As I explained yesterday, the big cost in providing internet hosting is paying humans to provide support. However there are still some technical factors that affect the price, and that’s what we’re looking at today.

Most internet hosting customers would be familiar with the usual measures: the amount of storage space you get and the amount of data transfers (“bandwidth”) per month. Those raw measures of capacity are certainly important. You need enough capacity to meet your needs. But you also need to consider performance, reliability, scalability and flexibility.

Performance. The key issues here are whether you’re sharing a server or have your own, the performance of that server, and the performance of the network it’s connected to.

At the lower end of the market, shared web hosting means your website and mailboxes are sharing a computer with other customers — sometimes dozens, hundreds or even thousands. If you want a server computer just for your business, that’s called dedicated hosting. Obviously it costs more, but it does mean you have the computer’s total capacity. Other customers’ usage won’t affect your website. It also reduces the security risk.

There are other systems such as clustered hosting, where the load of many sites is spread across multiple computers, and virtual private servers, where it looks like you have a dedicated server but it’s being simulated — but that’s all outside the scope of this article.

Whether it’s shared or dedicated hosting, the server’s performance can make a difference. The apparent speed of your website will in part depend on the speed of the server’s hard drives and processors, the amount of memory (RAM) it has and so on, as well as the capacity of its network link. Cheap hosting providers may put many, many customers onto a relatively low-grade computer with poor network links. And a cheap data centre may provide less network capacity for a given number of customer websites.

Prussia.Net has been offering shared hosting with around 50 accounts and a total of 170 domains running on a relatively modest server with a Pentium 4 2.66GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. While this sounds small compared with a desktop computer, remember that servers don’t have to run a graphical interface. That said, this server is reaching capacity and that’s one of the factors that led us to review what we do. The server is in ServePath‘s data centre in San Francisco, which is provided with high-capacity data links to the internet.

Reliability. A system’s reliability is measured by its uptime, the percentage of time for which the system has been “up” and running. Sometimes it’s measured in the “number of nines”, for example “four nines” being 99.99% reliable.

Many hosting providers advertise 99% reliability, which sounds good until you realise that you could endure more that 7 hours of downtime per month and still be getting the service you’re paying for. That’s not good if those 7 hours take out a busy working day.

“Four nines” or 99.99% reliability is 4 minutes 23 seconds of downtime per month, and “five nines” or 99.999% reliability is a mere 26 seconds of downtime per month, or a little over 5 minutes in total per year.

Setting up such highly-reliable systems obviously takes engineering skills, planning and money.

Many hosting providers advertise 99% or 99.5% or 99.9% reliability, excluding “scheduled downtime” for systems maintenance. If you want higher reliability then you can expect to pay much, much more money. If a problem has to be fixed within five minutes, you can’t rely on someone responding to a complaint and then trying to work out how to fix things. Backup systems have to be set up in advance, with automated monitoring ready to switch everything over in the event of a failure.

Many hosting customers forget that even if their hosting server is, say, 99.9% reliable, the overall reliability of their website or email will depend on how their website has been built and what arrangements they’ve made for their web developer to be available to fix problems. The hosting server could still be 99.9% reliably serving out a broken website!

It’s also easy to forget that even if a hosting server is “guaranteed” to be 99.9% reliable, that may just mean you get your $29 monthly fee refunded if things go wrong. Again, not good if being offline for an hour means you’re losing hundreds of dollars.

Other hosting providers don’t specify an exact target reliability level, but simply take reasonable steps to keep things going. This is called “best effort” reliability. While “best effort” hosting is often quite reliable, there are no guarantees.

Prussia.Net’s data centre, ServePath promises a 10,000% Guaranteed®, 100% Uptime Service Level Agreement, which means that for every minute their network in unavailable they refund us 100 minutes’ worth of our monthly fees. However Prussia.Net itself offers only “best efforts” reliability, as we don’t have automated monitoring systems. In practice, we’ve experienced 133 minutes of unscheduled downtime in the last six months, which is about 99.95% reliability — but that’s more through good luck than planning.

Scalability. To give an overly-simply explanation, this is about how your internet hosting can cope with sudden increases in demand — for example if your website suddenly becomes vastly more popular than you expect, or there’s a sudden increase in email traffic. A cheap hosting provider might be running everything very close to full capacity, which means a sudden surge in traffic will cause everything to fall over.

There’s also a business angle to this. The hosting provider might offer a certain amount of base capacity, but anything over your pre-booked capacity might still be delivered — but at a vastly higher price than if you’d organised it in advance.

Hosting can also be provided “on demand” or, to use the current buzzword, though cloud computing. This is where the data centre automatically allocates more capacity as it’s needed, and just bills for usage. This is rapidly becoming the preferred method.

Prussia.Net’s hosting server is moderately loaded. We’ve coped with surges of email 10x their normal levels without problem. However this week we saw a massive spam surge at 32x normal levels and we struggled — although this was the biggest spam surge we’ve ever seen in more than a decade of operation. I’ll write more about that soon. I’m seriously considering just on-selling cloud services instead.

Flexibility. A computer can be configured any way you want. However to make it easier to sell its services a hosting provider will usually offer only a certain set of pre-defined options. This keeps the cost down, as staff just choose from a list. Some providers will be more willing to customise the set-up, but that will always be more expensive.

Prussia.Net has always been willing to customise a client’s hosting account however they want. Indeed, this was originally one of the key differentiators of our service. However this has meant keeping prices high.

You may well be looking at this and saying, “I’m a business manager. I don’t care about these technical details. I just want things to work.” What you’re looking for, then, is a “managed service”.

A hosting provider is really just renting out capacity on a computer or multiple computers in a data centre. Questions about what options are right for your business isn’t their concern. That’s the job of your CIO or your IT Manager. “But,” you say, “I’m a small business and I want someone else to figure this out.”

That’ll be the topic of the next article in this series, “IT support vs management vs consulting”".

Comments please. This is very much a first draft of my thoughts on this topic. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.

Internet hosting prices are usually explained in terms of the amount of storage space you get and the amount of data transfers (“bandwidth”) per month. However the real cost factor is paying the humans who provide support.

Some technical factors do affect the price of hosting, and I’ll address those tomorrow in Internet hosting: the cost of reliability. But with storage and bandwidth prices always dropping, particularly when set up on a large scale, hosting is now so cheap that Google, say, or WordPress.com and many others can provide free hosting in exchange for advertising. Or in Google’s case with Gmail, monitoring your email to build a profile so they can target advertising at you.

No, the humans are the expensive bit, and the cost can vary dramatically depending on how that support is provided. Here’s just a few of the factors.

Response time. From the time you initiate a support request, how long is it until someone answers? A fast response means paying for people to be there, and if you want to guarantee that response time then you need spare people in case it suddenly gets busy.

Prussia.Net has been providing support for our internet hosting service with a target response time of one hour, but allowing it to be slower when things get busy.

Hours of service. Do you want support to be available 24/7? Even on public holidays? Then you’re paying for a team to work around the clock.

Prussia.Net has been providing support 24/7, 365 days a year.

Phone support? Or email and web support? Phone support is much more expensive to provide than support via email and the web. Phone support requires fast response times because clients don’t want to wait on hold, and staff who are good communicators. Phone support also ties up a staff member for the entire length of the phone call, whereas with email support they can fire off a suggested solution and then get on with something else while you try that out. With web and email support, you can also save time by sending a pre-written reply.

However phone support is interactive. Support staff can quickly ask a series of questions to clarify the problem. From the client’s point of view it’s often faster — especially if they don’t have the technical knowledge to write a clear, unambiguous support request.

Prussia.Net has been providing support via email and the web. However I’ve often ended up providing phone support anyway, which is outside our cost model.

Scope of support. Just how many things are the support staff expected to help you with? Say you were expecting an important email but it hasn’t arrived. There’s no fault with the hosting server, and the support staff can see the email sitting in your mailbox. Something’s wrong at your end. Is that now the end of the call? Or are they expected to figure out whether the problem is down to your internet connection or your Wi-Fi or your email program? If it’s your email program, are they expected to help you solve that problem? How many different email programs are they expected to understand? Just Microsoft Mail and Outlook? Apple Mail as well? Your iPhone? Other, less well-known systems?

Prussia.Net, as part of its internet hosting service at least, has in the past been a little vague about this point. In theory our contracted support provider is only meant to help you solve problems with the hosting server, not with the computers and networks your end.

Level of detail and customisation. When support staff send you a technical answer, do they link to appropriate documentation on the web, like a software manual? Send an outline procedure? Prepare detailed step-by-step instructions? What level of technical knowledge should they assume on your part?

Prussia.Net hasn’t had a consistent policy here, and I suspect it’s caused confusion.

Scale versus personalisation. A big support centre is better able to cope with sudden increases in demand, and can arrange to have common problems handled by less-experienced staff (see the next item). That reduces costs. They’re also more likely to have seen the same problem before and have a pre-written response. But the flipside is that you’ll rarely get the same person handling your requests. If the support centre keeps comprehensive notes that’s not so much of a problem, but keeping good notes takes time and time is money.

A big support centre probably won’t have any idea about your business and the way your computers have been set up, so unless you can explain that to them it’ll take a while to reach a common understanding. Conversely, a small support centre means that you’re dealing with the same set of people and after a while they’ll get to know you and your systems.

Prussia.Net’s support team is provided by Bobcares, an Indian firm which specialises in providing support services to more than 200 companies worldwide. Overall Bobcares has more than 300 engineers on staff and is responsible for supporting 3.5 million websites, but Prussia.Net’s needs are provided by a specific team of six people who handle us and a number of other clients — so you’ll tend to get the same people answering your questions. It’s a compromise.

Skill level of staff. 90% of support requests are a few common questions. The most cost-effective approach is to have less-experienced staff handle the initial contact (“first level support”), and only escalate it to more-experienced staff if it can’t be solved. First-level staff can also work from a set of scripted questions. If the scripts are written well, the staff members don’t necessarily need a technical understanding of what they’re asking.

Conversely, some providers have what’s sometimes called “business grade support”. With the most expensive providers, from the very start you’ll be speaking directly to a fully qualified and experienced network engineer. Not cheap.

Prussia.Net’s team at Bobcares is in the middle. Everyone has technical qualifications, but initially your request might be handled by a staff member with less experience. If their first email to you says they’ll need time to get back to you, that probably means they’ve had to ask a supervisor for help.

From a client’s point of view, the ideal support deal would be a specific person they could phone 24/7. An experienced network engineer who knew everything about their business and computer set-up, who’d answer immediately and start working on their problem. It ain’t gonna happen.

Even if a client were willing to hire a full-time network engineer at, say, $100,000 a year and pay their on-costs, that person still needs to eat, sleep, take time out for training and paperwork and take holidays. And one person can’t be expected to know about everything. These days IT is broken down into a number of specialities.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you’re paying $29 a month for hosting, the service provider makes maybe $4 profit. Dealing with just one technical support request kills the profit for that month, and the next three.

Yet in my experience most small businesses want something better than the low-grade support provided by commodity hosting providers. If an important business email hasn’t arrived, waiting 36 hours for emailed technical support won’t cut it.

I suspect that what most small businesses really need isn’t “hosting support” but “technology support” or even “technology management”.

Small businesses and their staff don’t have the skills to start troubleshooting a problem from the beginning, so they don’t know whether they should be calling their internet service provider (ISP), hosting provider, some technical support guy or the shop that sold them their computer.

I’ll expand on these thoughts in the third article in this series, “IT support vs management vs consulting”, to be published on the weekend. And as a bonus link, try my essays from the other year, There ain’t no shortcuts to professionally-managed IT and the cranky “I don’t understand computers” is not an excuse

Comments please. This is very much a first draft of my thoughts on this topic. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.

[Update 16 April 2010: I should point out that the Prussia.Net service hours and response times I refer to here are for technical support relating to internet hosting. Prussia.Net provides other services, with different service levels, and this too has confused some clients because they didn't necessarily understand which service their question related to. For example, when we did general IT support, that was only available in (extended) business hours Monday to Friday, not 24/7. Administration matters were only dealt with during business hours, and with a 2-day turnaround. But clients would, and still do, send urgent technical requests to the administration email address -- and then wonder why it isn't addressed promptly. I'm not sure how you solve this.]

I’ve written before how I’m starting a business called Skank Media, and the new Topic 9 website is the first project out of the starting gate. Certainly since the beginning of this year I’ve been spending more time writing too: 133 posts in January 2008 compared with just 16 a year before. I’ve spent more time in dialogues online too, re-establishing links with my community.

What’s the Old Thing that’s stopped?

I’ve been getting less sleep, certainly. And less exercise. But I’ve also been doing less work for my “old” business, Prussia.Net — and therein lies a problem. Prussia.Net is what generates the income.

Oops.

Yes, cashflows are down. And because I wanted to change Prussia.Net itself, that change process takes more time of its own too. Some client projects are running terribly late. I even lost a wonderful long-term client a few weeks ago because I couldn’t dedicate enough time to their change process.

Big Oops.

So for me, today’s the day I start sorting out that chronological challenge. Here’s how I’ll proceed…

Since Prussia.Net pays the bills (and there’s plenty of bills to be paid) I’ll tackle that business first and sort out the timelines for the rest of this month. Then I’ll see how much time that leaves for Topic 9 in the two weeks until the Australia 2020 Summit. Once I know that magic number of X hours, at BarCampSydney 3 this weekend I’ll talk to people and figure out how I can best spend that time doing something about the Summit. I think that’s the right strategy because presumably I should exercise my geek skills as best I can — and fellow geeks can make good suggestions.

That means I’ll definitely be at BarCampSydney on Sunday. I’ve even written an explanation over at Topic 9.

Whaddyareckon, folks?

[Note: This post was very much me "thinking aloud". I figured that if I had to explain it all to you, then I'd be forced to get it clear in my own head. That's been a valuable technique -- but do you want to see this sort of post?]

[Update 17 February 2010: The website at topic9.com.au has been killed. For the moment, I've linked to the pages at the Internet Archive.]

My business Prussia.Net always has clients who resist any long-term IT planning. While researching potential suppliers to handle our increasing workload, I stumbled across the best explanation I’ve ever seen for how the process should work.

Many SOHO and very small business seem to have no plan for their IT at all. Most, actually. They just call for help when something breaks, and only replace computers and other equipment when it’s completely dead. They complain that their computers are slow or unreliable, and yet resist spending anything on preventative maintenance or minor upgrades which could deliver substantial improvements.

Zern Liew and I have discussed the causes of this before. However the two key elements are, I think, a lack of understanding of IT issues and the perception that doing things professionally will be expensive.

Last year Australian IT services company First Focus‘s website presented a 3-phase model for developing professionally-managed IT. They removed it when they renovated the site, which I think was a mistake. But here it is anyway, thanks to The Wayback Machine…

In the Learning phase, [we] will meet with your management team to hear about you. What are your priorities? What would you like to be able to do? How much do you want to spend? How much are IT problems costing you right now? Based on this information, we will create a proposal for moving your business towards a “best practice” IT environment. The proposal will include fixed costs, recommendations and alternatives, and we will discuss it with you in plain English to map out what’s going to happen next. During this phase, we will also distribute a survey to all members of staff in your organisation. The results of this survey will be used as a baseline for measuring improvements in your organization’s Network.

The Stabilisation phase is all about ensuring your network meets a minimum level of reliability and usefulness for your staff. A poorly designed or cobbled together network is only going to cause you an endless series of problems. Our goal is to prevent problems from recurring by fixing the root causes, rather than the symptoms. Critical problem areas are addressed first, and typically this phase may include the delivery of one or more Focused Solutions to address key business objectives.

The Support phase is all about ensuring your cost-benefit. This “phase” is more a continual process, where First Focus ensures your network stays highly organized, documented, and stable. Preventative maintenance, Software updates, and Staff training are the hallmarks of this process. A regular strategic IT review is also conducted in order for First Focus to report to your management team, and in order for the management team to keep First Focus aware of any new business objectives or requirements. We will also survey your staff on a regular basis to help you measure any improvement in your organisation’s Network.

Very sensible stuff. The killer for me, though, was their final paragraph:

There are no shortcuts to this process; we can’t maintain your network to the standards we are satisfied with, until it is in a stable state. And we can’t move your network to a stable state until we understand the business processes and objectives your network must support.

100% correct. Businesses can’t ignore planning and maintenance and then whinge about poor reliability and sudden unexpected expenses when things need to be fixed. And yet this is precisely how most small businesses seem to run. It’s like getting a dodgy second-hand car, failing to check the water levels or change the oil when recommended, and then being surprised when the engine blows up.

Even though First Focus dropped that explanation from their website, they’re definitely a contender for Prussia.Net’s outsourced IT support. Expect my call soon, chaps.

I think I’ve figured out how to explain my business plans for 2008. I’ve written about this previously, but while running errands today I had a brainflash. How does this sound…?

In my new About Stilgherrian page, I wrote:

I’m particularly interested in how new social networking and communication technologies are changing the way we work, play, socialise and organise our societies. Yes, I’m a geek… But I’m not that interested in technology itself. I’m more interested in the social questions.

What does it all mean for your life? Your family? Your business? Your community? For the law and politics? How will it change the very core of what it means to be human?

Well, my brainflash is about how this translates into what the two businesses actually do.

Here’s a first draft.

• Skank Media is about using this stuff. Tool-making geeks already use the tools to talk about the tools. (Hi! You know who you are!) Big corporations have whole departments to deal with it — or at least they should. But small businesses simply don’t know where to start, and most small-business owners are too busy to start from scratch. So Skank Media has two, maybe three roles:

  1. Acting as a production house to produce and run social media and “new media” [ugh!] operations for its clients.
  2. Producing and running its own projects for fun and profit.
  3. Providing an umbrella through which I discuss these things in the media. (Sounds uncomfortable.)
• Prussia.Net is about providing the tools. Currently Prussia.Net is about maintaining clients’ computers and data networks. The plan is to get them thinking about their information and how they communicate it, internally and externally. We look at how they can improve this using the new tools, and then help them make the transition — as well as keeping everything running.

Some Prussia.Net clients may not want to come for the ride. Perhaps they’re not comfortable with change, or don’t see the value of this stuff. Perhaps, like so many small businesses, they’re just incapable of thinking ahead — they just react to whichever crisis is in front of them today.

That’s cool.

There’s plenty of fix-my-computer people out there.

So whaddya reckon?

Starting today I’ll focus more of my time on “media stuff” rather than “IT stuff”. I’ll include Internet-related media in the mix, but I’ll phase out the time I spend farting around with other people’s computers. I’m interested in computers and the Internet as tools to achieve my own goals, not fixing other people’s tools. I hope to get all the hands-on IT stuff off my plate by the end of September.

This “media stuff” includes quite a few projects, some of which have been slowly incubating for years. There’s 3 book concepts (one of which would also make a good TV series), a set of 6 short films, a piece of music and a couple of things which will take the form of blogs. These will start being developed under the (probable) name Skank Media — more of that one day very soon.

I must admit, I’ve been longing to return to my media roots for ages. It feels good to see a coherent plan emerging to achieve just that.

So what happens to the existing business?

I still want to work with small businesses and their information systems — but by helping them make better use of emerging Internet technologies. And doing that within a planned framework — not just responding to failures or ad hoc requests. We may still provide IT support services, or that might be outsourced, but it certainly won’t be me worrying about misbehaving printers or crawling under desks fixing cables.

My friend and colleague Zern Liew developed a 3-point to-do list which is a delightful example of simplicity:

1. Don’t take on any new clients of the wrong sort. Knowing that you can say “Sorry, I don’t do that any more” is immensely empowering.
2. Work out how to transition the existing clients. That’s what I’m working on today, and I hope to have contacted every existing Prussia.Net client by the end of business tomorrow.
3. Start the new business. Well, there’s a lot under that one point. And there’s actually two businesses to think about: Skank Media and whatever Prussia.Net evolves into. But it puts the focus onto the future, not the past.

I feel really good about this. My target mix for the rest of this month is 20 hours per week billable time on IT and Internet work for existing clients, 10 hours on redeveloping Prussia.Net and 10 hours on Skank Media. Plus the usual extra 10 or 15 or 20 hours on making everything else work. I’ll report back on Friday evening.