By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
This story appeared in the January/February 2005 issue of Web Host Industry Review magazine. Click here to subscribe for free.
February 14, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting companies often discuss differentiating their services through unique specializations, niche areas of expertise or special efforts at customer service. But before a hosting provider can begin to think about adding special features, it has to make sure that it meets certain fundamental standards of service.
There is no facet of Web hosting more fundamental than performance, and no standard that amounts to a more direct measure of quality. There is arguably no more important factor in a Web hosting customer’s experience. Performance is integral to a Web host’s image, too. It can be among the most significant selling points for prospective customers, and among the most significant issues related to customer retention.
“I think that in terms of a customer coming on board, performance is number two. Price is still number one. But in terms of customers staying with the company, performance is the number one issue,” says Bevan Erickson, director of marketing and sales at Web hosting firm WestHost (westhost.com). “We get a lot of our new business from customer referrals, so performance is something that we’re always looking at improving.”
Service level agreements guaranteeing adherence to certain established standards of performance are now accepted, and expected, to be a part of any legitimate Web hosting contract. And savvy hosting customers are checking hosts’ SLAs and making sure they meet their mark.
An essential part of managing performance is monitoring, and the use of tools to maintain a “network awareness,” says Eric Rosebrock, president of webmaster network The Web Freaks, and lead developer of the company’s network monitoring tool Hybodus (hybodus.com).
“I think network awareness is critical to any Web hosting operation,” he says. “If you don’t know if your sites are online or if your servers are online, and you are contacted by a customer that can’t connect to your servers, it makes you look bad, like you don’t have control over your network. And it creates doubt that you don’t know what’s going on.”
A serious performance problem, such as a server going offline, is probably the worst problem a Web host can experience. But it can snowball, creating problems that stretch into technical support and customer service. Catching problems before customers identify them and contact you is a Web host’s best defense, says Rosebrock.
“By trying to intercept network problems and server performance problems,” he says, “you can reduce the dissatisfaction that anyone would have with your technical support. If you know about the problem when it happens or before it happens, and you can get it repaired before your customers come to you, it eliminates that last step where the customer has to deal with you.”
And as network hardware becomes more powerful, a problem with a single server can become more acute. Web hosts are packing more customers onto a single server, so a problem that would have affected 50 clients in the past now affects 500.
There are plenty of tools available for Web hosts looking to monitor their network performance, says Rosebrock, from the limited, but open-source or inexpensive, tools like Nagio, Cacti or PHPsysinfo, to the more complete, more expensive tools like IP Check and up.time and even enterprise-scale products like Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView.
Carol Carpenter, director of product management at Web performance monitoring firm Keynote Systems (keynote.com) points out that third-party assessment enables a Web hosting provider to objectively verify the performance of its services. Keynote’s performance monitoring services emulate an end user’s experience, using machines distributed geographically to simulate the distribution of users to test the performance of Web applications, transactions and sites.
Keynote has partnered with hosting companies, including IBM, enabling them to offer their customers that kind of objective verification as an integral part of their services.
“We’re really that neutral third party,” says Carpenter, “that can provide the monitoring that allows Web hosting companies to prove the value of their services to customers.”
Keynote offers a range of performance monitoring platforms that includes its high-end Transaction Perspective, for detailed monitoring of complex, high-end Web transactions, to its more affordable Red Alert platform, for tracking Web site uptime.
Most applicable to the mid-sized Web host, says Keynote, is its Application Perspective platform, which can offer both an external, end-user view of application performance along with the internal private agent view.
In developing Hybodus, says Rosebrock, the company looked at targeting certain key areas of network performance failure. He points to the current Web hosting trend of overselling in which Web hosts sell more space or bandwidth than a server can provide, banking on the fact that customers will not use all the capacity they are given as one such area. When customers start using all the capacity they are paying for, servers can quickly become overloaded.
“When people start tapping into what they’ve actually purchased,” he says, “hosting companies start getting into trouble. If they don’t monitor that disk usage, bandwidth usage, server load, CP utilization and TCP connections there are so many different aspects that you have to monitor they’re going to hit that point where the server is maxed out, and it’s running slow for everybody.”
In deploying a network monitoring solution, Rosebrock stresses the importance of setting up the monitoring server off-site. A monitoring server located in the same data center as the servers being monitored will likely be able to connect, even if the external network goes down. The result would be an inaccurate picture of uptime, since the outside world would be unable to connect to the servers.
“I would set up a network monitoring application in another data center, as far away from your servers as is reasonable,” says Rosebrock. “A lot of people set up these network monitoring applications, but do it internally and it’s irrelevant to the outside world because your main pipe can be down but behind the gateway, everything seems okay. You’re defeating the purpose of network monitoring for connectivity if you don’t have your monitoring server located outside your data center.”
As improvements in monitoring technology afford Web hosting providers a better view of their operations, and of their service level agreements, stripped-down monitoring tools are enabling Web hosting customers to perform more detailed performance reviews of their own. As a result, performance the fundamental feature of the Web hosting relationship has become a measurable agreement, something any host that hopes to succeed must measure carefully.
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Since 2000, The Web Host Industry Review has made a name for itself as the foremost authority of the Web hosting industry providing reliable, insightful and comprehensive news, interviews and resources to the hosting community. TheWHIR is an iNET Interactive property. For more information on iNET Interactive, visit http://www.inetinteractive.com
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