Xbox Web Hosting

You are using an Xbox to do what?
The server that your website will be hosted on is an Xbox. We are working with a company called RockBochs to provide us with the modified Xboxes that we use for hosting. A plain, unmodified Xbox won't work for hosting by itself, it takes a little bit of work to prepare an Xbox to be used the way we use them.


What is done to the Xboxes?
First, the Xbox bios is replaced. This requires removing the original bios chip that comes with the Xbox, and replacing it with a custom bios chip. We then upgrade the RAM on the Xbox from the original 64mb ram. This requires soldering an additional 64mb ram to the motherboard, bringing the box to a total of 128mb. Since Xboxes come default with a 10gb hard drive, we upgrade them to 160gb hard drives so we can allow our customers plenty of storage space. Finally, we install CentOS 4.1 and add the Xbox to our H-Sphere Cluster.


What about performance?
"Even after all of that modification, the Xbox is only a Celeron 733mhz with 128mb RAM and a 160gb hard drive. Won't that affect the performance of the websites on the server?" Good question! In a regular shared hosting environment where all of the hosting services are stored on the same server, quality of performance would be greatly affected by the slower speed of the Xbox. However, we are not a regular shared hosting provider, this is where the Beauty and Power that is H-Sphere comes into play.

In a regular shared server, the services that use the most resources on the server are MySQL and Mail. With some servers processing hundreds of thousands of database queries for all the websites, MySQL can easily use up all available resources on a server. At the same time, a sudden influx of email can bring a mail server to a crawl, affecting all of the websites on that server as well.

With H-Sphere, we can separate all of those services onto separate servers. So we have a dedicated MySQL server that processes all of the MySQL databases. We also have a dedicated Mail server that handles all of the email for all domains in our cluster. These servers are not Xboxes, rather they are Dual Xeon servers. This means that the Xbox hosting your website only has to worry about serving your website, and not process databases or email. We have found that even hosting active forums and many domains, an Xbox performs very well.