Web 2.0.11562 beta

OK you’re a startup without the money or patience or expertise to setup your own servers in a way that will enable you to scale to a spike in demand. You hope you’ll experience growing pains, but worry about it too.

You pay as you go in the cloud computing model. Define server “instances” and create and kill them as needed. Defining server instances mean to decide what applications go on the server, and the configuration options you’ll need. I’m oversimplifying it a bit, but in general you can automate the process of spawning and reaping server instances based on traffic levels. There are some nice tools available to help you set triggers, specific amounts of traffic that will cause a new instance to start up, or go away.

I was oversimplifying it, that’s true. For webservers this model is just about as easy as it gets, because many others have defined server profiles you can choose from and use. But obviously a database server is going to pose additional challenges, right? You can’t just pull up more database servers without some plan for replication. You must plan in advance to scale… I mean start with a single server, be prepared to setup a backup DB server as a slave, proceed to having multiple database servers, some replcated servers dedicated to read operations and some sensible strategy for passing update data around. But hey, if you actually make it to the end game in your plan you must surely be hitting a home run with your website!
Amazon is the mindshare leader here with their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, but there are plenty of rivals cropping up everywhere. Amazon gives you the nice benefit of being able to use their S3 storage service in conjunction with EC2 without incurring a data transfer fee. Same with their queueing service SQS.

Why would you consider this? You’re a startup, as I said, and your budget and time are both limited. Pay by the hour as you need - what could be better?

OK so you’re a hotshot and you want to do it right. Your site rocks and you think it’s gonna be huge!

Grid computing gives you the reassurance that when your site is digg’ed you can automatically use a share of the resources from all the machines on the grid. Similarly in the case of a hardware issue, an automatic failover can save your butt by having the HTTP requests routed to the next box. Sweet huh?

From what I’ve seen, the hosts offering this service tend to let you install and run pretty much what you want (within reason) as was the case with the dedicated server we covered in the previous post. Compare this to the dedicated server and you may find the advantages very appealing indeed! They both offer you plenty of storage and bandwidth, grid accounts a bit less perhaps, but you get the scalability that can be oh so hard to get when you’re running on one physical server. In the Digg scenario, there’s not much time to react, let alone try to get another machine running and partition your app to run on two boxes instead of one.

OK this is just getting too weird, somebody should be watching and making these guys adhere to some sort of policy. Any consistent policy at all. I had several expired domains, with expiration dates spanning a stretch of more than a week, all removed from my account within a couple minutes today. Weird.

With any other registrar I’ve ever heard of or dealt with, they allow a certain amount of time to pass, a grace deletion period, between the expiration date and the time when the domain will be deleted from my account. Here it seems arbitrary, maybe it depends on the domain. In fact some of the recent domains have deleted, but most of the recent ones have been “moved” into an account controlled by Encirca. I think they’re taking advantage of a time when registrar activity is not being monitored by the registry. It’s a shame, because customers like me value knowing what to expect. I’m buying .pro domains elsewhere from now on.

Ah, so you’re not a good fit for the shared hosting environment? That means you did not meet one of the requirements: low traffic, only one or two sites, small amount of static content, no need to have much control, low budget, no special programming environment requirements, standardized software is fine, etc.

If you winced when you read one or two of these then VPS is for you. As the name implies, this is a virtual server. Depending on your host and plan you may have a control panel software that makes life easy. Some things may not be allowed or enabled, but in theory you should be able to restart the server, serve up many sites, install common apps for multiple sites to use and more.

The next step is not a virtual but an actual server. A dedicated server is a box that you pay for. Sometimes it’s completely managed for a monthly fee, and sometimes you bring your box to a colocation facility to use only their bandwidth, environmentally sheltered room, backup power, massive connectivity? Well there’s typically an attentive guy watching over the boxes waiting for a chance to do something, like put a CD-ROM into one of the machines. This is part of the service, as should be physical security.

The beauty of this obviously, is that it is totally yours, install and run whatever you want!

Cloud computing, grid computing, dedicated servers, VPS, virtualization, shared hosting, etc. - what does it all mean? And how can you choose what’s best for you and your website? Too broad a topic to cover in one post, but maybe it’s a good theme to come back and examine in a series of several posts.

First of all, if you have one low traffic website that’s a collection of several static (as in unchanging) web pages then shop based on price. But keep a backup copy of all files. This describes most personal and small business websites unfortunately, because most people don’t realize the opportunities they’re missing out on by not using their website as a tool to do things for them.

If this describes your site, a shared hosting environment is for you. These are dirt cheap, you typically get a nice control panel to manage services like FTP and email, and if the support is decent you need to look no further. Actually good friendly support is rare in setups like this in my experience, but choosing a medium sized company ought to improve your chances.

Encirca was the brave innovator that decided to exploit a loophole in the restrictions and offer .PRO registrations to the masses via their “Pro Forwarding” service. As the incumbent they are uniquely positioned among approved registrars. Most of the best domain names in this TLD are currently registered at Encirca. And I’ve noticed some strange behavior from them recently.

This past month I had a couple dozen expired domains delete. Typically there’s a process where expired domains are held for some sort of a grace deletion period for 30 days or so before being deleted from the registry. Early pre-registrations were being offered for .pro for $49 each (instead of the recently revised $75) and so I watched these domains drop and registered some at the new lower price. But there was no rhyme or reason to the process; indeed it seemed ad hoc or even manual! Several domains with identical expiration dates actually dropped on different days, one after another. That suggests manual tampering with the process, which is not acceptable.

Now I’m noticing another trend, that of Encirca keeping domain names instead of allowing them to delete. This (as opposed to the previous issue) is probably fair and acceptable behavior normally. One of four that should have been dropped yesterday is now registered to Encirca. That’s one of the benefits of being a registrar - getting first crack at dropping domains. The problem is that there is no way to know what to expect, even as the brand is re-launching itself, and inviting the world to come get great value at promotional prices. I expected a domain yesterday to delete, and I was ready to try to register it fresh, at the new $25 promo rate. Instead, the registrar is pressuring us to renew at the older, higher $75 price to avoid the unpredictable. Extortion plain and simple.

The agreement between ICANN and the registry for .PRO, RegistryPro was recently modified. The original expiration date had passed and it was an opportunity for the parties involved to reconsider the extension and the rules imposed on registrants and registrars. I wouldn’t characterize this as an opportunity lost per se, but rather an opportunity not firmly seized by those who stood to benefit the most from it.

The improvements in this arena are apparent; several registrars are now competing to offer .pro registrations, including Network Solutions. That’s important because this extension will now be on the radars of corporate registrants, who often use registrars like NetSol. They will quickly realize the inherent “rememberability” of this brand. It’s also important because price competition is crucial to the mass adoption of this TLD, and it only happens when more registrars join the fray.

The downside is that they left restrictions in place, but made them vague and unworkable. There will surely be legal challenges if they ever decide to revoke registrations (as they claim) based upon invalid certification data from the registrant. This is an absurd approach, and will retard the adoption of this TLD by scaring off a portion of the potential registrant pool. Hopefully the upside will outweigh this negative vestige from the TLD’s origins of yesteryear.