One of the things coming to Frog Host will be a resource management system and this will be tracking per user usage. The big problem with unlimited hosting is a user never knows when they’ve crossed that invisible limit and whether or not it’s fair. We’ve decided the best way to show users this is to actually track it but not exactly in the same sense as others. Hawk Host uses an internal system which is being updated for new features and it’s also what Frog Host will be using.
Every server will be reporting back usage to our centralized system which gives us a few advantages. The first one being the fact it’s centralized and not server specific. The second portion is we’ll be able to easily link usage back to a specific service or even to a specific client to get interesting trends of usage. With the system centralizing the stats portion it’ll allow us to display useful information to each user in their cPanel. It will not just be server specific but we can show them trends on a more broad perspective. Rather than the user being in the top percentile in usage for a specific server. It can tell them potentially of the 10000 sites you’re in the top percentile of the entire Frog Host service. So it’s not just you’re using more than normal on a specific server but tells you overall across all servers. This can help give the user a better idea of just how out of the norm their usage is.
At the start the system will be tracking CPU, MySQL and Inodes but being centralized and how it’s setup we can easily deploy new tracking features or even revise what sort of data is being stored very easily. We can easily replicate changes of the reporting to our centralized system as well as change our custom cPanel theme with just a few quick clicks. So it’s not a lot of work to change the system as the company evolves. So it’s not set in stone by any means on what we track of how in depth we are. We could start by just tracking overall CPU coming from MySQL but then later on count the number of rows they’re referencing or joins or whatever we want this is all possible. I suppose the next question is what do we do with all this data we are keeping track of as far as how it affects the user.
At the start we plan on not doing anything as far as quotas for users when it comes to what we’re tracking. What it is used for is a gage of to the user of the resources they’re using. We hope to provide a general sort of number for the total month usage on the cPanel menu. Then you can view more detailed statistics of the stats on a month, day, hour basis sort of like how you look at the web stats. We’ll at some point provide graphs as well as other pretty interfaces to make it look all nice. The information will be pulled from our reporting server so none of this will be handled on the web server end. This means it will not be degrading performance in anyway.
So that’s just a general overview of our resource management system and what it’ll be like. When we’re close to launch or just maybe the day of launch I’ll post some screen shots of what it looks like on the cPanel end of things.
How how will this be accomplished? Is it a custom setup or are you using an open source or proprietary system already developed for this purpose? My concern would be if this would be stable, reliable, and secure? Will it use resources on the server that’s allotted to my account, therefore count against me?
There are tools available already that are capable of tracking usage. No one bothers to store the data and display it to the user. It won’t affect the usage alloted to an account since this will be polled via our systems.