A little over a year ago, when I worked at EV1Servers, I got a call from an event producer who needed 200 Mbps of bandwidth capacity for a three-day webcast. I told him I could set up a dedicated gigabit switch with unmetered connectivity, but he’d have to place his order a week ahead of time, and keep the system for at least 30 days. He said I was out of my mind, and I thought he was being unrealistic. What I offered was a highly flexible solution that had served hundreds of other customers well.
But I was wrong.
Earlier this week Second Life (SL)(which traceroutes to Internap) came out with a new version of its client software. Half way through release day, the file was moved to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). According to SL’s official blog:
“For the tail 8 hours of the download rush, we averaged roughly 70 gigabytes of viewer download per hour. [That's about 160 Mbps] Then it settled down to a relatively steady stream of about 20 to 30 gigabytes per hour. In the last 23 hours we’ve transferred a total of ~900 gigabytes so far – which I’d estimate to be around 30,000 to 38,000 downloads.”
S3 costs $0.15 per GB for distributed, redundant storage and $0.20 per GB for bandwidth. Second Life now owes Amazon $180.15. In contrast, the solution I quoted the would-be customer cost at least 20x more. And that’s for one single server on Cogent-only bandwidth. Yikes.
By the way, SL had also considered Akamai, but…
“It just turned out that the S3 solution was ready for deployment immediately, where akamai requires more negotiation. In other words, we already had an amazon S3 account where I was test something out, and then when we noticed the bandwidth was pegged, we made a fast decision to speed up our plans to put our viewer elsewhere, and chose S3.”
Here’s what I think is the moral of the story: the web hosting industry is evolving very, very quickly. If you can’t meet a customer’s needs – no matter how crazy it sounds – someone else will.
Which reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend Patrick. He’s an attorney now, but I’m expecting him to become a Web 2.0 CEO any day now.
Him: If I order a web hosting plan, they’ll back up my data continuously and automatically, right?
Me: Which planet are you from?
But based on what David Wartell at Righteous Software has been telling me, quite a few web hosting companies will be able to deliver what Patrick’s looking for very soon. The question is, will you be one of them?
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