theWHIR.com Blogs - Isabel Wang

Wouldn't It Be Great If There Were a ModernBill/StatCounter Mashup?

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 19:57:00 -0400

By Isabel Wang Over the past decade, I've bought and sold many millions worth of online ads. When I ran ISPcheck, I had no real answer for prospective advertisers who wanted to know what results my customers were able to achieve. And when I became responsible for RackShack/EV1's ad buys, I found that there was no easy way to measure ROI.

Fun Fact: Google's Revenue is $17,066 Per Server

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 19:52:00 -0400

By Isabel Wang I read about this on Bert Amijo's blog. 3Tera CEO Vlad Miloushev did the math: 1. Google's infrastructure consists of 500,000 to 1 million servers.

On the Wal-Mart-ized Web...

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 17:39:00 -0400

By Isabel Wang Liam says this week's most important trend is web hosting providers' continued expansion of data center footprints. The strong demand for hosting facilities seems like a good sign. At the same time, there are a number of outside-world developments that folks in the hosting business ought to keep an eye on. 1. On Wednesday, in addition to officially releasing RHEL5, Red Hat announced that it will soon launch an open source marketplace called Red Hat Exchange (RHX). As Business Week reports, Red Hat will guarantee the compatibility of RHX products with its platform AND provide tech support for each and every 3rd party product on the exchange. In addition, RHX will allow end users to submit ratings, read reviews and compare notes.

Twitter is Misbehaving and I Blame Joyent! (Or, Hosting Providers as Venture Capitalists)

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:25:00 -0400

By Isabel Wang Dave Young from Joyent recently blogged about Twitter's use of Joyent Accelerators. Accelerators are Solaris Containers on Sun Fire X4100s with Sun Fire X4500s (also known as "Thumpers") for storage. Joyent promises on-demand, no-leash computing and offers virtual servers for as little as $45/month (includes 256 MB RAM, 5 GB storage, 15 GB bandwidth). It sounds pretty cool - and check out the video of Dave and Jason on Sun's website! The problem is, after reading Dave's post, I think of him every time Twitter is down. Which, as many of his readers pointed out, happens often. Dave says us complainers are missing the point. Twitter is growing like crazy! It serves 4,000+ requests per second! That's a lot - and Joyent helped get them there! Unfortunately (or fortunately?), Twitter users' demand seems to exceed its already-substantial capacity.

Are We Running Out of Storage Space? IDC is Concerned, but Maxell Says Never Fear

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 14:15:00 -0400

By Isabel Wang I learned about the IDC storage paradox on Zoli Erdos' blog. Zoli mentions this Associated Press article, which cites IDC's estimate that "the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes in 2010". Even more alarmingly, Dan Farber over at ZDNet reports that according to IBM, "the world's information base will be doubling in size every 11 hours" by 2010. Does this mean that on Jan 1, 2011, our 988 exabytes of data will double to 1,976 exabytes by 11am, and 3,952 exabytes by 10pm?

In Case You've Read Otherwise, SmugMug Still Loves S3

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:01:00 -0400

By Isabel Wang Last Thursday night, I came across this SearchStorage.com article via the Storagezilla blog. Beth Pariseau wrote that Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) has had "performance and reliability issues serious enough" to prompt second thoughts among early adopters. In particular, SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill recently decided to move hot storage back in-house. The instant I finishing reading the article, my RSS reader lit up with Don's response. He still loves Amazon, even if S3 hasn't solved the "speed of light problem". It takes at least 60-80ms for bytes of data to travel the distance between SmugMug's west coast location and Amazon's east coast data center. There's no getting around that. He moved hot storage closer to his web servers NOT to solve Amazon's performance problems, but to reduce those thousands of miles to inches. Don also tracked down the Storagezilla post and added a comment there.

Uptime Institute Says Power to Cost 300-2250% More Than Server Hardware; What Does This Mean?

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:31:00 -0400

By Isabel Wang I came across Uptime Institute founder Ken Brill's CIO Magazine article via 3tera VP Marketing Bert Armijo's blog. Ken says while hardware prices are falling, total cost of data center ownership is headed through the roof. 5 years from now, the purchase price for a rack of servers will drop 27.5% from $138K today to just $103K. But while it only takes 15 kilowatts to power that rack right now, the energy requirement will rise to 22 - 170 kilowatts by 2012. It could cost as much as $2.3 million to power/cool $103K worth of gear throughout its 3-year lifespan.

The Future of SaaS, and What Puts ThinkFree Ahead of Google

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 18:30:00 -0500

By Isabel Wang ThinkFree is way cool! I signed up for an account earlier this week, and its web-based spreadsheet, word processor and slide presentation apps work beautifully. TJ Kang, the company's founder, has been developing office productivity software since the 1980s, and it shows. Founded in 1999. ThinkFree spent its early years as a desktop software company. Its online edition was released in April 2005. Now the LA Library offers it on 2,200 computers across 71 branches, and NHN, a Korean telco with 20 million subscribers, has integrated the product with its email system. In addition, over 250,000 individual users have signed up for accounts.

SixApart, WordPress and 37Signals Support OpenID; Why Not 1&1 and GoDaddy?

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 12:09:00 -0500

By Isabel Wang I've been reading a lot about OpenID, a free, decentralized framework for managing digital identities. You start with an URI (think of it as a master username) and store your password and other creditials with an OpenID provider. You can then log into any OpenID enabled service with your URI. The service will fetch whatever credentials it needs from your identity provider. Simon Willison wrote a great post on cool things you can do with OpenID. My favorite is restricted single sign on. Simon suggested that if everyone in an organization had "username.internal.example.org" OpenIDs, all internal apps behind the firewall could be configured to grant automatic access to such users. This eliminates the hassle of creating/deleting accounts on each service for incoming/departing employees. Couldn't GoDaddy use a similar method to apply the same logins across its many services?

Worried About Churn? Your Marketing Department Might Be the Culprit

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 19:22:00 -0500

By Isabel Wang So far this year, at least 31 web hosts and domain registrars (see list) have reduced prices or increased resource allocations. Here's a quick breakdown based on a few different parameters: (a) 11 offers were limited time; 20 were permanent adjustments;