Data Center
Superior Web Hosting and “The Day the Music Died”
Feb 9th
Last week there was a whole lot of news reporting on the 50th anniversary of “The Day The Music Died.” Early in the morning of February 3rd, 1959 a small plane crashed near the Mason City, Iowa airport killing Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper.
The three, along with Dion and The Belmonts played their final concert the night before at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa.
So what does this have to do with an ISP in Minneapolis? Well, besides the fact that I have a copy of the Surf Ballroom concert billboard on the wall of my home office (for years I was rather obsessed with the tragedy), there is a tie-in here.
The Surf Ballroom’s website commemorating the 50-year anniversary was hosted by ipHouse. (By the way, this site was designed by another ipHouse customer, Sassafras Design) As I said, there has been a ton of media reports lately and many of them have focused on the Surf Ballroom.
So in light of the media buzz, we thought to review the performance and reliability of the site over the last few months. The increase in web traffic the website saw was quite staggering and perhaps a testament to how important this day was to a lot of people.
Check this out:
Comparing single day web statistics from 11/2/2008 and 2/2/2009 the website had a 13,596% increase in web browsing. Yes, that number is correct, 17.6 MB on 11/2 and 24.1 GB (2,410 MB) on 2/2.
From another perspective, the site had 2,738 hits on 11/2 and 247,884 hits on 2/2. That is a stunning increase in traffic.
And we handled it.
The folks at the Surf Ballroom verified the website hosting was flawless during this heavy load.
While many ISPs claim to have burst capability, ipHouse’s web hosting cluster delivers. A common trick that some ISPs use is to speed cap or limit GB of transfers. On ipHouse’s clustered web hosting – we don’t do this – our cluster can handle all the transfers requested of it…even if your traffic increases by 13,000 percent!
To find our more about ipHouse clustered web hosting, go to http://www.iphouse.com/web-hosting-service.html or call us at (612) 337-6320.
Rave On!
- Andy
Power, Power, Power, & Cooling
Nov 19th
Gas prices may be down, way down, but data center power costs are still going up. Data center power and cooling costs are going to be one of the huge drivers of increased IT costs in the coming years. Earlier this year, Network World ran a series of articles detailing the problem. Because servers, switches and routers have very few moving parts, generally power in is equivalent to heat out. Heat that then must be cooled.
ipHouse is working hard to position our network and data center for the future. This fall, we initiated a huge virtualization project. By using high-performance, efficient, virtual servers, we have been able to reduce the total number of physical machines used for hosting email and web services without impacting performance. Mike, our CTO, has been blogging about the virtualization project in his multipart series, “Virtualization and the ISP.”
