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.

Mrtweak.com is being moved to a new server this weekend (Jan 27th & 28th). Please excuse any downtime as the new DNS destination propagates.

Anyone who’s a Windows Vista beta tester probably knows it already, but Windows Vista probably isn’t going to ship “on time”.

Everyone knows why (bugs, bugs, bugs), but Robert McLaws makes some great observations in “Vista Needs More Time” and compares the buggy Vista Bets 2 with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2. One of them was basically production-ready with Beta 2, the other still has issues with the 3D interface that seems to be the main selling point in a lot of “get users excited ads”. Whether the interface, or anything else, is working right I think Microsoft should ship the Vista RTM version to software developers, OEMs and corporate customers regardless.

Robert is right, Vista isn’t ready to launch in retail, but he justifies the possible slipped ship date with the same-old argument about “shipping a great product”. Inveterate Windows commentator Ed Bott even wants Microsoft to push Vista’s ship date back to March.

Despite the very sorry state of Beta 2, it would be a great thing to get a Vista RTM out the door with a LOT fewer features and then release a service pack, or even a feature pack, a month later. After all, whether customers are actually buying the operating system or not, Vista will probably need to be out a good 6-9 months before most IT shops really start to get on the upgrade path.

This shiny, new OS is a hardware hog and is going to force many companies, including the majority of the companies I deal with and have friends at, to either speed their upgrade cycle or wait through at least one, if not two, budget cycles. Of course, one good way to force operating system or office-suite upgrades is to give software developers plenty of time to test and patch around it - which gets IT departments testing it and pushing it out to higher-end machines sooner - which puts it on the CFOs desk - which gets a budget decision made sooner.

Then again, with MSFT sunk for 2007 already and a $30 billion stock-buyback planned - maybe Microsoft should knock the date back to next summer and save themselves some of that money.

Article tagged: Windows, Vista, operating, system, Beta, 2, RTM, final, ship, date, slip, slipped, miss, Robert, McLaws, budget, upgrade, 2007

I’ve started doing a lot of development lately and been shopping for an MSDN subscription. I happened to run across an academic copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional with an MSDN Pro subscription, for just $1. While I may not be able to take advantage of the deal, maybe someone out there can save a few dollars on the Visual Studio suite.

No, I’m not an affiliate of this website and I won’t earn anything if you click through, buy, don’t buy, etc.

Update: Looks like the price was updated (now $1,150), sorry to anyone who was hoping to pick Visual Studio up cheaply. Link removed.

MIT’s Media Lab demo’d prototypes of their $100 laptops today, May 23rd. Here’s a photo gallery of the OLPC $100 laptops that are targeted at children in developing nations …and they’re some sweet little machines. Putting aside the issues of black- and gray-market sales of these systems the whole rest of the project is incredibly well thought out.

Our “custom-configured” Windows world has a lot to learn from the design of these little machines. By standardizing both hardware and software configurations they’ve managed to implement 802.11 wireless-mesh networking and a minimal-IT-required Linux system. Should the operating system or software get messed up or infected (…however unlikely that is on Linux) - the whole system can be reimaged without worries of data loss. How do they manage to store data without any expensive servers? Each machine only has 512MB of FlashRAM/non-volatile storage and is designed to share data via a community (the local mesh, I think) wiki system. Sounds a little like Windows roaming profiles, except without the bloat and ability for users to still store data on the local drive; also way ahead of the server-centric network PC/thin client systems encouraged by Oracle, Citrix, Wyse and many hardware manufacturers.

The whole project is well documented at laptop.org, so take a look for yourself.

Microsoft has just released Virtual Server 2005 R2. The software is central to Microsoft’s planned server system, so grab the free download of Virtual Server here. Surprisingly, Microsoft has also announced support for virtualizing Linux in the Virtual Server 2005 system. Currently supported flavors of Linux include Red Hat and SuSE, in both Standard and Enterprise versions. An explanation of why Microsoft is freeing Virtual Server permanently is in this quick interview with Zane Adam, Windows Server director of product marketing.

The support for Linux on Virtual Server does make sense. Microsoft’s denial that their customers were using Linux was driving the same customers to actively search for non-Microsoft and open source replacement programs. This could continue to keep Windows Server relevant as open source OS’s improve and reduce Windows’ feature/ease-of-use advantage - provided that Microsoft can provide a decent level of support for Linux guest servers (virtual systems running inside Virtual Server) and create a good set of tools to manage those Linux systems. With Red Hat and Novell, parent of SuSe Linux, relying on support fees for income it will be interesting to see how they respond to Microsoft’s added Linux support. With the licensing and support fees for both companies’ Enterprise Linux versions this move puts all these server OS players on even closer footing.

One minor player who has responded is VMWare. A new “VMWare Server” product is now free, though it lacks a lot of the failover features and load balancing capabilities that make VMWare’s higher-end versions so useful. It will be interesting to see how VMWare Server and Virtual Server compare to each other, though VMWare has a strong lead in supporting the widest range of guest operating systems.

Article tagged: Microsoft, Virtual, Server, 2005, R2, Linux, guest, OS, support, operating+system, VMWare, virtualization, Red+Hat, Novell, SuSE

Apparently Symantec was installing its own rootkit with installations of Norton SystemWorks. They created a folder, called NProtect, hidden from Windows Explorer and Micorosft’s APIs (in other words, it was in the regular filesystem but Windows and any software that ran correctly under it couldn’t see the folder existed). While Symantec’s NProtect software was only designed to keep people from deleting SystemWorks files “accidentally” and didn’t directly threaten Windows, the existence of the NProtect folder could have been used by virus writers to create their own programs - and once installed in the NProtect folder those viruses, trojans, and spyware would be a real rootkit that Windows and most anti-virus programs wouldn’t be able to detect and remove.

On the positive side, Symantec has recently, according to eWeek, released an update for SystemWorks that makes the hidden folder visible to Windows. It’s likely that Symantec felt the bad publicity Sony got because of their slow response after installing a similar folder wasn’t worth protecting their own software.

Article tagged: symantec, sony, rootkit, NProtect, virus, trojan, major, antivirus, vendor