It’s been a few years since we looked at the shared hosting services we provide. While we haven’t sold or advertised any shared hosting plans for a few years now, we still maintain hundreds of smaller accounts on our PHP 4, 5 and Lasso 6, 7 and 8 servers.

With the release of Lasso 9 with FastCGI support (and through that, suEXEC), we now have something that is really feasible to offer as a shared hosting product. Each user can have their own install of Lasso 9 completely isolated from other users on the system.

While playing around with this, we also discovered that php can run under FastCGI in exactly the same way, providing additional security and isolation for PHP hosting accounts.

Stay tuned for a revitalised, revamped shared hosting offering with all new web based administration features. It’s going to be good.

Experimenting today with LUKS and dm-crypt, setting up whole disk encryption for our Xen VM environment. Interested to see what the overhead is like.

Encrypted disk + VPN + firewall + strict access controls, should make for quite the fortress of a server. Any banks out there looking for a new host?

Edit: first test results are in. Root filesystem encryption is working great. Write performance takes quite a hit though:

encrypted:
write: 39.4 MB/s
read: 113 MB/s

unencrypted:
write: 103 MB/s
read: 112 MB/s