Closer To The Ideal

In late 2005 I was working at Bluewall and the owner of the company became convinced that some of the sites we were building were about to go super nova, so he got a second server from Rackspace. This was a stupid decision, but it is a a common one. I find clients often get over-excited about their projects. I’m sure some of this excitement is a healthy part of being emotionally invested in the project that you’re trying to bring to life, but that same excitement can lead to needless expense. Dedicated servers from RackSpace are expensive and, as it turned out, Bluewall’s need for extra servers was years in the future. The purchase decision in 2005 represents a lot of wasted money. So why didn’t the second server get shut down? Because once you have even one (low traffic) site on a server, it becomes a pain to shut down that server.

The Second Road had a similar experience. They started off with 3 dedicated servers, plus a firewall and load balancer, from Rackspace. The cost was $1,800 a month. When we got involved with the project, we moved the site to a server from Hostway, which costs us $150 a month (and on which we have several other websites, all sharing one server). So far, this has met all of the Second Road’s needs on the web.

Dedicated servers represent a lot of potentially wasted resources, especially for a small startup which may grown quickly, but which also may NOT grow quickly.  And what is growth, when you’re talking about traffic? If you get mentioned on BoingBoing, and suddenly you are getting 200 requests a minute, and your server collapses under the load, is it time to get another server? What if the spike in traffic lasts 2 days and then dies away and never comes back? If you get another server based on that one spike, you’ll regret it. Unless the spike is permanent. In which case you’ll regret not getting that extra server sooner.

These experiences have me interested in the new cloud services, which promise just the right amount of computing power that your site needs, no more no less. The idea of the “cloud” is that you can scale your resource needs up or down in increments finer than a whole server. So for the next big client we get we will try a cloud service. These are 3 we are looking at right now:

Mosso (this was just bought by Rackspace)

Amazon

IronServers

There has been a lot of investment, by a lot of companies, in cloud services and, really, it is hard to keep up. The fact that as good a company as RackSpace was willing to buy Mosso speaks well about Mosso. Since there is no way to evaluate all the contenders now competing in this field, we are forced to look at the best known, and then one of the somewhat unknowns, just as a test.

For the Amazon services, one of the best known users is SmugMug. They’ve mostly written about the S3 service, but also some about the cloud service.

Amazon is also now moving into the Content Distribution Network business. This is an aspect of building websites that we haven’t yet researched much. My feeling is that neither us nor our clients will ever be interested in the nitty gritty details of getting content to every corner of the world. We don’t want to be up late at night wondering “Is the site running fast enough in Malaysia?” So we’re pleased to see Amazon in this space and we hope they do a good job, because certainly we will give them a close look, if we ever work with a client who really needs that kind of scale.

This is from the article on Ajaxian:

With nearly 2.5 million requests per day to the jQuery website, the jQuery project team is constantly on the look out for ways to decrease hosting costs while still managing the growing number of requests for the site’s resources. Originally leveraging Amazon S3 for many of their static pages, the project has now turned to Amazon’s new CloudFront CDN. The change has allowed for jQuery pages to be globally hosted as opposed to being centrally located in Amazon’s Seattle-based S3 hosting center.

In tests, John Resig, team lead for the jQuery project, noticed substantial performance gains based on the switch:

“I ran a similar test here in Boston and even managed to see a large improvement. I was seeing latency of anywhere from 50-200ms on Amazon S3, but only a latency of 17-19ms with CloudFront.”

What does all of this mean? It means that the jQuery site is going to load even faster than it does now. We already receive some excellent hosting from Media Temple but being able to off-load these static files to the fast-loading servers will only make for a better browsing experience.

In less than 24 hours the project had received almost 2.5 million requests for over 50GB of data. The only drawback is an increase in bandwidth costs but still substantially less than that of a traditional hosting plan. The jQuery project makes use of the Google AJAX API as well and recommends it as choice for linking to the jQuery and jQuery UI libraries.