What I Learned at CES: PIPA is the New SOPA

SOPA seems to be breathing its last!  Although Rep. Smith has indicated that he’ll remove the controversial DNS blocking provisions of the bill, we’ve heard that the bill is so poisoned, hearings won’t resume, essentially killing the bill.  That’s a huge victory for the Internet industry. This bill had big money interests behind it, and we in the Internet community were outspent to a ridiculous degree — but at the end of the day our voices were heard. Victory, right?

 

Not so fast! Read more

The Tech Bench: Jailshell in cPanel

Jailshell is a level of shell (SSH) access that limits a user to his or her specific directory structure.  Under regular SSH when users log into their servers they are taken to their home directory and can execute commands within their directory structure.

Under SSH that user can also travel to any directoy on the server and even use “ls” to get a directory listing, they just cannot open the files or interact with them.  Jailshell, on the other hand, logs users into their directory structure and locks them in (much like a prison or jail cell), disallowing them from openly traversing the directory structure outside of their home.

Jailshell is easily implementable in cPanel. You can switch an account’s shell access in WHM by navigating to Manage Shell Access, under the Account Functions header. Read more

Desert Bus for Hope Charity Event

November is in full swing and that means that once again it’s time for the annual Desert Bus for Hope charity gaming marathon. I genuinely look forward to this event all year!

Our friends at the sketch comedy group LoadingReadyRun created this event back in 2007 to raise money for Child’s Play, a charity that donates toys and games to children’s hospitals. Every year since it’s gotten bigger and bigger, and I’m thrilled at the role ServInt gets to play in it.

The gaming marathon centers around playing Desert Bus, a mini game within Penn and Teller’s unreleased 1995 Sega game, Smoke and Mirrors. Marathon gamers play the intentionally cruel and inane game in which players simply drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas in real time, on a perfectly straight highway, with no passengers or other traffic, at 45 miles per hour.

Read more

Thinking of Building a New Web Site?

Today, as you may have noticed, ServInt unveiled a brand-new web site — one that we hope will be easier to use, more pleasing to the eye and more valuable to our customers and prospects.

The deployment of our new web site, in and of itself, is probably of modest importance to readers of the ServInt Source. But it occurred to me that sharing details of why and how it was built might be useful, as the challenges we faced before and during the redesign are fairly common ones. So, following are some thoughts, observations, and rules of thumb that may be of use to you:

1. When your customers tell you it’s time for a change, it’s definitely time for a change. Face it: the attractiveness and usefulness of your web site is way down the list of priorities for your customers — so when they take the time to tell you it looks out of date, or is hard to use, it’s probably a bigger problem than you think it is.
2. Building a brand-new web site takes less work than propping up the old one. This one may seem hard to believe, since there is no doubt that the process of building a brand-new web site takes a lot of time and effort. But when you measure both the extra work your company has to undertake on a day-to-day basis to make up for your site’s lack of effectiveness and the big-picture process issues you can fix by implementing a new web site, the value proposition becomes crystal-clear. Bottom line: it’s worth it.
3. Make your web site a mirror facing outwards, as well as inwards. It’s tempting to see your web site solely as a reflection of who you are, or perhaps who you wish you could be. It’s just as important for your web site to accurately reflect who your customers are. Your prospective and current customers need to feel like they’ve arrived at their online home when they arrive at your site — a place where they’re understood and appreciated. Our customer base skews very heavily towards “value purchasers” — people who don’t have time for marketing fluff. That’s why our site was designed with a visibly minimalist style. Our overarching goal was to provide an extremely efficient path towards the information our customers seek.
4. Show, don’t tell. ServInt is fortunate to have a loyal customer base that is willing to tell the world how much they like us, and why. If your customers are similarly willing to compliment you in public — let them. A basic rule of thumb is: if your customers are willing to say nice things about you, there’s no need for you to say those things yourself!
5. Pick a designer who understands you. As mentioned before, we had a clear mental image of what this site was supposed to look like before we started building it. We actively searched for designers who understood the minimalist aesthetic we were after, and why we were seeking it. When we found them, we were able to set them loose to do what they do best. This made things much easier than simply “buying talent” and arguing with them over The Vision Thing. When you and your designer clearly understand the brand strategy you have in mind, as well as the design style that’s going to get you there, you can step back and let them do their job.

We hope you like it!

Cloud Hosting Series, Part 3: Making Hosting Better… Not Just Bigger

In part 2 of our Cloud Hosting Series, ServInt CTO Matt Loschert made some interesting comparisons between VPS and Cloud Hosting.  One of the things Matt said was “Cloud Hosting creates a world in which server instances are transient and disposable. The instance is no longer important — the communication and cooperation between instances is.” Pretty dense. Still, it got me thinking because this notion is at the heart of the promise of Cloud Hosting.

I was still thinking about it when I showed up to the local deli for a sandwich yesterday. I usually go around 2pm. Yesterday I went at 12:30. The place is tiny and normally sleepy-quiet. It’s just the owner at the counter and her son working the register. Frankly, I’ve sometimes wondered how they stay in business. But yesterday, an hour and a half earlier than I usually go to lunch, the joint was PACKED – and three times while I was there I saw groups of people come to the door, look at the line and walk out. Most of the time the owner’s just sitting on her hands when I come in. I realized that at 12:30, her business is MADE – but it’s not maximized.

So what does this have to do with Cloud Hosting? Well, the number one goal of Cloud Hosting seems to be the ability to achieve new levels of scalability. My deli experience serves to remind that the challenge of scalability to a business is not new.

ServInt has been a pioneer in finding solutions to the needs of customers who need to scale, sometimes quickly. Our entire VPS and Dedicated lines have been built to allow customers to expand and contract their single server at will. With the tech we employ today you can do things you can’t do in the real world. In an enterprise-class VPS world my little corner deli could simply grow in size to meet demand by calling the landlord—in this case a hosting company like ServInt—and ordering up a bigger space. One simple move later and the deli could handle the increased number of customers.

This has been a revolutionary and tremendously successful model, but it’s not without its problems and inefficiencies. The VPS model relies on manual configuring by the hosting company and time to complete any necessary migrations. The promise of a well-designed Cloud Hosting platform offers a tempting improvement on this.

To be fair to VPS, new improvements are continually being developed that bring these basic Cloud benefits into the VPS realm. In fact, there is a lot of pressure in the industry for companies like ServInt to call what we do with our VPS products “Cloud Hosting”. After all, when well-designed and backed up by high-end hardware, VPS has high-redundancy and incredible on-demand scalability at the core level AND the individual resource level. It doesn’t fit every technologist’s dream list of what a Cloud Hosting offering should be, but what does? It’s Cloudy and that’s good enough for some people.

Imagine what it would mean to my deli owner’s business if she could rely upon scaling technologies like the ones that I’m describing here. When the deli is packed, the owner hits a button and the deli magically gets bigger. When the rush ends, the owner hits another button and the new store shrinks back down. The landlord simply bills the deli owner rent and utilities based on the size of his restaurant at any given time. It would truly allow her to maximize her business. This kind of scaling may be fiction in the real-world, but in the Internet it’s very real – and available today. You can achieve that kind of rapid scalability right now, by either purchasing a scalable platform such as a VPS, or a Cloud instance configured to be used like a VPS.

But as Matt pointed out in his post, this benefit—while enticing to many—does not realize the true potential of Cloud technology. What VPS—and Cloud utilized like VPS—provides is the ability to take a single store, and either during a special promotion or just during the peak time of the day, turn it into a much, much larger single store. What Cloud Hosting promises you’ll be able to do is to take that single store and, instead, turn it into five, ten or one hundred identical stores working both independently and interdependently, increasing both redundancy and scalability in the process. At some point, no matter how big a single deli you build, if that deli becomes infinitely popular that one deli will eventually be too crowded to handle its business effectively. But if you turn that one deli into a whole chain on the fly… that’s another matter.

But here’s the thing – right now that kind of scaling doesn’t work right out of the box. Right now it takes coding. And so, frankly, a whole lot of people are getting Cloud instances and using single-instance scalability – basically using a Cloud instance like a VPS. And that’s fine for many.  This industry’s next steps will be in taking the true scalability promise of Cloud and making it attainable to a general business consumer. Once we do, we’ll truly achieve what Matt Loschert was talking about when he described a world in which individual server instances are transient and disposable. Once that is achieved, so will incredible levels of scalability, to greater degrees than we have imagined — and incredible levels of redundancy as well.

So just how does a hosting company build out a Cloud solution? Coming soon in part two of this post, I’ll talk about what providing businesses with the ability to scale like this looks like behind the curtain from a nuts-and-bolts perspective.

Photo by Liber

Remembering the Macho Man

I was saddened to hear of Randall Mario Poffo’s untimely death earlier today.  Of course, everybody knew Mr. Poffo as ”Macho Man” Randy Savage — or for me, just  ”The Macho Man,” the professional wrestling character he made famous in the 70′s, 80′s, and 90′s.  If you were a wrestling fan back then, it was tough not to root for Randy.  He was brash, he was colorful, and he was the living embodiment of professional wrestling attitude.

I didn’t know him personally, of course, but in 2003 or thereabouts, when I was working in our Network Operations Center (pre-MST), the Macho Man was a client of ServInt’s.  You can imagine the buzz around the office the day he joined the network:  ”The real Macho Man?”, everyone would ask.  ”Yeah, the real Macho Man.”  I suppose to some there were “more serious” customers that one might use in a business or social setting to represent the quality and prestige of our company’s clientele.  But for me, at that time, the first name that always came to mind — our coolest customer, in other words — was The Macho Man.  And not surprisingly, people continued to ask, “the real Macho Man?”  – and my response, delivered with a grin, would always be the same:  ”yes, the real Macho Man.”  There was no need for me to go any further.  The name had been dropped.  My mission was accomplished.

The real joy in having Mr. Poffo’s server under our wing was being able to talk to him on the phone on rare occasions.  For us ’round-the-clock tech support guys, it was always a real treat when Mr. Poffo would call and ask us for help.  You’d feel lucky if you were the guy who got to answer the phone when Randy was on the other end of the line.  I remember him as a very curious and patient person, polite and professional.  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that he was just a regular guy, but I was, if just a little.  And if you’re curious… no, his every-day voice wasn’t the booming growl he used inside the ring, in TV commercials and back-stage interviews.  But it was unmistakable — there was no doubt that you were talkin’ shop with Randy Savage.

After every Macho Man call, for a good 30 minutes or more, we couldn’t help but talk amongst ourselves in pathetic imitations of the Macho Man.  It was impossible not to.  Technical jargon just sounds better when you say it like Randy Savage.  More fun, too.  Every conversation was rehashed, sentence for sentence, for everyone else in the room.  For some reason, it was incredibly important that each of us knew exactly why he called.

As much as I may have wanted to, I never had the courage — nor did I think it was appropriate — to ask him for a patented “Snap into a Slim Jim, oooh yeah”!  But I was just as satisfied with phrases like “what version of Perl do I got” and  ”let’s just reboot it.”

“Macho Man” Randy Savage was an icon of my childhood and my favorite client during my tech support years.  On behalf of ServInt, I’d like to extend my sincerest condolences to Mr. Poffo’s family and friends.  Thanks for all the memories, Macho Man.

Photo by goodrob13

ServInt’s New Data Center and Our Green Commitment

We just announced the opening of our newest data center, and as I write this, I’m looking at some pictures of the new facility. Next to these are some other photos of trees being planted. We just completed our 2011 carbon footprint reassessment and have upped our commitments to reforestation through our partners at American Forests.

There’s something funny about seeing pictures of trees being planted next to shots of our new data center in Reston, VA: on the one hand, I’m looking at tender young saplings lovingly held and planted in the soil; on the other, I see stark, white walls, massive industrial cooling units, and rows and rows of server racks.

By the visual alone, you might think that data center space is the most un-Green part of a hosting company’s operation. And while this can be true for a company without a serious commitment to the environment, choice of data center facility and build-out has some of the greatest Green potential of anything we do. That’s one of the reasons we chose to build out our private data center the way we did.

In previous posts, I’ve gone into detail about how the server hardware choices ServInt makes have a huge impact on decreasing our carbon footprint. This is true now more than ever. As a basic example, in the last five years the number of cpu cores we can pack into a single rack of data center space for about the same price has multiplied roughly five-fold while the power consumption and cooling needs for that same rack have remained constant. (And this example does not even factor in the increased processing power of each core!) Committing to purchasing and deploying this new, more efficient hardware greatly reduces out power-to-customer ratio and keeps our carbon footprint in check.

But hardware is just one step. As we maximize the processing power in a rack, we also have to efficiently house and cool that rack. This is where the design of a datacenter really plays into shrinking our carbon footprint. As a general rule, the power required to cool and house servers is typically equal to 30 to 50 percent of the power needed to simply run those servers. Once you’ve picked your hardware platform, keeping the electrical requirements of cooling and infrastructure down is a central Green goal for environmentally sensitive hosts.

In most circles, air conditioning is not simply the punching bag of the Green movement, it is the devil itself. Nothing captures the essence of un-Green like the notion of cooling the interior of a building by literally pumping heat into the outside air… using fossil fuels… and leaving the windows open. But in intelligently designed, purpose-built data centers, we’re talking about well insulated, windowless rooms that are far more efficient than normal office or residential space. Still, when these rooms are filled with servers they can demand more than 40 times the cooling as the same amount of space in a typical residential home. There is simply no other way to keep servers from literally melting down than blasting cold air at them. Our business is hosting, but our byproduct is heat.

The modern data center facility helps greatly in minimizing the build-up of heat and efficiently removing it. From hot and cold aisles and forcing air directly to racks under raised floors to huge heat exchangers that tap into the cold air on a winter day and smart cooling units that are adaptive and work in sync to spool up or down as needed throughout a facility, engineers have come up with some downright ingenious solutions to efficiently deliver cold air to hot servers. And all these improvements have one goal: to reduce the electricity it takes to keep those cpu cores cool.

All of these and many other factors went into our decision about what type of new data center we would open. And they are just a few of the elements of our much larger Green Hosting Initiative, including the trees American Forests is continually planting to offset the carbon we cannot reduce directly.

If you’d like to see some pictures of our datacenters or some of the tree planting we have sponsored in recent years, check them out in our photos section on Facebook.

ServInt opens the Doors on its Newest Data Center

It’s been a hectic first quarter here at ServInt. We’re in the middle of a lot of very exciting improvements and new services slated to launch in 2011. And today marks the first. We have just completed build-out and opened the doors of our newest datacenter.

The Northern Virginia facility joins our Downtown DC and McLean data centers as part of the greater ServInt DC infrastructure. Not only does this new facility provide the room to grow that we require as we continue to expand our customer base and product lines, but its location along the area’s primary fiber routes augments our network infrastructure and connectivity at the same time.

If you’re interested in more of the specifics of our newest data center, take minute to check out our press release. And if you’re a current customer and want to know a little bit more about what this new facility means to you visit your customer portal for more details.

Cloud Hosting Series Part 2: VPS to Cloud?

I have to admit, I’m a bit baffled by some of the messages I’ve heard coming from our competitors and from customers recently about what Cloud Hosting means to our industry. I often get questions from customers and read advertising from other hosting companies that equate Cloud Hosting to being the obvious replacement for dedicated server or VPS hosting. We hear things like, “upgrade to our Cloud solution” and “host your website in our Cloud,” as if your website wasn’t working on its current platform, or with the advent of Cloud, your website would stop working all of a sudden.

Don’t get me wrong, Cloud Hosting has its place in the market, and it will become increasingly relevant with time. In fact, as a platform, Cloud will become a necessity over the next few years. But, right now – are you ready for it?

In the SMB realm, our industry continues to sell hosting as it has since pre-Cloud days. It’s all still server, VPS, or instance focused. Everything goes back to a software architecture and design philosophy that places the greatest emphasis on managing your operation on the server level, and automating as much of that operation as possible, hence the the proliferation of control panel software over the past 10 years. Control panels attempt to simplify web hosting management, a task that was previously highly technical and arcane, requiring deep knowledge, typically gained after years of experience.

If, as a customer, you think of Cloud Hosting through this server-centric lens, you won’t reach the promise of Cloud. You can have your server in the Cloud, but it won’t give you and your hosting company anything more than a way to more quickly and flexibly provision and bill for VPSs. If you’re looking at hosting the way most do who have been consuming hosting services in the era of mass-market server virtualization, Cloud Hosting offerings in the market today can seem marvelously underwhelming. It’s virtualization with provisioning automation, or — put another way — it’s hosting where provisioning control has been given to the consumer.

Okay, so then why does anyone care about Cloud? What has truly captured the attention of the industry is not what Cloud Hosting currently is for the SMB community, it is the promise of what it can and will be. Cloud will revolutionize hosting, but not in the way that some seem to assume right now. It is not going to make server management more simple, or optimize the software platforms of today. And it won’t simplify your life. Cloud will, however, make possible a paradigm shift in the way that applications are hosted on the Internet.

What makes Cloud revolutionary is the mental shift that it allows in developing web-based applications. The ability for the hosting consumer and/or software developer to control resource provisioning allows development that goes in a completely new direction. Cloud Hosting creates a world in which server instances are transient and disposable. The instance is no longer important — the communication and cooperation between instances is. The developer writes provisioning logic into his application because, by breaking the functional requirements out into logically separable parts, he can build a system that can auto-scale to meet individual application requirements.

The problem is that many seem to assume that they’re going to bring their old applications, control panels, and knowledge to the Cloud, and that it’s all going to work even better. That’s not really the case. You will
be able to bring these things to the Cloud, but they will not take advantage of the true benefits of the Cloud. One solution to this problem is time – time for developers to begin writing applications to Cloud APIs and using technologies that allow for simple inter-server cooperation and synchronized data sharing and manipulation. This will naturally occur over the next few years, and it will come as a result of the creation of new development frameworks that make splitting hosting tasks into logical chunks a simple process.

Ultimately, Cloud Hosting is cool, and it is revolutionary. But right now, if you want to rush to the Cloud, ask yourself what problems you are trying to solve and who are you relying upon to solve them. For your own sake, make sure you know how your Cloud vendor will improve your operation. Otherwise, you might just end up getting sold a good old dedicated server “in the Cloud” — which you might even pay more for.

Cloud Hosting Series, Part 1: A Marketer’s Perspective

 

A few weeks ago, I traveled to San Jose, CA, where I attended the “Cloud Connect” conference. Cloud Connect is basically an annual symposium where the biggest players in the cloud industry gather together to talk about what’s coming next for the Cloud. Analysts opine, accountants report, Fortune 500 CTOs brag, consultants take notes, and those of us who are already deep in the trenches of the virtualized data center industry scratch our heads and wonder how any of this applies to “ordinary” businesses.

In later blog posts, our engineering and operations guys will get into the technical/management nitty-gritty of Cloud hosting. For now, I just want to share the following summary of what I learned at Cloud Connect, which I hope will set the stage for some of their comments:

1. Extremely large enterprises are now getting very serious about the cloud. What was a buzz phrase last year has turned into a real storage/processing/hosting option for some of America’s largest companies.
2. These companies don’t know how to approach the cloud. Should they go with a “private cloud” — i.e., a virtualized private platform that ensures security, but provides little to no economic benefit? A “hybrid” platform, where they keep certain apps and data behind lock and key, and burst out to the cloud only when necessary? Or should they go whole-hog and move everything to companies like Amazon? Most seem somewhat paralyzed by the choice.
3. The real adoption of cloud — even in the Fortune 500 universe — is still very modest.
4. Having said that, enough hyper-enterprises have moved into the cloud for industry bean-counters to be able to analyze some real data about computing resource efficiencies at those companies. This data has led analysts to conclude that at the enterprise level, cloud savings are very real, and can be very, very significant.
5. There are dozens of clever startups that are trying to turn the generic, SMB-hostile resource platforms offered by today’s cloud companies into more useful products. In my opinion, where these companies are succeeding, they’re offering only partial solutions to huge macro-level problems — and you still have to be an extreme early adopter to make sense of them.

So that’s the story as far as generic cloud services are concerned.  Much of the same story applies to companies that are marketing hosting “in the cloud.”  For the most part, they’re targeting their services at customers with the ability to take a bare-bones, science-project technology and develop it to meet their specific needs. That means hyper-enterprises with seven-figure IT budgets and early adopters eager to take a whack at a new, unproven platform. If you’re not one of those companies, good luck finding a cloud hosting solution that works for you “right out of the box.”

I’m a marketing guy, so I generally tend to be one of those “glass-is-half-full” people. For now, though, that’s my honest assessment of the current state of the Cloud in general, and Cloud hosting in particular.

Next week in part 2 of our Cloud Series: “From VPS to Cloud? Redefining Hosting” by ServInt CTO Matt Loschert.

 

Photo by Liber

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