*** From the Archives ***

This article is from August 23, 2001, and is no longer current.

Under the Desktop: When Bad Things Happen to Good Sites

What if you woke up one morning and realized your Web presence was living in an Internet slum? Or that you had gone for a week without e-mail even from your more-needy clients? As a buddy of mine recently discovered, these questions and even the answers could lead to some sleepless nights.
This tale of woe was related by Joel Ingulsrud, the former displays product manager at SGI. He’s had a varied career, spending years as a software localization expert and GoLive instructor. His Third Culture Enterprises Inc. has offered Japanese translation services since 1988.
Following years of running his own Web site, Ingulsrud early this year moved the site from a Palo Alto, Calif. office space to one of the many budget hosting companies on the market. In addition to the expense of powering and housing the “servers” — a few long-in-the-tooth Mac desktops — he was fed up with the responsibility of managing a site and its hardware. The chore had grown increasingly difficult as his day job kept him busy; and sometimes a hands-on fix required a half-day road trip.
Like many small businesses and professional content creators, he was drawn in by the low cost and full package of extras offered by the hosting services. For about $10 a month, he could put up a site, create a storefront, manage discussion groups, run CGIs, receive loads of usage statistics, and use an unlimited number of e-mail accounts. Ingulsrud also used an express option, which let him register a domain and get the site up in less than 24 hours.
Into the Void
Everything worked fine for six months, until one day the hosting server went down hard. Very hard. Suddenly, the site’s availability was erratic, and worse, Ingulsrud couldn’t send or receive his e-mail; nor could his business partners (and family). “I slept well for six months and then I couldn’t get to sleep,” he said.
According to Ingulsrud, the hosting company had oversold accounts on the bargain express-setup servers, and the systems had simply overloaded. On each machine were a few hundred small sites. “It wasn’t until many days into the outage that I learned the situation: I was living in a tenement,” he said.
Ingulsrud admitted he hadn’t really examined the fine print of his service package when he signed up for the hosting package. The company explicitly guaranteed only HTTP services in the agreement, and the site was up actually available most of the time.
“I had assumed that mail services would also be maintained at the same high priority as the Web hosting,” he said. “It is the critical Internet application, after all.”
“Worse, even though I was hollering at the top of my lungs, I didn’t get any action [from the hosting company] because of the low priority of my account,” Ingulsrud said. Since the company considered it was meeting its side of the service agreement, support priority was passed to other, higher-paying customers, such as individuals who pay the $100 monthly fee for a dedicated server.
After eight days of hell, the situation was finally resolved.
The Pain, the Gain
So what lessons can we learn from Ingulsrud’s experience? Plenty.
For Ingulsrud, the selection of a hosting service is the critical choice. He said he would switch hosting to a local, smaller service, so he can develop a “relationship with someone who touches the hardware.”
This concern stems from his weeklong discussions with the customer support at his former bargain service. He said that while the support technicians were Unix-savvy and “knew their stuff,” none of them actually dealt with the problem machines, which all needed faster processors, more RAM, and bigger hard drives. In their bureaucratic procedures, the Web site support people were isolated from the hardware, which was located on some other floor or building. Even the second-level software technicians couldn’t just walk over and deal with the hardware problems, or shift some of the accounts to other machines to lighten the load.
After this occurrence, “the balance of service and cost shifted in favor of a local ISP,” Ingulsrud said. “Their service-to-cost ratio is significantly higher. But I want a place where I know where my money is going.”
A second lesson would be to avoid consolidating your e-mail accounts. It makes sense to keep a second, redundant account — perhaps a generic account with your ISP or broadband service operator. The account should be fully capable of receiving and sending large files, which rules out the free accounts at sites such as Microsoft’s Hotmail and Onebox.com.
To some, this practice may seem contrary to common-sense branding. After all, don’t we want to focus and leverage our domain branding in everything we do online? That may be a great idea in theory, but it’s also easy to see how the loss of e-mail can hurt your brand and business.
The need for a redundant e-mail account follows a rule of computing I posited perhaps a dozen years ago: The more we rely on something, the more unreliable it becomes. In this case, e-mail. While our main e-mail service may be extremely reliable, any outage — even for half an hour, not to think of days — is horrific, since it’s a service we can’t live without.
So you need to get the alternative account and, gasp, make sure your contacts and clients know both addresses. I suggest going so far as putting it on your business cards, e-mail signatures, and Web sites.
The medieval rabbi Levi Ben Gershon offers this advice: “A peace that comes from fear and not from the heart is the opposite of peace.” Selecting the right hosting service for your Web site and implementing a backup e-mail address may help you sleep at night — and wake up the next morning to a full inbox.

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