Hello everyone,

Little Oak hosts a lot of blogs. A lot. We also host a significant number of sites that run on content management systems. Our servers host countless forums, image galleries, and a multitude of shopping carts. We're up to our eyeballs in web software!

One of the reasons Little Oak's such a popular choice for blog, forum, and CMS hosting is that we officially support a wide variety of software. All of the non-commercial software that we support is installable directly through our control panel. Take a look at our Services Page and you'll see that the list is fairly extensive. Clients may build an entire web community directly through their control panel.

It's become sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy: Little Oak gains more WordPress clients and we train our support specialists to support WordPress. Our support of WordPress attracts more WordPress users. Drupal and Joomla users flock to Little Oak so we learn to support Drupal and Joomla, and that in turn attracts even more users. Right now our client base seems to be focused on vBulletin, PunBB, and phpBB forums so we've adapted to support them. Guess what we're seeing as a result: more forum leaders are starting to choose Little Oak.

Part of our commitment to hosting web software is our attention to MySQL. We've made our MySQL servers as robust and fast as possible. Your MySQL database is hosted on a MySQL cluster with RAID10 Intel SSD (Solid State Drives). Solid state drives are extremely fast, and energy efficient so that we maintain our commitment to the green movement. A battery backed up RAID controller ensures that data is never lost.

All of this is wonderful from our point of view. The more the merrier! Welcome bloggers, photographers, entrepreneurs, and community builders. After all, it's users like you that are paving the way to the future of the web! Little Oak is lucky to be a small part of that future.

Questions about Little Oak's cloud hosting have been pouring in ever since I mentioned it in yesterday's blog post. I'd like to address these questions in today's post with help from Brad, our senior systems administrator.

Q. What is cloud hosting?

A. Cloud hosting is a new technology that serves content from multiple servers at once. Little Oak's web servers are configured in a large load-balanced cluster. High traffic on one site does not affect any other site since the load is shared in the cloud. Each client's website is served from a minimum of a dozen web servers at any one time.


Q. Is Little Oak's cloud hosting safe?

A. Yes. Little Oak keeps all private information on secure servers off of the cloud.


Q. Is Little Oak's email on cloud hosting?

A. Little Oak runs a dedicated load-balanced cloud just for email services. The email cloud is kept separate from the web hosting cloud. We do this because email and web servers have very different goals: a web cloud is designed to make content public as quickly as possible, whereas an email cloud is designed to keep content private using tight security practices.


Q. My blog uses a MySQL database. How does Little Oak handle MySQL?

A. Little Oak uses a dedicated MySQL cluster with RAID10 Intel SSD (Solid State Drives) and a battery backed up RAID controller. The cluster uses a minimum of 24gb of ram on dual quad core hyperthreaded Intel Xeon processors.


Q. What's the advantage to me?

A. Minimal downtime, maximum speed and security. Most web hosts run all services (web server, email, MySQL) on a single machine which creates a single point of failure. With cloud hosting there is no single point of failure. If one machine goes offline it has no affect on your account.


Hopefully this answers most of your questions about cloud hosting. If you have any other questions, or you're interested in being hosted on the cloud, please contact me at sales@littleoak.net.

Hello everyone,

The Little Oak blog has returned! For those of you who are new to the blog, welcome! My name is Christopher and I work here in Little Oak's marketing department. To kick off our new blogging platform I thought I'd write a bit about what we've done behind in the past few months.

All customers are now on our new Cloud Hosting platform. That's right, Little Oak customers, we've implemented the latest and greatest web hosting technology behind the scenes! All of your websites are running on the Little Oak Cloud - a cloud of servers that constantly streams your content to the web.

A single point of failure is no longer a threat. If a server goes down it has no effect on client websites because there are at least a dozen servers serving your content at any one time.

We now have over a dozen employees in our Torrance, CA office. Support responses are now averaging under 30 minutes. (The current average is under 15 minutes, but if I wrote that statistic it'd seem as though I was bragging.) Aw, who am I kidding? The improvement to our support department's response time has been astronomical and it's something to be proud of!

We have a number of surprises this month. Be sure to follow our Twitter feed and join our Facebook group!