Share the Pain

By Doug Kaye

November 22, 2002 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Think back to how much easier life was before you owned a car. Maintenance? Insurance? Not your problem. You took the bus or got rides from friends and family. You depended on shared infrastructure. But at some point—perhaps because the volume of your needs increased—you “upgraded” to dedicated transportation, and discovered the joys of automobile ownership: higher costs, greater responsibility, and more anxiety.

Can you recall that feeling of, “Life was simpler and certainly less expensive before I had this car?” That’s how you’ll feel when you upgrade your web site from shared-server web hosting to a dedicated server. (And for you large-site operators, it’s probably how you feel every day. What follows applies to you, too.)

The vast majority of web sites are hosted on shared servers supported by shared infrastructure. When a web site becomes more complex or receives more traffic than a shared server can handle, it’s standard practice to upgrade the site to a dedicated server. The only problem is that when you go from $19.95 per month shared hosting to a $99.00 (or more) per month dedicated server, you take a huge step backwards in terms of management. In one of the ironies of the web-hosting business, you pay more for less.

As web sites grow and become more important to their owners, there’s a tendency for those owners to want increased control, most notably by deploying dedicated devices such as servers, routers, firewalls, load balancers, storage, and backup/recovery systems. However, when done properly, there are many advantages to going in the other direction, and seeking opportunities to share those infrastructure components.

The Benefits of Sharing

Consider what happens when there’s a problem with your dedicated server—a problem unique to your site. You’re fighting for your vendor’s attention, competing with other problems that need to be solved or routine tasks that need to be performed.

Compare that to what occurs when a web-hosting service has a problem that affects all of its customers. That really gets attention, and suddenly you’ll have your vendor’s very best people working on your problem because it’s now the vendor’s problem, too.

I think of it this way: When the power goes off at my house, one of the first things I want to know is whether my neighbors’ power is also off. At one extreme, if the entire state of California is without power, I know I’m looking at a long outage. At the other extreme, if it’s just my house, I become concerned that I may not be important enough to get the attention of the utility company. My best chance of getting power back quickly is when my entire neighborhood has lost its electricity. I want the utility company to have enough pain (i.e., unhappy customers) that it will take the problem seriously, yet not so much pain that the problem is beyond the scope of its typical skills. I want to be in the situation where my problems are those that my vendor handles routinely, such as the failure of a small, local power transformer.

To use the same strategy with outsourced web hosting, you must identify which services are appropriate to share with other customers. For example, all of a web-hosting service’s customers use the same fiber to connect their servers to the Internet. If that fiber is cut by a construction site back-hoe (unquestionably the Internet’s single worst enemy), all of those servers may go offline. As unpleasant a prospect as this may be, you can expect that the web-hosting service will use whatever resources are available to work around, and eventually solve, the problem.

Some web-site managers think they’re better off using colocation with their own, independent connection to the Internet. But if you go that route, you won’t be leveraging the skills and attention a web-hosting service could apply to solving a problem that affects all of its customers. (A well-designed data center will have multiple fiber runs entering the building through multiple points of entry so that a single fiber cut can’t take the entire building offline.)

There are two opportunities to increase your leverage of shared resources. First, some of the larger vendors offer shared-server hosting on large redundant systems. Rather than run a modest number of customers’ sites on a small server, these vendors build larger, more reliable clustered configurations with redundant processors and storage systems on which they can support 10x or even 100x as many sites. You get the benefit of the redundant architecture for free. Furthermore, the law of averages is in your favor. Because these systems have more capacity, a single site on the same server that suddenly becomes inundated with traffic has less effect on your site. Ultimately, you may be able to keep your site on such a larger shared server, i.e., delay your upgrade to a dedicated server, for longer.

Even if you do find you need to switch to dedicated servers, continue to look for opportunities to leverage shared resources such as connectivity, monitoring, DNS, backup and recovery, load balancing, SMTP/sendmail, streaming media, and content-delivery services. If done right, you can minimize the scope of your responsibility at the same time you save money, and sleep better.