Web Server and testing (Techies only :-)

[robertuk]

Hi all,

my friend has his own webserver (linux box running redhat). His website consists of :

A 'public' 8mb flash movie and html page.

A 'private' login where clients can upload and download project files. These files are huge (>200MB ).

So just 20 downloads ( 4 GB ) in a month would exceed most people's bandwidth allocation.

Now..
Sometimes I cannot load the site. Othertimes it works fine.

Pinging it returns a request timed out response when this occurs. FTP does not work either when this occurs.

My questions to the PH'ers are:

1). What software/services/company do you guys use to test uptime/performance ?

2.) In my opinion, having your own server is a real headache ?

Would it not be more preferable to say have a hosting company serve the main website and have a sub-domain to a local machine for the large file downloads and uploads ?

www.mydomain.com > hosted with hostiung company
sub-domain.mydomain.com > hosted on *our* machine so no bandwidth charges.

Do you guys think this is an elegant solution ?

R.

>>> Edited by robertuk on Tuesday 3rd February 20:59

[JamieBeeston]

your own server is only as much headache as you make it,

sure taking taxis everywhere is easy, but once you learn to drive, its much more fun

By all means you could have the situation you describe re: subdomain.

If your friend 'goes down' it could simply be his home connection dieing.. The Ping timeout could just be a firewall, or IP filtering stopping the ping requests.

Hosting can be had cheaply and easily nowadays, for home user level, or not so cheaply, but alot more 'easily' for corpoprate level.

It is fun tho, once you get to grips with it all

[tuffer]

For testing purposes you could try Nagios it runs on Linux and can check services etc and send alerts when you box goes down.

[jam1et]

JamieBeeston said:

Hosting can be had cheaply and easily nowadays

You would say that

[fatsteve]

tuffer said:

For testing purposes you could try Nagios it runs on Linux and can check services etc and send alerts when you box goes down.

Agreed, or Big Brother is also excellent (and free!)

[robertuk]

thx I'm going to print this out and show it to him.

I personally prefer to pay for a service,
that if things go wrong you have someone with years of experience on the other end of the phone.

Better than googling "webserver not pinging pls help"
:-)

If your a large operation (say an online bookstore) it would be more viable to have your own in-house team and servers.

Cheers guys

Ramesh

[JamieBeeston]

robertuk said:

If your a large operation (say an online bookstore) it would be more viable to have your own in-house team and servers.

I would say not.

it would cost millions to build a datacentre inhosue. The Aircon, the Fire Suppression, the Generators, the UPS's the batteries. Not to mention the costs of hiring 24x7 techinical staff or the cost of feeding gbit links into your office.

Outsourcing is the future, thats why the Colo business IS so huge.. Companies realise they get a far better level of service, for a fraction of the costs.

The number of PLC's I have on my books.. who could easily afford to build their own datacentre 10x over.. but dont.

Its just not value for money.

[jam1et]

I think co-location is a great idea for any size company. ASP's are a different kettle of fish altogether though. The SLA's would have to be bomb proof before anyone had my autograph. Plus ASP's kinda make me redundant so why would I want to put the idea to the board? I think thats why some ASP's are strugling - company IT departments are always going to fight it.

>> Edited by jam1et on Thursday 5th February 16:55

[JamieBeeston]

ASP's.. interesting one.

I always took the ASP to be one of those .com buzzwords, that never really took form.

I cant say I have had the pleasure of coming accross anyone i would term an ASP.

Colo and ASP are almost opposites.

Colo, its all in your (the clients) hands, you can manage it, or not, you can out source it, or not.. you can reboot it, or not.. you can upgrade it .. or not..

with an ASP, all those choices are taken away from you, you put your money in, pull the level, and out drops your product/service...

[jam1et]

JamieBeeston said:

ASP's.. interesting one. Colo, its all in your (the clients) hands, you can manage it, or not, you can out source it, or not.. you can reboot it, or not.. you can upgrade it .. or not..

Thats why colocation is a good idea.

JamieBeeston said:

with an ASP, all those choices are taken away from you, you put your money in, pull the level, and out drops your product/service...

Thats why ASP's are not.