I’ve always wondered if most hosting companies even care about supporting their customers when traffic surges hit. A recently Dugg article “How Not To Deal With A Digg” makes it worth revisting those thoughts and putting up a bit of math to support that shared hosting companies are concealing a lot behind the bandwidth they offer in their packages.

Just like most gyms sell memberships to more people than could fit into the workout area if all those members showed up once per day, many hosting companies price their packages at levels that are only profittable if traffic stays very low. In the Seminal’s article, referenced above, they started with a shared web hosting package from iPowerWeb. That package offers 2,000 GB of bandwidth for $8/month - and I’m going to stay focused on that number because bandwidth is the number one place where shared web hosting companies fail to deliver on their promises (plus an 800mhz Pentium 3 with 1 GB RAM webserver that I run at work delivers 10-15 GB/day of web traffic for an application we only use internally, so the meagre specs on that hardware work fine for 275 GB/month [conservatively, 12.5 GB/day for 22 work days each month] over 100 mbps & 1 gbps network connections). A good price for bandwidth, for a hosting company leasing multiple OCx-class connections, is about $0.06/GB. That means that 2,000 GB of bandwidth works out to $120/month. In fact, your $8/month is only enough to pay for about 133 GB of bandwidth before the hosting company starts dropping into the red.

Yikes! The truth is there’s no way those lower-end hosting companies can make money from basic web hosting packages if even a small percentage of their clients are using a good chunk of the allotted bandwidth. It’s true that the numbers presented in the hosting package descriptions are typically loss-leaders, but the packages and services offered by any hosting company should be capable of reaching what they’re rated to. And, if the high bandwidth usage is a problem thsn companies should either ask users causing them a loss to leave (which sure would get those companies a lot of attention on Slashdot and Digg) or they should also institute and disclose a rate-cap of how much bandwidth/second can be used (for example: 2,000 GB/month over 2,592,000 seconds for a max rate of ~768 KBps).

In my experience of content sites’ daily traffic patterns, most non-rich media websites see averaged daily traffic rates that are only 5-15% of their peak daily rate. Let’s assume that a front page link from Digg will only triple your normal peak rate of visits (unlikely) and then work backward from 768 KBps to see what a realistic monthly usage would be from one of those shared hosting packages. One third of 768 KBps is 256 KBps, which represents our peak daily traffic rate when not featured on a big, linking site. Take 10% of that and get 25.6 KBps, or 26 KBps if we round to keep things clean. 26 KBps times the 2,592,000 seconds in a 30 day month is 67,392,000 KB of data, or ~67.4 GB/month when we’re talking in the same terms as those hosting plan providers. That seems more reasonable at a rate of $0.06/GB for an $8/month web hosting plan. Now only about $4/month goes to pay for bandwidth and the rest can pay for the hosting providers servers and staff.

Before we forget the whole point of this, 768 KBps means that an average content site with a 250 KB front page, JS, CSS, and images will take about 1/3rd of a second to transfer. Add another half second of latency, I know average latency isn’t that high but the server and browser take a little while to deal with each individual HTML, CSS, JS, and image to be transferred, and the total page load time is about 5/6ths of a second. Now grab this Browser statistics Firefox extenstion and check your own shared host website. This site has a 156 KB page load, is happily hosted on a 1and1 shared server, and has a 4.5 sec. average page load time and 1.8 sec. minimum page load time according to Google’s webmaseter tools and the large number of page loads their spider does of this site. Odds are you’re looking at a download time a lot higher than 5/6ths of a second. If that’s the case then how can your shared webserver ever stand up to the traffic experienced when being Dugg or Slashdotted?

Plain and simple, that shared web server won’t cut it when you’re Dugg or Slashdotted. The artificial statistics I’m using above, of 768 KBps peak and 26 KBps sustained, make it clear that shared host webservers aren’t capable of profittably delivering the 1,000+ GB/month that most of them advertise. Real world page load times indicate that most shared hosting companies can’t realistically sustain a 768 KBps peak rate or 67 GB/month of traffic to your site. All the caching and HTML/CSS-tweaking in the world won’t save a website when it still has to get squeezed through a skinny pipe.

Sadly, many shared hosting companies are generally happy save money offering poor service and then by allowing higher bandwidth users (costing them $0.06/GB) to move elsewhere. I really hope this practice goes the way of selling CRT monitors based on the tube size instead of the viewable size. Since I’m not a fan of government regulation, I hope some of the bigger or higher-quality shared hosting companies start offering throughput guarantees to compete with the cheap shared hosting packages that can’t deliver.

The Recovery Console is an incredibly powerful tool at times when a Windows system boots straight into a blue screen (of death) error or viruses/spyware have even made the system unusable in safe mode. Unfortuantely it’s hard to use for several reasons. Firstky, Microsoft doesn’t, to my knowledge, provide complete documentation for the Recovery Console anywhere. Also, the Recovery Console is a command-line-only interface that’s unfamiliar to most Windows users and even many non-Linux IT staff. Finally, the commands available in this environment are fewer and slightly different from those in a typical Windows shell environment.

This site, Command Windows, provides a complete list of the available commands with a description of each. Also included is documentation on some preventative measures (as usual, registry edits) that can be taken before Windows crashes to remove some of the restrictions on the Recovery Console later on. The restrictions that can be removed include disallowing Recovery Console from writing to a floppy disk, blocked access to some system folders, and not being able to use wildcards on the command line.

Always looking for a better way to manage my business’ help desk queue, about two weeks ago I bought a copy of the AxoSoft OnTime 2006 software after a $495 to $5 price cut was posted via Robert Scoble. OnTime is designed as a bug tracking system, but Steve Richard’s OnTime 2006 review discussed how it is completely customizable. Both the interface and data store are so customizable that Steve reworked OnTime to manage his personal tasks according to the “Getting Things Done” organizational system.

For just $5 (current and regular price is $495) the 5-user version of OnTime was worth a test as a replacement to our current mixed system of customized (and fragile) Exchange Forms in a Public folder and the non-customizable and no-longer being updated Intuit Track-It software. Only an hour after purchasing OnTime it was running from our existing SQL Server instance with both several Windows clients and a working web interface installed. The installation process was as simple as it can get without not prompting you for any information. The basic installations of Track-It and FrontRange’s Heat helpdesk software were more far complicated and fragile, and neither of those products’ base versions even included the installtion of a web-based client or reporting system.

Customization of OnTime was equally as impressive as installation. Field names, like “bugs” - in the interface here, can be changed within the program’s interface and persist everywhere (data labels, in reports, even menu names and items). With multiple related data categories I quickly configured the system to track Help Desk calls, ongoing tasks, and a basic KnowledgeBase. All three are displayed separately, but with the Projects tree view setup to match our current Exchange forms heirarcy of the network (ie: desktop-, networking-, server-issues, and their sub-items) we can tie them together and better track resources and the cost/benefit of hardware, patches, etc.

Despite all the benefits I forsee, we haven’t fully implemented OnTime yet. A lot of SQL DTS work is required to migrate data from our current systems and the normal management bureaucracy has raised issues related to documenting, training for the help desk staff (aka: documenting the reporting interface for supervisors), and support (I think many are due to the low cost). …but that’s OK, because despite the “incomplete rollout” the Help Desk technicians are already using OnTime to log and answer new calls - they took to it pretty quickly once I installed OnTime’s email-to-OnTime module. The free add-on automatically imports user support requests from Exchange into the OnTime queue. I also expect AxoSoft’s support to be better and less necessary than the $5 price might indicate to my supervisors. I’m also happy to see that AxoSoft’s Hamid Shojaee has his own blog. It’s a good sign that AxoSoft is bound to be far more responsive to requests and error reports than larger software companies, such as my own experiences with Intuit and FrontRange. The software is already serving our small help desk well and I firmly recommend it, even at the regular 5-user price of $495.

Informal “rules” to make MashupCamp more constructive are pictured on the ZDNet’s article Around the MashupCamp fire. I love their “Law of Two Feet” …the basic priciple being to “learn, contribute, or move on to something new”. It’s simple advice that can help keep any IT department, Help Desk, or development team focused and productive.

Stupid jokes and viral videos aside, developers and IT staff spend a lot of time rethinking the “best” ways to solve the 20+/- similar problems. Each time slight differences in the exact situation (often vendor- or service provider-related) and resources available force you to put in so much extra effort. Just an informal posting of this rule on the intranet, code repository, and in conference rooms would server as an excellent reminder to keep things constructive. Taken one step further with the support of management and the concept to learn, contribute, or move on could help even the most junior staff members to gracefully refocus a discussion if starts a too frequent death-dive into a gripe-fest.

Article tagged: IT, development+method, IT+department, developers, productive, productivity, focus, learning, contributing, help+desk

This secure, NOC-style, home network isn’t just a geek’s dream network, but a great example for small businesses. The distribution of hardware and software across several inexpensive servers (or Mac mini desktops with a few upgrades in this case) is a far better use of the small IT budgets that are typical at most small businesses I’ve worked with.

Buying the single biggest, fastest server that can be afforded may seem attractive to small business owners (who may also brag about how fast their server is later). The big problem with having only one big server is that it usually leaves no alternatives when there are conflicts between important software tools, can create contention for hardware (usually disk drive access), and a frequent need to kick everyone entirely off the system whenever a patch requires a reboot. Even for companies running on Windows Small Business Server software it’s usually cheaper both up front and, especially, in the long run to install two less expensive servers running different features from the Small Business Server package. Of course, even on a budget the one thing worth spending extra on in any server is for multiple, fast hard disks and a simple hardware RAID setup. Hard drive space is reduced, but speed and data protection is far greater with RAID.

In the cited article “Mini Network with a Big XServe Style” the author, Ken Collins, separates the most important functions of his systems on to three separate servers; with a database, web, and mail/DNS/router/everything else server. Only one change is necessary in an average business, especially when running Microsoft’s Exchange Server, the e-mail server should be on its own box because mutiple email client programs checking for mail continuously can really be hard on a server. The other important thing Ken does is to run separate internal and external networks which adds a huge level of security, plus some speed in a busy office, beyond what a non-customizable firewall (ie: Cisco Pix or similar programmable systems) provides.

The one huge shortcoming of Ken’s described system is the use of WiFi networking to connect the servers together. In a business use cabling for both security and speed (which is quite slow with this setup, since WiFi shares it’s 45mbps speed between all connected systems). With gigabit switches getting much cheaper there is no reason not to at least install a small gigabit switch just to connect the servers together - I’ve seen disk and memory usage drop on server communicating via gigabit connections because there is less data sitting in queues each time files are saved or transferred.

Article tagged: small, business, network, server, configuration, Windows, SBS, SMB

Visual Studio 6.0 is no longer available from the MSDN library. Visual Basic 6.0 only has until June 30th, 2006, before it’s gone too. There’s a note from MS’s Federal Developer Team about it.

Microsoft, as part of the Java/anticompetitive business practices lawsuit settlement with Sun, must stop distributing any time-of-lawsuit Microsoft software with Java built-in. The judge was lenient enough to let Microsoft pull the software off the market over a several year period, with the development tools being the last to stop distribution. This was probably to help companies who relied on the Visual Dev tools internally and for products they sold.

What I do wonder: How are we going to support our current VB6 apps in the future?

I know we’re well beyond the time to upgrade any apps to newer and better platforms, but there’s a lot we’re stuck with by the nature of our business. Since we’re an accounting firm we regularly dredge files up from 5 and 6 years ago. After all, tax laws change, the IRS audits, and clients get dragged (or dive) into lawsuits and then need to provide a lot of financial history. We have a subnet on the network with a whole host of one-off machines and printers. We still run one Windows 3.1 box and an HP LaserJet II printer so that we can read and print files from a custom VB app (VB 3, I think) that was used well beyond its own lifespan to track EVERYTHING at several hotels. …now, 20 years later, the thing still runs - and I can’t upgrade it or the financial reports I export could be called into question in litigation. For similar reasons I also have copies of msjava.dll all over the network so I can keep installing pre-2000 versions of Quicken and QuickBooks.

The best I can do is to archive copies of Visual Studio to tape, CD, and everywhere else they’ll probably be lost from anyway. What Microsoft can do for us, both IT professionals and highest-volume buyers, is to stop pushing the limits when someone else (like Sun) has a great technology. The loss of Visual Studio 6 and other Microsoft-Java products only hurts Microsoft’s customer relations with us, the opposite of what they intended when they “extended” Sun’s Java.

<edit> - Corrected misspelling of “subscribers”

We’re running Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphones in my office now and I’m not happy about it. Any other IT managers working at legal or accounting firms can understand the frustration of being unable to stop technophile partners from bringing in new technology. With many partners asserting their “ownership” the firm it’s near-impossible to get a consensus on when to implement “cool” things. …but I can always tolerate that, I’m really unhappy about the Windows Mobile 5.0 OS and its new ActiveSync system.

<Actual Troubleshooting tip here:>
Odds are that you’re using USB to connect to the PC, and that your having problems with it… that’s the same thing we saw with every device our users installed before consulting the manuals/IT-staff. For solutions, first check out the basic Windows Mobile Help site, in case any new patches will eliminate errors. Then, look to the ActiveSync 4.0 USB Guide for pseudo-tips like “it’s not ActiveSync, check your firewall/VPN/USB docking station/parental control tools” - so why is a “USB Guide” if the problems described are all TCP/IP issues?

The number one solution, try to enable the ActiveSync ports and executables (listed on the “USB Guide”) before installing ActiveSync. Once we saw communication errors a reset of the device and a reinstall of ActiveSync was almost always required.
</:End of Actual Troubleshooting tip>

While my users may not like that their shiny, new PDAs don’t work, I’m slightly consoled by the fact that I’ve managed to stem the tide of Windows Mobile 5 for this long. After all, Stephen Manes a writer for Forbes has already seen the issue and gotten the article published: Smart Phone. Stupid Software. (signup required or use BugMeNot.com for login, and article may only be free for a limited time, so check Google’s cache for the full article).

I think anyone’s best bet at supporting Windows Mobile 5.0 is …to prevent those devices from being purchased until they’re running Windows Mobile 5.1-5.9. Just remember to skip 6.0 too…

If you’re an employer, consider my attitude about supporting new products - it’s great to get to learn on the newest toys, but it stinks when I’m surprised by a completely new system. Really, new technology launches are a great chance for employers to provide a low-cost, high-value benefit for IT employees. The problem here is that neither myself nor any of our admins/techs know Windows Mobile 5, but we’re being asked to support it. Instead of learning new things on our own schedule we have to put aside all the network upgrades and development projects to learn how to use, and then how to fix, a few desktop devices. Since most of my staff is in this business because they like technology (it sure isn’t for easy money and short working hours) I could really help with retention and Help Desk attitude if the firm would buy an extra device that I could give out to whomever would be willing to put in the extra time to learn it.

Article tagged: Windows, Mobile, 5.0, ActiveSync, SmartPhone, sync, error, help, TCP/IP