Dedicated Server Reviews

The way Jon Price (ISPCON organizer) introduced it, I got the impression that getting Dave Schaeffer (Cogent Communications Founder/CEO) to keynote at this event was a big coup for him. That is, he said he’d been working on it for a while, and he seemed pretty happy to have him here.

I can see why he’d feel that way, though. Shaeffer’s presentation had that feeling of significance. There was nothing rote about it – it was a well-reasoned argument on a subject about which he is clearly passionate.

The presentation was particularly articulate, too. As conference keynotes go, it was one of the most free-flowing and confident I’ve seen. Here is a guy who clearly knows what he’s talking about. 

Despite the fact that we were given a warning in advance, I found myself less than 100 percent able to keep up with Schaeffer, who – as Jon described in his introduction – says a lot in a few words.

That, and the presentation dealt very specifically, and in a great deal of detail, with an issue of particular importance to the ISP and access business – and did so in some very specific access-related terms.

The crux of the presentation was Schaeffer’s attempt to answer the question at the heart of the net neutrality debate – is bandwidth a commodity?

His answer was, unequivocally, yes. Everything Cogent does, he says, (in particular designing its network) is done with the understanding that the network is a commodity.

The network itself is a very large system for delivering content. And for certain kinds of content (the kinds that require a two-way means of communication), it’s the only way to reliably deliver them.

The problem with the large, incumbent carriers on the other side of the neutrality debate, he says, is that they’re a monopolistic business that has been allowed to ride for a long time on assets that were long ago paid for by their rate base.

Efforts against neutrality, for closed-off networks and prioritized traffic, are based on a desire by those incumbent carriers to keep per-bit rates high – preserving the old model of network and application packaged together, and moving into higher-margin services.

Obviously, this is one side of an argument, provided by the head of a controversial enough company with a clear agenda. But it is a well-reasoned and impassioned argument, which at the very least, makes for a hell of a keynote.

In case it’s not perfectly clear, Schaeffer thinks it’s critical that service providers support net neutrality.

• SWsoft Launches Plesk 8.3 for Windows Beta
• Layered Technologies Web 2.0 DynaVol Debuts
• ISPCON Fall 2007 Premieres in San Jose

Attended the morning session “Strategies for Growing your Hosted Business” yesterday, delivered by Ravi Agarwal, CEO of groupSPARK and Rich Bader, president and CEO of EasyStreet Online Services. 

The presentation offered hosted Exchange as one such “strategy for growing your hosted business” – unsurprising given the involvement of groupSPARK, which provides a private-label platform for selling hosted services such as Microsoft’s Exhange, SharePoint and CRM.

Rich’s part of the presentation included some interesting insight on the process of selling hosted Exchange – EasyStreet is, among other things, a groupSPARK reseller. The company, he says, focuses a lot of its work on grassroots efforts, making itself known through posting in forums. EasyStreet employs a blogger who focuses on small business issues and has developed a following of small business readers.

He pointed out that the small business market is a business that deals specifically with relationships, and that those relationships with vendors are what convince small businesses to make purchases, with the exception of particularly low-value services.

Ravi’s contribution seemed a bit like the typical groupSPARK boilerplate. Admittedly I haven’t seen this particular presentation before – it’s just a feeling I got. The information had a lot to do with the value of a private label hosted exchange, a point I would have assumed groupSPARK had long since made. I know I’ve heard a similar (or identical) argument at almost every event I’ve been to in the last few years.

That, perhaps, was the most interesting aspect of the presentation for me – I wanted to know what the objective of the session was (for Ravi, in particular). Is he preaching to the choir? Are these attendees who actually haven’t heard the case for SaaS before? Or are they willingly submitting to being won over through repetition?

Fortunately, I had the opportunity to sit down with Ravi shortly after the presentation. He said it was a combination of a couple of those factors. Regardless of how often some of us may have heard that message, he says, some folks are hearing it for the first time. On the other hand, some people are in the process of making a decision about whether hosted private-label applications are something they want to involve in their business.

What’s more, he says, he makes contact with a few prospective (or eventual) customers after every one of these presentations. In fact, he met Rich at an ISPCON event two years ago.

It seems like the SaaS message still needs a bit of a push, even at the very basic level. It certainly answers a question that’s been nagging at me for a while.

Unprecedented demand for the new Radiohead album reduced the official website to a standstill last week when fans from all over the world tried to take advantage of an offer to download the new album for just one penny.

Massive demand for the Radiohead album, and elsewhere in the music industry concert tickets for the Spice Girls, resulted in websites experiencing huge usage spikes, which can have a serious impact upon the user experience if not managed properly. Both examples raise the question of scalability and resilience issues for web hosting providers and their customers alike.

These websites are experiencing enormous demand within a very concentrated timescale, but with careful consideration of business critical solutions such as load balanced and high availability infrastructures, plans can be put in place to ensure that spikes in demand do not bring a website to a standstill. This is especially true if there is an anticipated flurry of activity on the site, such as a product release, promotional campaign or user generated content.

Organisations can consider hosting providers that offer short-term contracts with burstable bandwidth for the period of time surrounding a campaign or product launch. In both instances, the site remains accessible and the user experience consistently positive throughout the promotional campaign in spite of the large amounts of data being downloaded.

This situation is further exacerbated if websites or online applications have an international audience with users wanting to access information across different time zones. When Radiohead fans in the US found out about the special offer, the already struggling website was further deluged with stateside fans eager to take advantage of the special offer.

It seems music, and indeed any, download sites should be aware of the impact of promotional offers and product launches on the resilience of their sites. Increasingly users expect websites to be up and running 24x7 but at these most profitable periods, availability should be a key consideration early in the planning process.