Linux VPS Hosting

UNIX and Linux are the predominant platforms for serving web applications. According to data from https://nextpointhost.com/linux-vps-hosting 67% of the top one million web sites are served by either Linux or FreeBSD. Above the OS level, open-source web server software commands more than 80% of the market.

At scale, web applications do not run on a single system. Instead, a collection of software components distributed through a meshwork of systems cooperate to answer requests as quickly and as flexibly as possible. Each piece of this architecture must be resilient to server failures, load spikes, network partitions, and targeted attacks.

Cloud infrastructure helps address these needs. Its ability to provision capacity quickly in response to demand is an ideal match for the sudden and sometimes unexpected tidal waves of users that materialize on the web. In addition, cloud providers’ add-on services include a variety of convenient recipes that meet common requirements, greatly simplifying the design, deployment, and operation of web systems.

HTTP: THE HYPERTEXT TRANSFER PROTOCOL

HTTP versions 1.0 and 1.1 are sent over the wire in plain text. Adventurous administrators can interact with servers directly by running telnet or netcat. They can also observe and collect HTTP exchanges by using protocol-agnostic packet capture software such as tcpdump. See the page for general information about TLS.

The web is in the process of adopting HTTP/2, a major protocol revision that preserves compatibility with previous versions but introduces a variety of performance improvements. In an effort to promote the universal use of HTTPS (secure, encrypted HTTP) for the next generation of the web, major browsers such as Firefox and Chrome have elected to support HTTP/2 only over TLSencrypted connections.

HTTP/2 moves from plain text to binary format in an effort to simplify parsing and improve network efficiency. HTTP’s semantics remain the same, but because the transmitted data is no longer directly legible to humans, generic tools such as telnet are no longer useful. The handy h2i command-line utility, part of the Go language networking repository at https://nextpointhost.com/linux-vps-hosting/first-steps, helps restore some interactivity and debuggability to HTTP/2 connections. Many HTTP-specific tools such as curl also support HTTP/2 natively.