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Customization vs Standardization, or What Amazon and Rackshack Have in Common

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 23:27:00 -0400

In early 2001, just a few months before Exodus filed for bankruptcy, Robert Marsh launched Rackshack. Unlike his struggling competitors, who typically built servers to spec, Robert sold $99 Cobalt RaQs. Only one configuration was available, and orders were provisioned instantly and automatically. And instead of demanding multi-year commitments, Rackshack offered month to month service. By the time I joined the company in early 2003, Rackshack (which later changed its name to EV1Servers) had become the world's largest dedicated server provider.

A year or so later, Robert unveiled EV1's private racks program during a customer gathering; two attendees signed up on the spot. Soon other orders starting pouring in, along with complicated network diagrams and super detailed server specs from customers who wanted their systems built just so. We did our best to accommodate any and all requests, which were a huge challenge to keep track of. Only much later did I learn about ITIL from Rich Bader over at EasyStreet. By that time, Amazon had already launched S3 and would soon introduce EC2.

Unlike EV1's Custom Order team, who gladly built whatever customers asked, EC2 sells only $0.10 virtual server instances. There's just one configuration available, and orders are provisioned instantly and automatically. Instead of demanding month-long commitments, Amazon offers pay-as-you-go service in 1 hour units.

According to Vinne Marchanadi from Deal Architect, pay-as-you-go is what large customers nowadays are looking for. (A former Gartner analyst, Vinnie now advises enterprise IT buyers on vendor selection.) He offers the analogy of plugging into an efficient power source versus buying fancy generators. On behalf of his clients, he says:

"Message to vendors - so long as you meet our security, privacy and compliance standards, we want as vanilla, standardized a service as possible. Sell us capacity by unit of consumption. We want to leverage all your economies - in financing, procurement, operations, everything. In return, we want to fit as much as possible in to your standards."

Another couple of years from now, will standardization again give way to customization? I think the answer is yes. And no. Amazon recently started offering Machine Image sharing. And VMWare's virtual appliance marketplace features about 400 listings. And SalesForce.com offers over 500 partner apps on AppExchange. And earlier this month Netvibes unveiled its universal widget API... It seems service delivery platforms will become more - not less - standardized, while each user will have increasing freedom to mix and match a wide range of interoperable applications into highly customized solutions. Doesn't that sound like the best of both worlds?

Free Billing Software for Resellers

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:00:05 +0000
I got an e-mail last week, where Tom was wanting to know…
“Hi Mitch, love the podcast. I have just started up a reseller account of my own but I am in need of some billing or shopping cart software that will make it easier to resell the hosting space I have purchased. Any suggestions?”
Sure, ...]

Newtek’s Technology service lines include:

Host The Best Offers Reseller Program

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST
August 11, 2008 -- ( <http://www.thewhir.com> WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Software developer and web hosting provider Host The Best has announced its Reseller Scripts Program to offer web hosts and others a variety of scripts that have a high resale value.

Increasing PHP Application Performance with XCache

Fri, 30 May 2008 00:49:00 +1000

Most interpreted programming languages parse source files and translate/compile them into opcode/bytecode that are suitable to be executed in the virtual machine. Python for example, dumps the compiled opcode into the .pyc or .pyo files so when the same file is imported again in the future, no parsing and compilation needs to be done. On the other hand plain vanilla PHP does not really have a way to save cached opcode so that at every request, source files have to be parsed and compiled into opcode again and again.

So we have the PHP accelerators which are mostly opcode cachers + optimiser, which cache the compiled opcode to either memory or disk, so the scripts don’t need to be parsed and compiled again in subsequent requests. They greatly improve the performance, and even the up-coming PHP6 will have the APC built in by default.

Introducing XCache

Personally I am using XCache on most my PHP apps. From its introduction page:

XCache is a open-source opcode cacher, which means that it accelerates the performance of PHP on servers. It optimizes performance by removing the compilation time of PHP scripts by caching the compiled state of PHP scripts into the shm (RAM) and uses the compiled version straight from the RAM. This will increase the rate of page generation time by up to 5 times as it also optimizes many other aspects of php scripts and reduce serverload.

Maybe not 5 times, but there is definite improvement from a standard PHP installation without the opcode cacher. Here is a CPU utilisation graph for my VPS at Linocde — I took XCache off trying to debug a segfault issue, and put it back on a few hours later.

Performance with and without XCache

Installing XCache

Installing XCache on most Linux distributions is trivial. Most my production boxes are running Ubuntu now, so I just


$ sudo apt-get install php5-xcache

And restart my web server — it’s done! Or on my Gentoo development box:


$ sudo emerge dev-php5/xcache

The bundled xcache.ini (found in your PHP’s configuration directory) has pretty sane setting. You might wish to adjust xcache.size to reflect your memory size.

But Is It Stable Enough for Production?

An optimisation technique is useless, if it hinders stability. This is actually the reason why am I posting this story — because my PHP/FastCGI servers crash at least once a day that render the Lighttpd front-end returning “500 Internal Error”, which I suspect might be XCache related (although I usually don’t have a chance to debug the processes and verify).

It is not huge load — lighttpd is only serving around 4 requests/second. The crash also seems to be random, i.e. not always at the peak of the traffic, and it happens during weekends as well as weekdays (that site of mine gets around only 70% of traffic during weekends). I actually wrote a simple shell script to monitor the site every minute and if 500 Internal Error is detected, spawn-fcgi is restarted — but I can imagine my users must be very annoyed.

Or maybe there is just nothing wrong with XCache itself but the fault lies on PHP or Lighttpd — I have no idea. Easiest way is just disabling XCache for a few days and see whether my site still crashes. Might do that this weekend.

Static sites (simple sites): you will build one or more web pages (called HTML pages) with software like FrontPage or DreamWeaver on your computer. You will then upload the pages to your host's server using FTP software like FileZilla for example.

HTML Validator

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:47:52 +0000
Check the markup (HTML, XHTML, …) of Web documents:
http://validator.w3.org/
Copyright © 2007Dapur Hosting(digitalfingerprint: 8f57a6d5215d02f26c482a6410e1682f)Share This

To achieve this permalink feature, you need to have the .htaccess overwrite feature in your php hosting plan. Although you can achieve the same effect in asp hosting, we will not discuss how its going to be done in asp. We will talk on php .htaccess overwrite only.

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