Linux, Xen, and Hosting
Decent web hosting at a price is difficult. There's no shortage of competition on price, but the 'decent' bit seems quite a bit harder.
Low priced hosting is shared hosting. That means you get, typically, a share of an Apache server, usually with quite a few other people, maybe hundreds.
You're told you get unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth; the truth is more than a bit different. As your hosting service becomes more popular, what typically happens is that your website gets slower and slower, with latencies of up to several seconds, as more and more customers are crammed into an already highly loaded server.
Possibly the worst aspect of shared hosting is the 'one price, one service fits all' nature of it. There's no 'improved' plan with better performance available - the next level is an expensive private server.
I recently went through the exercise of trying to find yet another 'better' cheap hosting service for my various websites. My search eventually brought up a group called GPLHost who use only GPL'd software, and as it turns out have also written a hosting control panel, DTC, which controls both Xen and Apache. As a result of writing this software, the group is able to offer Xen Virtual Private Servers.
With a Xen VPS, you get full control, just as with a 'real' private server. You get to install a flavour of Linux you like, you can re-install, upgrade, reboot, and of course you get full console access.
DTC also gives you the ability to resell hosting, should you wish to divide up your Xen VPS and compete with all the other shared services on offer.
Because Xen splits up a real server into virtual servers, Xen based Virtual Private Server hosting gives an intermediate step between shared hosting, and a physical private server. Xen virtualisation also has the ability to guarantee both absolute machine performance and minimum bandwidth performance, unlike other shared solutions.
I tip this wil be a new trend in hosting; another plus for Linux and open sourced software. Made possible by Xen virtualisation, and DTC Xen Control Panel - both are open source.
Does anyone remember when we had Xen up and running in openPC Labs, with two different flavours of Linux running together on the same machine? I'd suggest it's a great time to get out Xen again at a club meeting, and play with it!
- David's blog
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Comments
The "S" in ISP stands for "Suppression" in Australia
It's just not worth the bother trying to hosts sites in Australia. There's just no recognition that ordinary people would want to be anything other than passive consumers of Internet-delivered services, so decent hosting and connectivity is priced for the Murdochs and Packers, and the rest of us are expected to get a MySpace page. That's why we need to build our own network infrastructure.
Elsewhere in the world, hosting is so cheap as to be practically free, and as you say virtualisation has made it possible to allocate server resources much more economically. I use VPSLink, who have been brilliant. For less money than I spend on takeaway food in a week, you could deliver the current web hosting requirements for every organisation in Coffs for a month. (Mind you nobody in Coffs really uses the Web yet.)
To put it another way, the amount of money you would spend in Australia on a hosting plan barely capable of running a single Drupal (or equivalent CMS) site, would be enough to host dozens (maybe hundreds) of such sites elsewhere.
It's absurd that all this data travelling between my clients (mostly geographically based around Coffs) and their clients (ditto) has to go via the US. Possibly there's a chicken-and-egg situation here: ISPs (I include hosting services in the term) won't price their services realistically until they feel there's a demand, but there won't be a demand until they stop serving network resources from an eye dropper (instead of the fire hose they're concealing behind their backs). More likely, I think there's just more money to be made delivering a small amount at a high price to privileged customers than there is in delivering several orders of magnitude more service at a price affordable to everyone.
The bottleneck is connectivity - even in Australia data storage ludicrously cheap. You can walk into a shop these days and buy a computer with a terabyte hard drive. When data transfer to your home or office is so cheap as to be virtually free, there will be no particular need to host your own services remotely. If the Internet had come along in the mid-twentieth century, universal decent-quality network access would have been seen as an essential social good - it's more important that it is provided at low cost to promote as much productive (and frivolous) activity as possible than it is to give a handful of telcos a license to print money by restricting access to the resource.
I'll leave it to Paul Templeton to talk about how much potentially information-carrying wire is laying silent underneath Coffs Harbour waiting for premium customers, while we all communicate with each other via the information cycle-path torturously winding it's way fom one part of Coffs to another via San Francisco.