March 12, 2009
what a difference bandwidth makes
I was getting about 30KB/s sustained out of my 2MB/s up 6MB/s down Comcast. Crap. Backblaze said my backup would take 419 days. Today I upgraded to 6MB/s up and 20MB/s down. These speeds were confirmed by Ookla. Now BackBlaze says I will be backed up in 119 days. Still too long, but better. I suspect it will get even better over time.
Posted by Martin at 2:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 1, 2009
finally some tools to catch Comcast bastards
thanks Dan for the pointer to Measurement Labs. They are backed by Google and have a couple academic focused tools for measuring your internet connection performance and catching your ISP if they are throttling specific traffic like bittorrent or others. The UI’s are pretty rough and some tools are Linux only, but it is a start. Glasnost found Comcast is throttling BitTorrent on my connection. I wonder if enough of us used these tools there would be enough data for a class action suit against the bastards.
Posted by Martin at 8:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 5, 2008
Did Comcast just convince me they are not throttling my bandwidth?
Humm. I chatted with consumer concast and they said I need to talk to Business. I called business. They had a problem with the account, but finally got it. They said I am paying for 6Mb up and 1Mb down. Now that is MegaBits. There are 8 Bits in a Byte. This is where it gets interesting and where many people go wrong. I have been running Pure Networks performance monitor for the last two weeks. It says my average network performance is 443KB/sec down and 105KB/sec up. Now KB is KiloBYTES and Comcast is selling MegaBits so you have to multiply Bytes by 8 to get Bits. So Comcast is delivering me 443x8 = 3.544Mb/sec download and .84 Mb/sec up. Now I have two computers on this network and my SonicWall Firewall/router. Unless I configure it differently, it will basically split the available bandwidth in half between the two computers. So I SHOULD be getting about 3Mb/sec down and .5Mb/sec up on each computer. Comcast saw my actuals and said, I am getting more than average actually. And then they said if that wasn't enough I could upgrade to 16Mb/down and 2Mb/up. I may have to.
Can this be right? Do I actually believe I am getting the bandwith i am paying for from Comcast????
Posted by Martin at 10:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 25, 2006
Data centers finally a profitable business again
After a long nuclear winter, it looks like the data center may be turning profitable again: Cultivating Server Farms - New York Times. The major issue now? availability of reliable power. I have it on good authority that Google considered buying an old soviet nuclear aircraft carrier as a reliable power source for their data center. What is next? Biofuels for back up power I would guess.
Posted by Martin at 11:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 10, 2004
Cool utility for tracking domains
Thanks to Troy for pointing me to SnapCHECK.com. Every domain registrar today needs a hook. These guys have a database of expiring domains and track what is expiring when. You can find out what will be come available soon. Kinda a cool thing to know if you want a domain that is already registered.
Posted by Martin at 5:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 9, 2004
cool server tracking tool
What to know what your ISP's real uptime is? check out Netcraft Uptime Survey. Lots of fun tools there too. You can find out who is gaining sites and who is loosing sites in the battle for shared hosting world domination. You can also see what your sites are running and where your servers set in the heirarchy. Very geeky fun stuff.
Posted by Martin at 11:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 10, 2004
A step closer to metered broadband today
I have been thinking for awhile that all you can eat broadband may be short lived. Today, the Seattle regulator of broadband had some harsh questions for Comcast. Apparently they are sending nastygrahams to people who use "excessive bandwidth". But they won't say exactly what that is. They say less than one person in 1,000 use too much. They give examples of behavior that could put you on the lists, but don't say exactly how much is "too much". This is one of the unintended consequences of broadband penetration and especially P2P applications. People actually use them! I bet if someone (Comcast probably does this) actually tracked the average bandwidth consumption for a new broadband user over time, it is up and to the right. There are just ever more interesting ways to use that connection.
It is interesting to remember the maturation of dial up pricing. It started out with per minute pricing. This is for very slow connections remember. Like Cell phones. Then it moved to all you can eat. Then back to what I call "all a regular person should eat" like the AOL 1025 minutes offer. There is an architecture reason for the ISP wanting people to sign on and off like that. For every subscriber, they need a modem at their end and a dedicated phone line. There own fewer modems and phone lines than they have subscribers. Broadband connections, thankfully do not suffer from the same architectural limitations, using software at the server head end. There the limitation is how big the pipe out of the server to the rest of the internet is. And remember, typical broadband connections today are and order of magnitude or two (10-20X) faster than dial up. You can simply drink WAY more bits.
I have seen a number of business plans from start-ups that begin with an assumption of large fixed price pipes to homes with spare processing and disk storage. These start ups want to do everything from distributed enterprise storage to streaming media networks to SETI like applications using all those "wasted" or "idle" resources. The problem with most of these ideas is that only the computer resources are actually sunk, fixed costs. A broadband network is designed with certain bandwidth usage patterns in mind. There will ALWAYS be way more subscribers than the system has capacity for. When applications at the edge (like P2P, web hosting, bulk emailing) start to take up more of the bandwidth, things go out of whack. And Comcast sends you a nasty graham. I hope Comcast has their printer well stocked with paper, because the number of people actually using their connections heavily is only going up and to the right.
When the nasty grams stop working, the next step is metered usage.
Posted by Martin at 8:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 25, 2003
some musings on hosting providers
I asked my good friend Troy who he recommends for hosting web sites. Here are his comments...
Pair Networks is excellent: http://www.pair.com/pair/shared/webmaster.html
I was a customer in 1995 and have referred about a dozen folks, all of whom are still there. They allow any CGI scripts but you or someone else will have to install MT. The MT people sell installation for ~$50 though I don't think there's much to it. Pair has a pile of online docs about adding CGI scripts. They're the best in the business for shared Web hosting, which is probably what you want.
As far as reliability, you can read their system notices at http://www.pair.com/pair/support/notices/
You can see their named machines at http://www.pair.com/pair/support/library/serverconfig/serverdetails.html
Next step up is a dedicated server. $120/month buys a speedy rented server and more bandwidth than you'll use from Rackshack.net and ServerBeach.com. I'd do it if I didn't have access to colocation. Get one with Ensim or cPanel, Web UIs that make short work of adding new sites and email accounts.
Given the huge cost of tech support for dedicated servers that people wreak havoc on, most folks just go without. Rackshack and Serverbeach support basically means reimaging your server back to its starting point. A friend of mine has been very happy with his Rackshack server, where he hosts a comics subscription site called ModernTales.
Aha, but you asked for support. If a shared Pair Networks account won't do but you want support or $200/month isn't unreasonable, go to DataPipe. http://www.datapipe.com/easyadmin.asp
DataPipe rocks. A friend of mine there occasionally forwards some of the bizarre and clueless tech support questions that they diligently answer.
Rackshack has thousands of servers: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/04/14/netcraft_hosting_provider_server_count_available.html
.. but DataPipe takes the cake for reliability and speed: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/performance.html
So in short: Pair and DataPipe are the best at what they do; Rackshack and Serverbeach provide a more affordable version with some known drawbacks.
Troy
Posted by Martin at 4:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
OK making the hosting MOVE! may be down
I am moving my server and changing the DNS entries. We may be down for a few days. I am moving here: <a title="Just $5/month! - Tranquil Hosting(tq)" href="http://www.tqhosting.com/">Just $5/month! - Tranquil Hosting(tq)</a>
Posted by Martin at 4:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 2, 2003
Here is how hosting really works
Thanks to Rich for laying it all out.. <a title="Tong Family Blog: Hosting Unstood (volume ii) BLOGGED" href="http://www.tongfamily.com//000006.html">Tong Family Blog: Hosting Unstood (volume ii) BLOGGED</a>
Posted by Martin at 6:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Searching for a new Hosting place
My friend who runs <a href="http://www.promoweb.com">PromoWeb</a> is getting out of web hosting, so it is time to move. Finding good resources from <a href="http://www.tongfamily.com//000032.html">Rich</a> and a couple of meta sites like <a href="http://hosting-web-central.com/budget.html">Host Web Central</a>, <a href="http://www.webhostratings.com">Web Host Ratings</a> and a (fairly) impartial <a href="http://www.webhostingtalk.com">chat board</a>. Sounds like there are lots of people unhappy about their hoster. And there are definitely tiers to the business. I am probably going to go with one of the larger ones just to make sure they are around. Maybe <a href="http://www.lunarpages.com/hosting.html">Lunarpages</a>
One interesting twist is that I have two domains to host. Some places let you "upgrade" your package to include two domains for a small fee. Some make you buy a whole nother thing.
Posted by Martin at 6:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack