Super-Networking Blog

You hosting something on your home PC and the IP address keeps getting changed by your ISP? Check out this service called Dynamic DNS, it is a service that allows you to have a hostname permanently pointed back to your home computer even with a dynamic IP. How they do it is you install a client on your PC and as your IP address changes it update the service. Even better it is free for up to 5 hostname.

It is really getting interesting on the bandwidth structures available to web based companies now. Amazon’s S3 service is lowering their prices even more than before, they were cheap at $0.20/GB transfer. It is getting to the point where even with a screaming deal on an unlmited transfer plan with a capped Mbps transfer you might want to make the switch.

With some plans you can get unlimited transfer but you can say use 100Mbps at any one time for a flat monthly rate. This can seem like a good deal when you are doing a lot of constant trasfer where you aren’t going to go over the 100Mbps and are just doing a lot of data. The thing is you are capped for high traffic times and no matter if your traffic goes up, stays the same, or goes down you are getting charged the same amount. So when you are doing 90Mbps everyday it is a good deal but when you are doing 10Mbps it becomes a waste of money.

So you look at an option based on GB transfer and they will charge you monthly depending on how my transfer you do. Benefit here if your traffic goes up, hopefully are making more money, the bill goes up but if your traffic goes way down so will the bill. You aren’t tieing yourself to a flat rate you might not be using. The thing in the past was that with GB transfer costs of $1.50/GB, that you find with some CDN networks and a more average $0.50/GB, you are just coming out a lot higher on the cost than with the flat rate. Now with Amazon’s less than $0.20/GB you need to relook at your contracts. Might be time to make the switch.

There are pricing changes coming to Amazon’s S3 service. I know most of the time you think price change, oh no I guess they are going up. Not in this case.

Current bandwidth price (through May 31, 2007) $0.20 / GB - uploaded $0.20 / GB - downloaded New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007) $0.10 per GB - all data uploaded

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data downloaded

$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data downloaded

$0.13 per GB - data downloaded / month over 50 TB Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of charge New request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)

$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests

$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

* No charge for delete requests

Storage will continue to be charged at $0.15 / GB-month used.

The end result is an overall price reduction for the vast majority of our customers. If this new pricing had been applied to customers� March 2007 usage, 75% of Amazon S3 customers would have seen their bill decrease, while an additional 11% would have seen an increase of less than 10%. Only 14% of customers would have experienced an increase of greater than 10%.

Thanks to Jeff for the info.

Here is an older post of mine on Amazon S3’s service.

Had a fun time of the weekend with one of our Co-Hosting providers. We have had two servers with them forever and they are completely hosted by them so it isn’t our hardware. We have had problems with their tech support in the past but lately we haven’t had any problems and they are dirt cheap.

Well this weekend we had both of our servers, which run the same content and are supposed to be redundant to each other, go down. They didn’t go down for a couple minutes or a couple hours but about 36 hours. I put in a total of 10 calls to their support line, out of the 10 calls I got through to a tech once.

Every time you call and don’t get through to someone they dump you to voicemail, there is no choice to stay on the line and wait. When you do leave a message they will not get back to you. In the past basically I have left a voicemail for them and a couple hours later things get fixed and you never hear a reason why or hear back at all. There comes a tipping point where cheap can no longer overcome the terrible support.

I don’t understand why it is so hard to either call me with a status update or at least a resolution and cause of the problem. If you can’t call me them email I left them both.

Hosting Provider is HiVelocity, be afraid very afraid of trusting your website with them.

Well we had a jam-packed day full of datacenter tours yesterday. We drove all over Minneapolis and St. Paul to look at 6 different datacenters. 10 Hours of touring and talking about places to co-locate some of our equipment.

All of the datacenters we visited were quite different, both in the facilities and the people of managed them. I am going to go through some of the highlights of all the datacenters we visited yesterday.

-TWTC (511 Building, Minneapolis)

We took a look at their old co-location space and the new 10,000 sq foot space they were building in the 511 building. They had a pretty nice layouts, the air conditioning wasn’t bad, the security wasn’t bad.

They don’t offer any managed services but it you need a cheap place to locate some equipment and you have the man power to manage it go for it.

Still nicer than having your own datacenter since they take care of the AC/Power/Security of your equipment for you. They have generator backup power, UPSes, no raised floor, fire protection was dry pipe only.

-Sunguard (511 Building, Minneapolis)

We took a look at their enterprise class datacenter in the 511 building and it was pretty impressive. They take a lot of steps to ensure security of your equipment, they have an onsite 24/7 manned NOC onsite.

Everything was very clean, very professional. They pushed their professional services a lot and it was clear that they wanted you to use all of their managed services you could because that is where they make their money.

They had plenty of air conditioning with a raised floor, they had a fire suppression system as well as dry pipes. Generator backup power, redundant everything.

Very nice datacenter.

-Honeycomb (Minneapolis)

We took a look at this datacenter and I would have to say it was the most interesting setup we saw. You pull into a neighborhood that doesn’t look like a co-location space should live there.

The building is a 1900 century in not good condition place that you walk up very narrow dangerous stair to get to. Basically what it is, is a geek shop that someone gutted some apartments, put up lots of AC, power, racks, generate etc… to start up a co-location space.

This is a total non corporate geek place where you can get space and managed service for much cheaper than you are going to get at a Sunguard. They are very rough around the edges, but seemed to be quite knowledgeable, they are staff 24/7 and had some good bandwidth coming in.

Did have a fire suppression system. Seemed a little warm in their datacenter for my taste.

Visi (St. Paul)

We took a look at this enterprise class datacenter and I was really impressed. They seemed to have it all, they has more than enough air conditioning, they had a ton of space available and even more to expand later.

They had raised floors for their AC, they had plenty of power and redundant everything, Fire suppression, etc…. They provided everything from just a 1/4 of a rack to caged off areas for all your racks. They will give you any level of managed service you need up to a completely hosted solution.

Great security, clean place, friendly people. They have a 24/7 NOC on site that is always managing the datacenter. Everything was straight forward, didn’t push anything and we will to work with you.

I would rank this datacenter #1 out of all the datacenters we toured yesterday.

Implex (Minneapolis)

This datacenter is in the basement of a high-rise building in Minneapolis. They datacenter is located in a bank vault for extra security. This datacenter was rather disappointing to me, their datacenter was downright hot, most equipment was in open racks with cables running everywhere.

Didn’t seem like they had their act together at all, someone could trip and rip a cable out of your equipment or power something off accidently. They didn’t have a lot of room open but even if they did their AC wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Wasn’t really happy with any aspect of their co-locate space.

I would rank this datacenter as the worst one we toured yesterday.

ipHouse (Tritech Building, Minneapolis)

This datacenter is located in the Tritech building and was impressively large. This was by far the largest open facility that we toured but most of the space was open cages for growth.

As I said this was a large space and so hard to cool and they did appear to have some cooling issues. They didn’t have a raised floor and really just seemed too hot for me to be real comfortable.

They have good security, redundant power, generators , etc… There are a ton of ISPs/telecoms in this area for cross connecting your connection to different carriers would be no problem. The people running this datacenter were knowledgeable, friendly, and willing to work with different situations.

I think I would rank this datacenter as my #2 pick over the ones we saw yesterday.

I would imagine that they are going to be much cheaper than Visi my #1 pick so might be the best viable solution.

We haven’t gotten prices back from any of these places and that could change some of the standings but I think by taking a look at these datacenters we got a feel for how they are going to stack up price wise.

This by far isn’t all the details for these datacenter but the things that stuck in my mind. If you have any questions of comments about these datacenters post a comment.

I have started playing with Amazon S3 in the past day or so to see what they can do for the company I work for. We currently use a couple of CDN networks as well as our own network to distribute content.

I started looking into Amazon S3 as an ultra low cost file hosting network and it seems to offer more than that and could answer some potential problems we are running into. If we use them as a content delivery service they are going to be slower and of a lower end user quality then a CDN because they don’t have servers all of the globe like a CDN. They are however cheaper than a CDN and therefore a possible viable alternative to content we currently serve out of our own datacenter.

The other thing I am looking at S3 for other than content delivery is content storage and emergency failover hosting. CDNs typically just cache your information onto their network for faster load times and bandwidth offloading but if you are down for an extended period of time they will have nothing to cache and so then cannot serve it to your customers any longer.

What I am looking to S3 it possible do is to be an emergency middleman for our CDN networks. So if we are down have the CDN networks cache off of S3’s storage. Since S3’s storage is so cheap it makes a great offsite backup solution. I have not worked out the details yet on any of this since I just got our S3 account up and running but I am hopeful.

S3 currently uses an API that you can write a program to use for file uploading, downloading, management etc… You can’t use FTP and it doesn’t sync automatically like a CDN so I have been out looking for some tools that are already out there to get us up and running quickly. Eventually I am sure we can write a program of our own to do it but for the interim some freeware will be just fine.

Here are a couple I have used so far:
S3 Firefox Plugin - This App has a very easy to use interface and great management but uploads are painfully slow.
S3 Java App - This App is less user friendly and the management of the files is lacking but the upload speeds are quite good.

One of the big companies that use Amazon S3 is Smugmug they are using it for the duel purpose of content delivery and backups as well. Check out the CEO’s Blog for some good info on their experience with S3.

Interesting Info on S3 by SmugMug
Slides Presentation

We have started to look for a new server co-location center in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. There are quite of few of them to take a look at. We are probably going to start taking tours soon so if anyone has recommendations on co-location spaces in the Twin Cities area please comment here.

We are looking for locations that can provide us high bandwidth at good costs, good hosting provider customer/technical support since we are not local. Of course there are a lot of factors but these are a couple of the higher ones on the list.
Some places we are going to look at:

Vericenter

Implex

ipHouse

XO Colocation

VeriSpace

Honeycomb

Visi

Sunguard

TWTC

I am always looking for lower cost file hosting for our network. We currently have a few providers that we use for downloads on our sites. Some of them are quite expensive like Akamai and some are pretty well priced like Panther Express. We also have used a company like FileBurst in the past as well.

Akamai and Panther both are CDN networks so they cache our files for faster transfers.

FileBurst was basically a glorified file server but we much less expensive than Akamai and had good uptime.

Panther Express came along and was a lower price then both of the past companies and went head to head in performance with Akamai.

I just started looking at a new ultra low cost provider which is Amazon’s S3 service. We aren’t currently using them but a lot of companies are and they look pretty promising. Price point is $0.15 per GB-Month storage and $0.20 per GB of data transferred. S3 is not a CDN network and so their performance won’t be quite as good but at that price you could at least dump some lower valued traffic over to them.

If we do sign up with them and start using them a lot I will update this blog on our experience. So far my recommendation is still Panther Express.

I have a recommendation for people who are looking for a lower cost high quality Content Delivery Network to distribute your content across the web.

Panther Express www.pantherexpress.net

Our experience has been that they are pretty much as good of a performer as Akamai. We have had great customer service experience with them. They have had no downtime and a pretty go interface. The kicker is they are less than 50% the cost of the big dog Akamai. Check them out.

Google just recently updated their “Quality Score” system for their adwords system. So if you buy keyword searches from Google you can now see how they rank it. The better the ranking in their system the less you have to pay per click to advertise with them. I have seen a lot of people talking that a CPC of $0.03 - $0.05 with a new rating of poor could jump to $1.00 per click.

Google’s Official Statement here.

I am not going to go into all the details on this since I am not a marketing guy but what I want to know is how can I help the quality score. Up front google tells you it has to do with your words matching your landing page content and all the marketing stuff but also it is affected my “customer experience”. What affects that, and how is it rated?

How much does downtime affect your quality score and how long does that downtime stay in your rating? How much does load times affect your score? Do they factor in if you are using a CDN or if it is all based out of your home network. I would like to see more details on what a network team can do to improve “customer experience” in Google’s eyes.

If anyone has details on this topic please post to this thread, I will update will info I find out in the future.