the three tiers are called ”presentation”, ”application” and ”storage”, in this order. A web browser is the first tier (presentation), an engine using some dynamic Web content technology (such as ASP, ASP.NET, CGI, ColdFusion, JSP/Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails or Struts2) is the middle tier (application logic), and a database is the third tier (storage). The web browser sends requests to the middle tier, which services them by making queries and updates against the database and generates a user interface.

For more complex applications, a 3-tier solution may fall short, and you may need a n-tiered approach, where the greatest benefit is breaking the business logic, which resides on the application tier, into a more fine-grained model. Or adding an integration tier that separates the data tier from the rest of tiers by providing an easy-to-use interface to access the data. For example, you would access the client data by calling a “list_clients” function instead of making a SQL query directly against the client table on the database. That allows you to replace the underlying database without changing the other tiers.

There are some who view a web application as a two-tier architecture. This can be a “smart” client that performs all the work and queries a “dumb” server, or a “dumb” client that relies on a “smart” server. The client would handle the presentation tier, the server would have the database (storage tier), and the business logic (application tier) would be on one of them or on both. While this increases the scalability of the applications and separates the display and the database, it still doesn’t allow for true specialization of layers, so most applications will outgrow this model.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Web application, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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