Re: Hosting allowances economies of scale

On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 11:33 AM, Jeff Lasman <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wednesday 01 October 2008 09:49 am, Steve Glines wrote:
>
>> Does anyone seriously trust them with your livelihood?
>
> No but ...
>
> We've got a client who's visitors download a lot of music every month;
> we've been thinking of getting them a separate server with a 10mbps
> pipe now, maybe more later (I know what you're thinking; she's a
> singer/songwriter; it's her music and legal <smile>).
>
> Perhaps we should just try everything on one of those accounts.  If it
> doesn't work the investment wasn't even equivalent to one month data
> transit on a server we'd get them.
>
> Whadda ya think?
>

One strategy would be to keep the website and ordering functionality
on your infrastructure and do all the downloads from two, or more,
external sites.

Looking for a low-cost backup for genunix.org, I signed up for a
dreamhoster account (unlimited everything - added a fixed IP address).
 This is a work in process, but you can test the preliminary site
(dumping ground) at: helopilot.dreamhosters.com. [0]  I took advantage
of the "DW50" [1] discount and the total came to $112.53 for the year.

Other possibilities:

- Amazon Web Services  S3 will provide a URL for each S3 storage
"bucket".  The pay-as-you-go model is fair - but could add up for
music downloads.  15 or 20 minutes to check it out.  Bandwidth seems
to be around 3Mbits/Sec (I could be wrong).

- joyent.com will provide a small OpenSolaris zone (they call it an
"Accelerator") for $199/year[2].  Bandwidth is good and not currently
throttled.  Setup can take days.

- slicehost.com $20/month for a small virtual machine.  It seems they
have almost no unhappy users and the web based console will let you
reload (your own choice of) virtual machine, or choose a different
one, if you totally foobar it.  Setup is 5 minutes - this is worth $20
just to check it out IMHO.

- yahoo.com has an all-you-can-eat offering - you have to dig through
the site for details.  It's inexpensive - but they limit the amount of
new content you can add over time.  The exact terms of service are
very fuzzy - meaning they can cut you off if they don't like
"something" about your usage pattern!!

Personal observation: Outsourcing and consolidation of service
providers are a continuing trend - where a service provider
concentrates his/her attention on a narrow niche and then exploits
economies of scale[3].  The challenge for traditional providers is to
become a systems integrator and piggyback on these services where it
makes sense.  Simple redundancy via multiple (out-sourced) providers
may provide *enough* availability/reliability necessary to meet your
clients needs.

[0] subject to change
[1] mentioned by Devils Workshop <[email protected]> blog.  Note that
he made $332 for referrerals - probably more now since he neglected to
provide a link to the signup page in his original blog.
[2] http://www.joyent.com/accelerator/pricing/
[3] note that genunix.org DNS is on dnsmadeeasy.com

Regards,

-- 
Al Hopper  Logical Approach Inc,Plano,TX al-Gniphm1Q+ng6rkq5uMl77VaTQe2KTcn/@public.gmane.org
                   Voice: 972.379.2133 Timezone: US CDT
OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Apr 2005 to Mar 2007
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/ogb_2005-2007/
-- 
Eat sushi frequently. - Avi
[email protected] is the human contact address.
[email protected] is the list posting address.
See below URL for subscribe/unsubscribe and list options:
http://inet-access.net/mailman/listinfo/list