Everyone's got a Web 2.0 idea (or several) these days. Even my mother. That Facebook thing she's been reading about? How come there isn't a site like that for English professors? And since I once worked with an offshore development firm to build a web project, friends and friends of friends are always asking how much I think it'll cost to get their concept implemented.
It's very inspiring, the 500-some reviews on Techcrunch and the 1400 sites on Web 2.0 Slides. Those and the cover stories in Newsweek and Businessweek, the articles in the Guardian and the New York Times. Technology Review says social networks, online collaboration and user generated content are fostering a new state of existence that it calls "continuous computing".
But... one topic Web 2.0 discussions hardly ever touch on is the web hosting infrastructure behind "continuous computing". I know of several content sharing sites that maxed out on their web servers' data transfer capacity. Most data centers offer 100Mbps connections. This would support only 12.5 MB per second worth of downloads. And with continuous usage at this rate, Canada Web Hosting's calculator shows that by the end of the month you'd owe $57525.65! Theirs is NOT the best deal, but is yours? Also importantly, is the capacity you have enough for the user base you hope to attract?
Another scary situation I've come across is a collaboration service that ran out of space on its database server. They tried installing hard drive #8 on a machine with 6 drive bays. You don't want to know what happened next. Especially since they didn't have a backup copy of their data.
I think the web hosting industry is partly to blame for these disasters. Quite a few Web 2.0 companies call Rackspace home, but does Rackspace's website offer any advice on what infrastructure is needed for a bandwidth- and storage-intensive project? None that I could find. Same goes for 1&1. I've seen their 16-page ads in several magazines; there's endless info on features and prices, but no pointers on how to evaluate your needs. EV1Servers promises to make the outrageous possible. But click on the link and it says the m/cluster software can load balance up to 16 web servers. How helpful was that?
(Maybe the user-unfriendly marketing comes from not having spent very much time with users? If you look through all those Valleywag photos of Bay Area networking events, you'll see people from dozens of VC and PR firms - but nobody from any web hosting company.)
Web 2.0 startups isn't the only market segment that web hosting companies neglect. ThePlanet does have a division that focuses on game hosting. But other than that, none of the major players reach out to porn producers, say. Or any other group (except possibly web hosting resellers) that represents a significant proportion of their user base. Which makes no sense. Even a tiny "we've worked with people like you" blurb would create more goodwill than all the keyword ads in the world could achieve.
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