Hybrid Logic Ltd, a United Kingdom-based company today announced the commencement of the first round of beta testing of their PaaS (platform-as-a-service) software product, Hybrid Web Cluster in partnership with CloudSigma AG of Zurich, Switzerland.

Hybrid Web Cluster is a cloud web hosting platform designed to run over any number of real physical servers, cloud server instances or a combination of the two. Due to recent advances in file system technology (ZFS) in combination with advances made by the software developers at Hybrid Logic Ltd; it is now possible to offer standard LAMP web hosting with a revolutionary level of redundancy, fault tolerance and scalability, at a price compatible with the commodity web hosting market.

ZFS is one of the key pieces of technology that enables Hybrid Web Cluster to offer near-instant data replication. This means that if any one of the nodes in your cluster goes down, some other nodes will always have a copy of every website hosted on the failed server no more than a few seconds old. The web cluster will automatically and instantly reorganise itself so that your websites never experience downtime – a failed server results in a slightly slow page load for a few seconds rather than hours of downtime.

Because ZFS support is crucial to the implementation of Hybrid Web Cluster, a cloud infrastructure provider willing to support the latest version of FreeBSD was essential -  ZFS support is also available in Linux and Solaris, but both options have significant drawbacks; Solaris is too far from Linux to feel comfortable for most users, and Linux's ZFS support is currently too slow to be usable in a production environment. It was therefore essential to find a suitable cloud infrastructure provider who would support the latest version of FreeBSD – The CloudSigma product with its support for FreeBSD 8.1 and ZFS provided the ideal infrastructure choice for Hybrid Web Cluster, and after talking to the friendly team at CloudSigma, a partnership agreement was reached which sees CloudSigma sponsoring the Hybrid Web Cluster beta testing programme.

Patrick Baillie CEO of CloudSigma commented “Hybrid Web Cluster is an exciting product and use of our cloud. It provides the potential to generate an additional revenue stream from our existing infrastructure investment. We see this product expanding our customer base by offering a more managed approach from our core offering. The white label support and sophisticated integrated billing and accounting system gives us the flexibility we require”.

Today the first round of beta testing began; 15 clusters have been provisioned and the first beta testers have each received login credentials for their very own test web cluster. Beta testers have full administrative control over their own cluster running on CloudSigma's infrastructure - it is possible to set up real websites (including Wordpress blogs), watch a live graphical visualisation of the load balancing and replication algorithms at work, pull the plug on a server and watch how the sites that are hosted on it stay live, it is also possible to generate load on individual websites and watch how the cluster's load balancing algorithms respond. Beta testers can also explore our next-generation web hosting control panel which includes advanced ticketing and billing systems, automated domain registration, white label support and full internationalization.

If you would like to learn more about Hybrid Web Cluster, watch video demonstrations, or sign up for the next round of beta testing to try out your own web cluster, please visit www.hybrid-cluster.com.