A few days ago, a GoDaddy customer lobbied to put his site on the front page of Digg. He said it was an experiment to see how well his shared hosting plan could handle a traffic spike. Some called his blog post a publicity stunt, others complained that he was inconsiderate of other customers on the same server. The fact was, his visitors got a “service unavailable” error.
In GoDaddy’s defense, many other customers reported that their sites have survived multiple waves of flash crowds from Digg. That’s great news – for now.
But Dan Golding from Tier 1 Research predicts that the volume of Internet traffic will continue doubling annually. Attention seekers will have the potential of attracting ever-larger audiences for their 15 minutes of fame. And web hosts will see higher and more frequent traffic spikes on their networks.
If you’re a large provider who operates your own data centers, your primary concern will be cost. Your customers’ aggregate bandwidth consumption will inevitably rise, and you may have to provision additional GigEs to accommodate all the simultaneous spikes. Unfortunately, thanks to oversold bandwidth limits, your additional expenses may not be offset by increased revenue.
If you’re a reseller who runs your business on leased servers, you may be in bigger trouble. All of your competitors offer 1000+ GB of data transfer for $5 or $10 hosting plans. You’ve got to keep up, but your own bandwidth allowance is only 1000 GB for a whole $99 server. As your customers’ traffic grows – and as they become increasing savvy at getting themselves Digged and Slashdotted – you face ever greater risks of being stuck with your hosting provider’s hefty overage fee.
So what’s the solution? Should you consider Amazon.com’s no overselling, pay by the GB pricing scheme? Switch to an ad-based model in which more traffic equals more revenue? Encourage customers to offload traffic through CoralCDN or other free P2P services? Because if Internet traffic is doubling, sooner rather than later, you’ll have to do something.
