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In Case You've Read Otherwise, SmugMug Still Loves S3

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:01:00 -0400

Last Thursday night, I came across this SearchStorage.com article via the Storagezilla blog. Beth Pariseau wrote that Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) has had "performance and reliability issues serious enough" to prompt second thoughts among early adopters. In particular, SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill recently decided to move hot storage back in-house.

The instant I finishing reading the article, my RSS reader lit up with Don's response. He still loves Amazon, even if S3 hasn't solved the "speed of light problem". It takes at least 60-80ms for bytes of data to travel the distance between SmugMug's west coast location and Amazon's east coast data center. There's no getting around that. He moved hot storage closer to his web servers NOT to solve Amazon's performance problems, but to reduce those thousands of miles to inches. Don also tracked down the Storagezilla post and added a comment there.

Fast forward to this morning, when someone sent me a snippet from a Tier 1 Research news brief in which Dan Golding wrote about Amazon's disillusioned users. I gave Dan a hard time for basing his article on the same two customers Beth interviewed without giving her credit. Dan argued that attribution isn't customary in the analyst world. Besides, we shouldn't even be having this conversation. As a non-subscriber, I should have deleted any T1R content that came my way upon receipt.

Ironically, during his HostingCon presentation last year, T1R founder Andy Schoepfer's key message was "don't be an island". It's important for web hosting providers to connect customers to external ecosystems like eBay and Amazon, because no e-business can thrive in isolation. Given T1R's Hosting 2.0 advocacy, Dan's reaction seemed... Analyst 1.0-ish. But towards the end of our conversation, he did promise that an upgrade is on the way. As a point of reference, Burton Group, Dan's former employer, has a great blog that links to external sources. Same goes for Forrester. And at least 220 other research firms, including T1R parent company The 451 Group. Raven Zachary, who leads 451's open source practice, is even on Twitter!

Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox now and back to Amazon. I think every web hosting exec needs to read Don's blog post - along with Robert Cichon's post on customer satisfaction metrics. Robert said a hosting provider has done a good job if (a) the company gets written testimonials, (b) customers refer other customers because they're happy with service quality, and (c) customers defend the company against negative remarks. Amazon gets three points based on Don's reaction. What's your score?

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Assembling Self-Branded Services On The Cheap

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST
To bring a new dimension of value-added services to their clients, resellers can integrate a number of inexpensive software packages and online services into their core service offerings.

Web24.com.au Connectivity Issue Right Now?

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:36:25 +1100

There seems to be some connectivity issue with regarding to my VPS at Web24 (profiled at VPS AU here) right now. For my websites hosted there, the heading will load, and then part of the content, and then the browser will just stall there trying to fetch the rest of the page but they never arrive.

Web24 is coloc at Fujitsu data centre in Melbourne, and a quite traceroute check with mtr shows around 20-40% packet loss at Fujitsu data centre.


$ mtr -r www.web24.com.au

HOST: localhost                   Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev

  1. 192.168.1.xxx                 0.0%    30    0.3   0.3   0.3   0.7   0.1

   ...

  7. 0.so-0-2-0.XT1.SYD2.ALTER.NE  3.3%    30   19.2  22.4  17.6  73.6  11.2

  8. so-0-2-0.XR2.MEL1.ALTER.NET   0.0%    30   29.0  34.2  28.3 125.5  17.6

  9. 411.AT-6-0-0.GW4.MEL1.ALTER.  0.0%    30   87.0  35.5  29.2 104.3  16.6

 10. fuji865-mel-gw.aspac.custome 13.3%    30   32.9  50.6  31.5 231.3  47.9

 11. v13.csr02.nobp01.fujitsu.com 10.0%    30   33.9  34.0  31.6  38.9   1.8

 12. 216.14.207.85                23.3%    30   35.6  37.0  32.0  50.1   5.0

 13. 203.16.60.201                23.3%    30   34.2  35.3  33.3  38.9   1.4

 14. www.web24.com.au             23.3%    30   35.0  35.3  32.3  43.2   2.5

I have posted the same issue on Whirlpool Forums and so far we have got no response from the provider. Web24.com.au and their HSPcomplete panel are hosted inside the same network thus neither are working at the moment. I can’t even get onto the support page to get the contact details (lucky there is Google cache).

Not happy Jen. Have to wait and see… Maybe it is a sign that I need to go to sleep now :)

Update 9AM AEST 27 Feb

I got a reply back from Web24 support this morning detailing the communication between Web24, Fujitsu and their up stream providers. Great job! Some paraphrased details:

Packet loss issue identified at 10:15pm on 26 February, and later found out it was an upstream router issue.

Web24 has been working with Fujitsu and Verizon in identifying and resolving the issue, and by 1:18am 27 February, the main web24 site failed over to US network (very good idea).

All the traffic are routing through secondary links by 4:45am, and still waiting for feedbacks on primary provider.

Pingdom still reports my site was down until around 8:20am. This is the graph generated from Cacti:

Web24/Fujitsu Network issue

Note that the network does not appear to be down from 10pm onwards because the querying packets are small enough to get through. I guess network connectivity is going to be patchy this morning.

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A ix web hosting review is usually positive. This is because ixwebhosting.com
uses cPanel as the ixweb hosting control panel. This makes it easy to use for
people who are just starting out as webmasters. There are a lot of new customers
who sign up with one of the other top ten hosting companies and get frustrated
right away. This is because these companies have gotten too large to take on the
new and smaller accounts and don�t really have the 24/7 support staff that can
teach beginners how to manage their site. What a lot of people don�t realize is
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or hand-holding. ixwebhosting.com seems to take this into stride and doesn�t
seem to mind the extra time it takes to coach someone along.

ixwebhosting.com has been around since 1999. They have over 180 employees and
host about 200,000 domains. They have three basic plans, Expert Plan, Business
Plus, and Unlimited Pro. The plans start at $6 a month and go up to $15. They
seem to get compared to Bluhost.com a lot, probably because their services are
the most comparable, although BlueHost seems to get higher rankings for a
customer-support staff that users claim are more knowledgeable. ixwebhosting.com
is fully compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac OS, which is handy.

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Other than that, it isn�t very remarkably different from the other hosting
companies who keep dropping prices and providing more hosting services. A few
extra features are included in the starting price, but in this extremely
competitive industry it�s hard to know how long that will last. In fact,
comparative reviews pitting one hosting company against another are increasing
as the consumer becomes more educated about how hosting companies quickly change
prices and services as everyone scrambles to make a quick buck off the internet.
ixwebhosting.com looks like one of the good companies, but again, provides the
same service everyone else has.

The Expert plan ($5.95 a month) includes unlimited domains, 600 gigs of disk
space, one free domain registration, 6,000 gigs of data transfer, and unlimited
subdomains. The Business plan ($8.95 a month) includes unlimited domains, 1,000
gigs of disk space, two free domain registrations, 8,000 gigs of data transfer,
and unlimited subdomains. Unlimited pro ($14.95 a month) includes unlimited
domains, unlimited disk space, three free domain registrations, 10,000 gigs of
data transfer, and unlimited subdomains. Some features like the site builder are
free and other optional features like credit card processing are reasonably
priced, but if you are serious about e-commerce, you are going to pay more here
and there.

Of course, the cpanel makes webhosting easy to use right from the start. It
doesn�t have as many icons as other hosting companies, but the Getting Started
Wizard is next to the Video Tutorials icon which makes getting started faster
for newcomers to web site management. The Logs section is at the top of the
panel which is convenient and includes icons for latest visitors, bandwidth,
Webelizer, Webelizer FTP, raw access logs, analog stats, and error log. The rest
of the panel is made up of standards like E-mail accounts, MX entry, FTP
accounts, Cron jobs, SSH/Shell manager, GnuPG keys, MySQL databases, etc.

Probably the biggest selling point for ixwebhosting.com is that while they are
shared hosting, they still own the company themselves and don�t look like they
are looking at selling anytime soon. This makes them a more reliable and stable
company for people who don�t have the luxury of becoming the causalities of
corporate mergers that are causing unnecessary downtime for sites these days.
Hopefully, ixwebhosting.com will stay the course of being independent and
continue to get good reviews.

Click Here to go to ixwebhosting
website.

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