hosting

Use Amazon S3 storage or not?

• Posted by Rob (#1) on April 18, 2008 15:11 CEST

Capsi is not in jeopardy of requiring more bandwidth and storage than planend for with its current hosting solution. It is however the goal that one day it will require more resources - and I'd like to plan ahead.

Capsi's current host, EngineHosting, is probably the best entry-level hosting provider when it comes to knowledge, support and reliability. They on quality of service, where budget hosts tend to oversell resulting in questionable availability and horribly incompetent support. Not EngineHosting - they know what they're doing.

The downside? EngineHosting offers limited disk space and data traffic. So I have the feeling that splitting dynamic content from static content would be a good decision in the long run. So let's do some math, assuming bandwidth is a greater resource risk than storage. What would the next 5GB of traffic (average filesize 50k, so that's 100,000 requests) cost? And what's the next upgrade step?

Let's take a look at the options:

• Upgrade to a higher hosting level iof EngineHosting. This would give Capsi 15GB more data traffic for $10 extra, plus 600MB of extra storage. That's $0.66/GB traffic. The next upgrade step would beanother $20 a month extra, for 25GB more traffic: $0.80/GB.
• Amazon S3. Marketed as content storage and definitely not delivery, but possibly a good starting point for smaller enterprises who can't yet commit to one of the big CDN's (content delivery networks). 600MB storage generating 5GB data traffic in 100,000 requests? Monthly cost: $1.25, or $0.25/GB. And how much resources would $30 extra buy as opposed to the 50GB in total for EngineHosting? More than 10GB of storage and more than 100GB of traffic (2 million requests).

Don't be surprised if Capsi's static content will soon be hosted on S3..

Additional benefits:

• Fewer static images in the htdocs directory, making it easier to find the actual dynamic pages residing there.
• User uploads go directly to the S3 bucket - no more need for PHP to have write permissions into an upload directory within htdocs.
• No need to manually ignore the user upload directory when uploading a new code base to the production server. No need to synchronise user content towards the development environment either - and in which case it is desired, the S3Fox Firefox add-on will make it a trivial task.
• Even though S3 is not a true and proper CDN, the separation of static content will make it easier to migrate towards one in the future.
• Seperate error logs for code problems and missing content. Seperate access logs for actual visitor activity and content delivery.

Yup, I'm going to give it a go with a couple of static images. And if I'm happy with the performance, reliability, ease-of-use and costs.. I will definitely port the user content uploads towards S3. Another added benefit, albeit specific to Capsi: this would be a great opportunity to obfuscate content names more, providing better privacy for users using Capsi's access levels.

Last but not least: Neil will probably complain how Amazon is naughty for its one-click shopping patent, but to be honest I don't think life will be much fun if you're going to avoid every single bit of evil..

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• Tags: Capsi, content, hosting, EngineHosting, Amazon, S3, CDN, data traffic
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Let's get a real hosting provider

• Posted by Rob (#1) on July 18, 2007 17:45 CEST

For a few years now, this site has been hosted with Powweb: cheap but not extremely reliable. Like many hosting providers, Powweb appears to be overselling their servers resulting in less than optimal performance. And first line technical support is pretty much clueless, answering questions from scripts and lacking even basic knowledge about the technologies they use. It's not that I need help with these, but it's kind of annoying when they break RFCs and URLs with a quote in then don't work even when some journal tags would like to use them.

Still, I don't really care about that for a small personal site. For Capsi however, I have higher ambitions and even though I don't expect it to become an instant hit I want to make sure hosting problems are not going to be an issue. So after some research I've decided to go with Engine Hosting, formerly known as pMachine Hosting. They're not as cheap as some others, but you get what you pay for: reasonable limits on data/bandwidth and a support staff that actually knows what they're talking about. I'm no longer interested in "technical support" asking me for my password so they can check my e-mail account when I ask about the IDLE feature of IMAP. EngineHosting's response to my pre-sales question was a lot more useful:

> Does your IMAP server support the idle command
> to provide push e-mail for mobile phones?

Here is a cut and paste of the IMAP CAPABILITY command from our IMAP port:

* CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4REV1 ACL NAMESPACE UIDPLUS IDLE LITERAL+ QUOTA ID
MULTIAPPEND LISTEXT CHILDREN BINARY LOGIN-REFERRALS UNSELECT STARTTLS AUTH=LOGIN
AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=CRAM-MD5 AUTH=DIGEST-MD5 AUTH=GSSAPI AUTH=MSN AUTH=NTLM

While I have not used the IMAP / IDLE function from a mobile phone it has been
tested/works from desktop client applications that support the IDLE command so there
should not be any problems on the mobile side as long as the software on the phone
supports it well.

Now that's a hosting company I can do business with!

As for Capsi, this means that I will be moving the technology preview away from its temporary URL shortly, finally making it available on www.capsi.com. Once that has been taken care of I will do my best to finish enough basics to allow for beta registrations and finally get the site up and running. :)

• PermaLink: Let's get a real hosting provider
• Tags: Powweb, Capsi, Engine Hosting, pMachine Hosting, hosting, IMAP
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