30,000+ Users x 30 MB downloads in 23 Hours - Guess How Much It Cost?

Tags:  Web 2.0  Storage  Amazon  Anet  Internap  Righteous Software  R1Soft 

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 (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?

One of the Web hosting industry's longest-standing citizens, Isabel Wang is also a high-tech enthusiast. Through her WHIR blog, she examines the impact emerging Web technologies will have on the Web hosting business, and on the motivations of hosting consumers. Isabel has been in the web hosting ... (Read full bio)

Comment anonymously or log into your WHIR account

Logging in allows enhanced commenting features (such as external linking) in news, features, blogs and more.

User:

Pass:

(reset password)

Don't have an account yet? Register now!


 

Comment by Anonymous on Saturday, October 28, 2006

Today's expectations are very demanding, or are they? What once were features in some datacenters are now industry standards.

Just take cell phones for example I remember when getting one that would make calls was sufficient now people want them to be able to do everything from take pictures, email, text, video, etc., now that is pretty standard.

Comment by Anonymous on Saturday, October 28, 2006

You weren't wrong. Things change rapidly in this industry. A year ago, you were doing the best you could for that customer. You've observed that this same offering today wouldn't cut it against other providers, but you're being a bit unfair to yourself with your comparison, don't you think?

As for Wartell's stand, I can see this being possible. In fact, I'm pretty sure companies are doing this now, sending an incremental image to a series of remote hard drives, each in a RAID array. Every hour, a different drive gets the incremental backup. Because it is incremental, the load and time is relatively small and quick, and you always have a "save point" available up to X# of hours back. This would be overkill for a 1-to-1 server/backup setup (unless your data was really that mission-critical), but for a cluster, I can see it, and I think it's already taking place.

Comment by Anonymous on Saturday, October 28, 2006

I didn't mean wrong as in I treated the customer badly, but in retrospect I was short-sighted. EV1's private rack was a really popular solution, and people who bought it seemed happy. So I thought of it as a finished product; it didn't occur to me that customers requirements might evolve beyond its capabilities. It's not easy to innovate and standardize at the same time, but it looks like that's what it takes to stay in this business!

As for backup, you should look at Wartell's product :) (http://www.r1soft.com) It does almost continuous incremental backups, even on open files.

Comment by Anonymous on Sunday, October 29, 2006

I was reading through his site yesterday. I looke

Comment by Anonymous on Sunday, October 29, 2006

These are very good questions. How frequently you

Comment by Anonymous on Monday, October 30, 2006

Thanks for the clarifications Dave. Your explanat

Related Content

Most Popular

OLDER: These Numbers Make Me Dizzy | NEWER: HTML 5: the next generation, or largely a pointless effort?