System support for web hosting services on server clusters

The Web hosting service is becoming increasingly important in which the service providers offer system resources to store and provide Web access to contents from individuals, institutions, and companies who lack resources or expertise to maintain a Web site. Web server cluster is a popular architecture used by the hosting service providers as a way to create scalable and highly available solutions. However, hosting a variety of contents from different customers on such a distributed server system faces new design and management problems and requires new solutions. This paper describes the research work we are pursuing for constructing a system to address the challenges faced by hosting Web content on a server farm environment. We also report performance data measured from a real hosting service. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.