High performance Ruby server – Raptor Passenger 5
Raptor (Passenger 5) offers a new performance dimension
If you’re a Ruby developer, it probably didn’t escape your attention that Phusion have announced a radical update to their awesome Ruby application server – Passenger.
Codenamed Raptor, this new server boasts performance up to 4x faster than Unicorn, and even up to 2x faster than Puma!
Worried about the SSL transition from SHA-1 to SHA-2? We’ve got you covered!
Every internet user is familiar with the lock icon which comes with almost every website these days – this means that the website is secured by an SSL certificate which will guarantee that sensitive information sent across the Internet is encrypted.
We all know how vital security is in the online world, but how does the SSL manage to encrypt all of this information so that it won’t get in the wrong hands?
Well, the answer is the hashing algorithm – an important feature of the public-key encryption which is used to encrypt the communication between a server and a browser. It’s really important to keep up with it and use the latest version to make sure your website is protected. Here at Layershift, this is our main purpose: to ensure that your website and business are protected and up to date – so we followed the evolution of the hashing algorithm and pro-actively updated the certificates issued via ourselves to use the latest version.
Read more…
Santa Cloud is coming to town
The final countdown to Christmas has begun and we know that all of you can’t wait to spend some quality time with your family, friends, and loved ones. OK, maybe not all of you, we suspect there’ll be at least a few programmers donning their Halloween masks by mistake:
Q: Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas?
A: Because Oct 31 == Dec 25!
If you don’t understand, don’t worry (and Google it!), but most of all don’t be scared if you see a few confused ghouls roaming the streets over the next few days – these are the good folks that make the Internet world tick so give them a hearty handshake (and maybe a bucket load of sweets: let’s face it you’re going to eat enough sugar these next few days anyway!) on our behalf!
Is it safe to use SSL SNI in production?
Thanks to SNI technology you can now host multiple SSL certificates on a single IP address. But what is SNI? How does it work its magic? What are the disadvantages? Let’s take a closer look and decide together if you should use SNI for your production websites.
Two announcements that shook the Internet
Could the Internet be reaching its last days? Surely it could never happen? Ok, perhaps slightly melodramatic, but a few recent incidents clearly demonstrated the impact IPv4 address shortages are starting to have on everyday Internet operations.
One of the largest outages in Internet history recently shook the online community. Major Internet Services Providers like BT and Virgin in the UK and AT&T, Time Warner and Verizon in the US went down. It appears that these outages were all caused by growth of the BGP routing table – a knock-on impact of the increasing scarcity of available IPv4 addresses.
Our friends over at Microsoft Azure also had their own problems when they ran out of spare IPv4 addresses earlier this year.
Add to that the fact that Google have started giving a ranking boost to secure https/SSL sites, and intends to accelerate the prominence of this factor in future. So Google are at it again – shaping the lives of SEO experts and their clients the world over. This time there’s a catch due to the implications this has for excessive IPv4 address consumption!
PHP 5.6 available on our Cloud VPS platform
Over a year after PHP 5.5 was released, the latest and greatest version 5.6 has just arrived and is already supported on our fully managed Cloud VPS hosting platform.
New features in our PHP 5.6 hosting
Here are some of the highlights of this new version of PHP:
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Constant scalar expressions: you can now provide static scalar expressions, so you can now use static expressions (in the past you could only use static values), e.g. in function arguments, const declarations or property declarations;
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Memory usage using POST has been reduced;
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An interactive debugger called phpdbg has been implemented – you can access it from the command line to debug your code step-by-step;
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Uploads of over 2GB are now accepted (but check you have enough server resources before doing this!);
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php://input is now reusable;
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Many SSL/TLS improvements such as protection against attacks, improved peer verification, fingerprinting SSL certificates, and significant enhancements when using encrypted streams;