Tigershark

The custom Tigershark Web server, developed by Intercosmos Media Group, Inc, recently was named the 8th top Web server in use on the Internet, according to a poll recently conducted by www.NetCraft.com.

The Internet consultancy, based in Bath, England, ranked Tigershark behind industry forerunners Apache, Microsoft, Netscape and Web Logic, based on top 10 market share.

The custom Unix Web server is engineered to handle the highest volumes of traffic, allowing great scaling and security. The pre-forked server, which recently was made available for public licensing, is similar to Apache, but it implements highly evolved and hybrid technologies to meet the needs of the high-volume hosting community.

Tigershark creates a low, fixed-number of processes, capable of handling huge numbers of concurrent user connections. Tigershark has been tested with up to 500,000 virtualhosts on a single server. A single Pentium III 500 server with a gigabyte of RAM has been benchmarked at sustaining more than 50 megabits per second, using Tigershark.

Tigershark's speed advantages are due to how it saves data. Configuration information is stored in a MySQL database for robustness and acceleration. The server uses a scalable shared-memory mechanism and loads the database contents into shared memory before forking.

Tigershark specifically was developed for the free hosting industry and has incorporated many advanced features to meet the industry's needs, including the ability to dynamically serve advertisements, based on language type. The server also helps to eliminate fraudulent activity through a custom FTP daemon that authenticates from the back-end of the database. Extensive server statistics for various languages, search engines and spiders can easily be generated, using Tigershark.

The server also dramatically eliminates downtime. A Tigershark subprocess keeps the database contents in shared memory in sync with the database; thus, virtualhosts and other account information may be added, deleted, or modified without server restart.

Tigershark is available for custom licensing. For information, email tigershark@domaincontender.com.