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Suggestions for a Startup Web Company
mochaone asks "I've always admired the Slashdot crew for putting together a great site that has vastly contributed to the internet experience. I have an idea for a website that I think has great potential also. I would like to know how slashdot (or any other webcompanies) got started and what tips they might offer? Should I use webhosting services or provide content on my own computers? What's a typical server setup -- separate boxes for web servers, database, banners, etc? T1 line or T3? How often should I backup data if providing content on my own computers and should I store backups offsite? Any other tips are welcome. More interested in the high-level, architectural issues rather than the "Use Debian over Redhat" or "Use Python over Perl" issues. I think those have been covered in other Ask Slashdot features. "
Oh yeah, first post :-P
Sig broken, watch for
Right now I'm letting a web provider take care of keeping the servers up for SaveTheLaptop (http://savethelaptop.zzweb.com/). It's doing fine even though it's running MySQL, Apache and other applications on one server. The server is also situated on a DSL connection and is working fine.
If your site isn't expecting to get much traffic then you don't need a high-end connection, but if it does get popular enough, it would be best to host it yourself. And yes, storing backups ffsite is recommended if your server will be located in a high-risk area (like California for example)
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http://savethelaptop.zzweb.com/: Tips and help for laptop theft
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
If you know what you are doing, and have the money, run it with a T1 line though your own boxes. If you don't have a clue or don't trust your own experience, webhosting is the best way to go.
It also depends on how big you really want it to be. Is it going to be huge with thousands of hits an hour? or reletively small with only a few hundrend hits a day?
So what's this great idea anyways? Doesn't sound like you have much of a plan except wanting to do stuff with the web . . . hmmm, any other specifics?
On the subject, what is the best place to start when looking into advertising on a new site? Or even if the site has begun generating decent traffic, where does one turn to find the best advertisement revenue? The 3rd party agencies all seem to pay incredibly low dividends.
You have to lookat what everyone has and not do that. It is something people have already seen, thats my /. and mp3.com are so successful. You have to think of something origional and neat to do. I recommend a T1 with a nice server to use. A suggestion is to use a raid 1 so that you can pull one drive just in case, and you will always have a backup. Definatly seek some hosting and co-locations beacause you can charge and pay the fixed costs with that stuff. Then you can think about dial-up and dsl hosting as my company has. You aren't going to get very much from dial up so it is almost not worth doing...i might be biased towards dsl/co-location/hosting. brings in more money to cover your bottom line.
/. you prolly won't need a t3.
Good server setup:
Pentium iii 400-500
256-384meg of ecc sdram
adaptec aaa-131 (1 chan) raid card or the aaa-133 for 3 chan.
raid 1 or 5 depending on your space needs
and a t1, go with one t1 then multiple t1s then think about a t3. Unless you are getting hits like
that should be enough to get you started, and not have to upgrade the actual server for a while.
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
The Zope web site lists serveral vendors that provide zope services. The premium service allows you to add your own Zope products to their site. If you have them install the Squishdot product you will have a ready-made slashdot up and running in no time.
I use different boxes for different type of content: ordinary Pentium 100's for the static pages and PII-350 + for dynamic content (perl, c++, asp). You could add a server just for images and graphics.
This type of load balancing is real easy, but it's not fail-safe: if one server dies, all the site is affected. That's why I have a few old boxes with replicated content that are ready to rock in case a server dies. All I need to change is the IP.
A T1 line is not very hard to saturate, and to some extent, only one server could probably manage the whole static/dynamic/graphic content.
We have a T1 line and host our own content. This way you get much better control. We use one tape backup per server, and investigate our logfiles as to when the best time to backup is. That's typically 3am for us.
Until recently I thought that just keeping up to date with patches on linux would be enough! NO WAY !
:)
/. and pray that your setup survives!
Whatever you do, setup a firewall. I am currently working on setting up OpenBSD on a machine to run as a firewall.... and if you are going to run a business, i would recommend that you keep funds aside for a firewall and work on security.
On that end i would think that having a database on a different server would be nice. Preferably one that does NOT have a direct connection to the internet!!! (Hmm maybe it could be hooked up via the NEW USB standard
Also, make the website that works well and dont PUT TOO MUCH into it. I think a lot of ppl. get annoyed when you can see 6 guzillion things and still can't navigate!
:Lastly, try and get your website to be featured somehow onto
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
Getting your own lines is probably not a good idea. It's too expensive, you'll end up paying for bandwdith which at the beginning you won't need and it may not scale well if your site starts generating a lot of traffic. Which, few sites actually do. Generic webhosting isn't a good idea either, not flexible enough. Your best bet is colocation - use your own boxes connected to some ISP's bandwidth. Jump.Net is good in the central Texas area.
And I mean _get_it_now_. Don't wait until other pieces have fallen into place - by then your domain's probably long gone.
Also, when you've settled with a fabulous, unreserved name, don't mention it anywhere until it's yours. I made that mistake once and the name was taken by a speculator in a matter of days... grrr...
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
That you need to be clearer about what it is you want to do. What services are you going to provide? What's the hook? How are you going to draw people in? What services/equipment you use completely depends on exactly what services you want to provide, how much you are charging for them, who your clients are, etc..
Im setting up a start-up company now. The portal will be reviewplex.com(down) have news, forums, free email, chat, files and all sorts of good stuff. There will be seperate sites for different types of content...our first will be expertreviews.com. We have a T1(donated by the admin) on a small machine running bsd, but soon to be linux(for cf)...but it will soon be a high powered raid machine. Were planning to go up late nov or december one. Were finishing up cold-fusion backend that will be phoneominal and will have the public able to see what it looks like. We have a team of programmers and designers. We have good support from the companies we have contacted so far. Stay tuned! JD jd@expertreviews.com
I think that the bandwidth, distribution of load, etc are really dependant on how big u plan this site to get and how fast. Also its going to depend on what kinda capital you have.
I've been looking to start a database driven site for a bit and am putting a lot of thought into the architecture of the database... like, how i should organize tables to give me the best speed for queries.
Another question that u might want to look at (and a question that im wondering about) is what kind of processor works best for what u want to do. I've heard risc based processors work badly for floating point... but what if yer doing a lot of integer operations? (i duno where this would come up...)
Daily if not half daily. Do full backups at least once a week and incrementals in-between. If you could do full's everyday, all the better. If you can also do redundancy, that would kick butt too, but redundancy (what?) redundancy (what?) is no replacement for backups. Take backups offsite. A must.
As for services, have a different host-name for each service... so if you wanna move your database off of your web machine, www.myhost.com still hosts the web and db.myhost.com still hosts databases.
Make sure to use the latest (or at least clostest) to the newest stable unix you can. Make sure you keep your software up to date security wise and feature wise when it is intelligeble. (If we are on HTTP 1.2, you should probably upgrade to keep up on standards.)
Other tips, make sure you have a policy for the machine. Even if its for 3 people working on the machine, if rules aren't established early on, chaos may ensue when conflicts arise or the company grows. Most important, be openminded to learning. But you seem to have that. ;>
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
hardware, yeah i would reccomend separating the db from the web servers regardless of weather you host it or not.
if your comfortable, or you think you could get comfortable, with considering all thats involved with keeping a site up, ie backups, security, reliability etc. go for it. with remote hosting you lose control. it gets hard to try out new stuff, because your not the administrator. but you do have someone to yell at when it goes down...
as far as bandwidth goes, it's far easier to go up to a t3 from a t1, as opposed to getting rid of a 15-45K/month phone bill for that fat t3.
The Zope web site lists serveral Zope Hosting Providers. Ask one of these ISPs to install the Squishdot product and you can have have a ready-made slashdot up and running in no time. If you need something more complex you can buy the premium service and install your own custom built products.
Obviously your server architecture should be driven by your expected load, but you should also design your app for scalability(meaning you can add boxen easily).
For the companies I typically work for its split into a static image server, a couple apache/modperl servers, a big database box, and possibly middleware box(en) for caching data. Add a sendmail box if you expect heavy email traffic. Possibly an admin box on a VNC.
But again this design is for a biggish site. Sometimes just two boxen (apache on one and database on the other) will do just fine. I would try to avoid putting them on the same box just for security.
Colocation seems like the way to go, you get control of your own machines, but won't have to worry about power and pipes. This may be colored by the bad experience I've had with one of those full service type shops.
Backup: What else am I gonna say? Backup to tape daily, with off and onsite redundancy. You may just have to back up your database daily(if all your content lives there), and just be ready to rebuild your web server if it goes south.
for a 2-3 hundred/month you can get a dedicated hosted server from someone like dn.net (where btw slashdot is hosted). You will have access to massive bandwidth and full control over the box. You could also find a (semi)local company that provides similar services in which case you would have physical access to the server.
Even load balancing between 5 boxes hosted at dn.net will probably cheaper than running a dedicated T1 line to your office.. And your servers will be on multiple-DS3s..
The Zope web site
lists serveral Zope Hosting Providers. Ask one of these ISPs to install the Squishdot product and you can have
have a ready-made slashdot up and running in
I have a friend who runs a very popular service on his Linux box, which I help administrate. It is combination of text and file transfers (mainly text). However, he's got about 30-35 users on at any time of day and night, each one using a basically constant text stream. The number of users is increasing exponentially.
My question is this: He is currently using a cable modem for his Internet connection. Would DSL be better or faster? At the current rate of growth, the number of users on at any given time can be expected to grow to 50 within a month. Which is better for this kind of thing, a cable modem or DSL?
I own a webhosting co, and we've had a few clients that started with us but then after geting much bigger than they had planed move to a seperate option, be it their own setup or something like colocation.
I think really there are three options for people:
1) simple webhosting if you aren't planing on having too much traffic (this is sharing your server with alot of other sites, after all)
2) CoLocation If you're planing on alot of traffic but don't have alot of money/time to deal with firewall/server/bandwidth/etc/etc/etc issues
3) Roll your own If you're expecting alot of traffic (slashdot-esque) and you have the resources (cash, knowledge, possibly staff)
SE
Anyone can suggest a reliable (nevermind price) solution? Has anyone tried hydra's (www.hydraweb.com)? Obviously not so many people need to load balance their sites but those who do are damned concerned with all these "cool" solutions.
If you need some web site suggestions, just get back to basics. It's unfortunate how the web has strayed from its pornographic roots. You'll be rolling in dough in not time flat.
You folks on the Slashdot there best watch yourselves.. I got patents pending for the microprocessor, the hydrogen atom, condensation, the food chain, the bubonic plague, algebra, the hamburger, the human brain, sex, the automobile, green eyes, extraterrestrials, the motion picture camera, hot dogs, chrome, the cumbustion engine, the planet Mars, the paper clip, Henry Kissinger, the Roman Alphabet, nude women, rug burn, catfish, and the city of Detroit. So watch it or I'll sue you into a paper bag!
spoo
I'm a part-time webmaster, so I use virtual hosting with several different ISPs. My favorite is Pair (www.pair.com). They don't do any dial-up services (read: bandwidth hole), run BSD servers (which I prefer to Linux for web hosting), and I get to let them take care of the details. That way I can take off for the weekend and not worry about my server going down while I'm gone. Yes, I sacrifice some flexibility and power, but my time is valuable. Matt
If you're really serious about getting into web stuff, study http://arsdigita.com/ and http://photo.net/, as there's stuff like an entire book online on how to set up a serious e-commerce site. And the author's an entertaining writer, too.
Don't bring a high speed line to a box on your own site. Just look at the money and reliability. If you have an enormous need co-locate. Put your server into a colocated facility. The bandwidth will be cheaper and you will be getting redundant power, physical security, and network reliability that you wouldn't get at your own facility. Price redundant T3s, a power generator, HVAC equipment, physical lockdown of server, and network equipment (don't even get me started on trying to deal with your LEC). -Nathan
You need to answer basic business questions 1st.
What is the market you are serving?
Why are customers going to come to you, and keep coming back to you over others?
Does anyone in your group of people understand basic accounting?
Do you know how to run the accounting package you have chosen?
How are you going to link this accoutning package to your business?
And the REALLY big one:
Do you have the money to do this?
Sweat, blood and credit card advances only go so far.
Go to the public library, any of the small business web sites, and even (gasp) the IRS and do some reading. They will tell you ALL kinds of questions you should be asking. Like Insurance, type of business org., etc.
After you have done the above mentioned research *THEN* start wondering about DS1 or DS3, colocation, etc.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
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It's more than annoying at the massive chasm in pricing that exists between commercial and non-commercial pricing for any sort of high speed internet access, even when comparing identical speeds. There just isn't an affordable way to start small and grow.
Eventually I moved to co-located with 9netave.com and now I'm making money. I positioned myself as a low cost hosting company and automated everything to make it so that it wouldn't drain more time than it was worth.
The moral of the story is to start with something you can afford, and expand as required. Since you're just building one site I'd start with a hosting company and build and test it there. It would suck to pay all the money to set up a co-lo and then have the thing fizzle. (Short plug: I support php3 and mysql plus 100MB storage for $20/month - Sorry - I had to!)
If all looks good, move it to a co-locate and try to go big-time. If that takes off then maybe you can afford your own bandwidth, but it's tough to compete with co-location.
As my business grows it may become less expensive to run my own T1, but then I'm loosing the speed of all those OC-3's, so it'd probably never happen.
Hope this helps.
Any natural disaster big enough, like the current series of earthqueakes in Turkiye, can make your whole physical location just disappear in a cloud of dust.
With either good friends or severe costs, you'll be able to replicate the whole service on a server on another continent, ready to jump into action in the worst case. The DNS will take a while to update
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
They must have plenty of bandwith if they can handle it! I'm sure Tom explained how he got to choose pair, but I can't seem to find the link (and Thomas the searchengive is dead...)
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
How to get started? A slashdot article can always help :) Really depends on your audience. If it's just a site for you and your friends, tell your friends. If it's a humor site, try advertising on well known humor sites. If it's a geek site, get slashdotted and you're all set :)
Typical server setup? There isn't a generic typical one. It depends GREATLY on what kind of traffic you expect. Slashdot and Andover probably have 30 billion dedicated servers, other, smaller sites, just need geocities or the like.
T1 or T3? What kind of question is that? Of course you want the fastest connection possible. Maybe your real question is whether it's really worth the extra money to get a T3 instead of a T1. Well, a T1 and a T3 doesnt mean much - you could get a T3 with insane amounts of traffic and be slower than a T1. And of course, there are other choices besides T1 and T3 :)
Backing up - definately key. I backup every 1 to 2 weeks. Note, make sure you dont overwrite your previous backups with new backups - I've done that :)
Webhosting service vs own computer? Uh... depends how much cash you have and how good your computer and connection are. If you have a really fast internet connection and your ISP doesn't mind, then use your own computer. But if you dont know much about server admining then it's probably easier just to go with a webhosting service. At least to get started. Move from there.
I think that covers it. Have fun - starting new sites can be a blast :)
"Then I'll tell the truth. We're allowed to do that in emergencies."
Seriously, the only clue you've given us is that your web site "has great potential" (what doesn't?) and that it might have some use for banners and a database. That's a lot like saying "I have an idea for a computer program that has great potential; what language and OS should I use?"
I've seen a lot of posts here regarding T1s or T3s. I've done a bunch of research into this, and it breaks down into this:
/.'d once, but the rest of the month you're back to normal...you don't get charged for the /. (if it fits in that 5% usage).
You pay for your local loop (from your local telco) from your location to your service provider (UUNet or Qwest etc.). That typically costs around $350-$450 for a T1, and a little more expensive for a T3. Then you've got your net connection charges. You can get a fractional T1 or T3, and have less bandwidth to use, but you're not paying as much. When you need more bandwidth, give 'em a call, and they can up it for you.
That doesn't work so much with T1s, 'cause it really doesn't make sense price-wise since theres a lot of money involved in the connection itself, regardless of the bandwidth.
I've found Qwest to be the cheapest solution, and I hear the quality is really good (guarenteed 100% uptime, and 0% packet loss...within their network). What you could do, is purchase a T3, but only pay for 3megs of bandwidth (its usually charged in increments of 3 megs). Need more bandwidth? Add another 3 megs.
There are other solutions (especially for T1s) called Burstable T1s. This is where you only pay for an average bandwidth...for instance, they monitor your bandwidth usage every 5 minutes (in the case of UUNet), and average out your usage. They then take off the top 5% of your bandwidth, and then charge you for what you've used. The 5% off the top is so that, say for instance, you get
Anyway...My suggestion is, if you're expecting a lot of growth, get a router that can support up to 45 megs/sec (full T3), get a T3, but only pay for 3 megs to start. For me, I figured the monthly bandwidth charges to be around $1300 for a T1's bandwidth, and $350 for the local loop. I can't remember what the charges were.
Lemme say again, that UUNet is EXPENSIVE! And, from an ISP standpoint (which is where my day job is), they're down a lot. I've never dealt with Quest, but they're pretty responsive to their customer service calls, and they boast a really sweet network.
As an overpaid consultant, setting up databases for websites in silicon valley, I'd like to say this:
Don't hire anybody just yet. Pay as little money as possible, and get as simple and cheap hardware as possible. I'ts easy to talk about what the ultimate setup is, but you are at point A, and that is point B. You have to think in terms of your first steps, while visualizing the *path* to the larger setup.
0.) get a domain name.
1.) Check out www.cobalt.com. Look at the Qube or raQ server appliances. The skinny: simple setup, 90% of the features you will need ultimately, and 120% of the features you are capable of using today. That way, you get started on content, not on DNS, Apache, TCP configuration etc. etc. I can setup all these things, but if I was starting up my own website, that's exactly where I'd start, with an appliance like this.
2.) get your site going in your bedroom, completely offline.
3.) find a ISP that rents out cobalt servers. I think there are quite a few, at least in the bay area. Install your server there.
4.) revel in the massive response to your site.
5.) hookup with someone who can setup a faster linux box for you , and improve you site to eclipse slashdot.
6.) hire another guy to do grunt work like backups etc. thay you've been doing till now.
6.) roll the multi-server, load balanced version to a co-location facility, using the stuff others have talked about in this thread. 7.) work on your keynote address, focusing on the story of how you got started with a post to slashdot.
For now, I'm running a startup outta my home - but it's only in the devlopment phase. Some things I've budgeted for this one when I get some $$$ (in 3 weeks!):
E-com server: P3-450(X2), 256MB, RAID, >= RedHat6, Enhydra, IBM JDK 118, Apache
Db Server:Postgres (free+transactions), same hardware (ditto for Auction Db server)
Auction server: same hardware, Apache, EveryAuction
All running on a 100mbps switch. When the need arises, we'll move the hardware off to Qwest or somethin. All the above can be purchased for under $20k! Our whole goal for the business - software wise - is free and open source.
We've come to the obvious conclusion that there's no need to run anything M$.
My personal webserver is a SPARCserver 1000 w/8 CPUs. It pretty much rocks to tell you the truth. I only paid $250 for the thing and it has 512MB of RAM in it which was in the thing when I got it. It runs Solaris 2.5.1 and also runs a few other services (ftpd, sshd, telnetd, etc). The "line" is a 4Mbps "wireless LAN" unit from TTI. I couldn't reach my employer's site which is around 13 miles away (there is a DS-3 there) so I built a an amplifier that pumps out approx. 8W on 915MHz into a pair of 33 element antennas. I am going to put some of this stuff up (amplifier schematics [ which should also work on aironet, zoomair, wavelan, you name it at 900MHz, etc) for some content which is about all that I'm currently lacking. :-) Don't think ya gotta use intel h/w though, the high end older sun stuff can be had extremely cheap and it performs pretty well for the money.
Sorry to go off topic, but this is a great opportunity to get some opinions from people who know how sites should be designed. Speaking of Ideas on how to build a great web site I am running a consulting service using a local provider to host my web site, but im not doing anything special. I want to add some more active content to it, can any of you guys suggest anything ? www.cubedd.com
NTL, the main cable company in the UK will fit an E1 line (2Mbps), and let you start at 128K and increase the bandwidth as required. They only need 10 days notice, so as long as you keep an eye on the amount of traffic you're getting, you should be able to plan ahead.
Co-location is fine, but the cost (certainly in the UK) adds up if you want to have several machines hosted - eg. several load-balanced static servers, cgi servers, an image server, MySQL server, etc, which you'll need if your website generates a lot of traffic.
Usually you only get 1 or 2 Gigabits per month for each machine and have to pay per MB after that.
So, if it's going to have a low bandwidth requirement and won't have thousands of hits per hour, then just co-locate one machine with an ISP, otherwise go for a full set-up like Slashdot (there's info on their set-up in the Slashdot FAQ).
First things first, your servers should probably be as follows: Static Content - P-120 /w 128MB RAM Dynamic Content - PII-350 /w 256MB RAM
Depending on the amount of space you need either use RAID1 or 5. That way, if one drive dies, you don't have to resort back to tape yet.
You will also want a decent tape backup system. I prefer the Exabyte Mammoth drives as they are quick and hold 20GB native.
As for you backbone connection, my experience at my current job (network admin of a small ISP) shows that you can actually run quite a bit of content on a single full T1. If you are expecting around 10,000 hits, a T1 should be fine. You will want to get some sort of firewall and you would be smart to use multi-homing T1s. That way, when one provider dies, you have a backup.
As for co-locating and such, being that I work at an ISP, I have never done that myself and we currently do not have anyone co-locate with us. I can see benefits to co-locating, but physical access to the machine is sometimes necessary and you will want to check and see if you can get to the machine any time you want/need.
Other than that, you shouldn't have any problems. Another nice feature to look for when getting a backbone provider is to see if they offer some sort of emergency notification system for outages.
"Those of you who think you know everything are annoying those of us who do."
kc8apf
Don't start a business. Start a normal, hobbist-style web site. If it catches on, expand. Don't load down any capital in it. As a rule of thumb, most of the good sites were hobbist-maintained and grew. Most of the sites that suck huge amounts of cash started as businesses and floundered.
Your parents lied to you. They said money isn't everything. Money is everything. To be able to generate a successful website, you need money. No longer are the days when sites become popular by word of mouth or thru Yahoo's Cool Site. You need to either be /.ed or pay for advertising. Look up the Ask Slashdots on venture capital. While your idea may be great and your site may look awesome, it won't be worth it if nobody shows up. Just my two greedy cents.
Howdy.
The prices I'm hearing quoted here are stupid. At a local NAP, 100Mbit connections direct to routers sitting on an OC-192, an OC-48 and two OC-12's are only a couple hundred dollars a month, plus bandwidth (which is quite cheap).. in Canadian dollars. $600 a month for ISDN is ludicrous.
Not to be too picky, but the answers you want are what network consultants get paid $100-$200 an hour to answer. There's not ``one answer for everyone.'' I'd recommend visiting your library or bookstore and grabbing a couple O'Reilly books and other stuff from the same section and start reading. Call a couple ISPs near you (or not near you for that matter) and explain what you want to do, how much traffic you expect, and the like, and you'll notice a lot of data starting to approach an asymptote. And therein lies your answer.
:P )
(Or, just gimme a call and give me two hours and a hundred bucks. I'll set you up real good.
-Chris
Around here, you can pay approximately $200 a month for a business cable modem, with much greater upstream bandwidth, as well as similar downstream bandwidth.
Hmm...
A lot of comments about hardware and hosting here and almost none about design misstakes.
I'll tell you a story: for more than a year ago I started collecting links to different Linux programming resources. Is started out with some static pages and got my self a domain (linuxprogramming.com). After a while I needed a database to keep track of all the resources so started learning MySQL, because that was what my hoster provided. I didn't know any SQL nor any database theory. After many hours of work, I manage to get everything to work the way I wanted it to.
But then I got more and more ideas. I came across a big problem: because I didn't know what I was doing when I created my base, I made alot of misstakes (especially in the design of the database). Te result was that I could not implement all the new stuff. This summer I decided to redo all of it. That is more than 4 months ago, and I'm still not done! (School and work takes a lot of time)
Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that if you have such a great idea, create a base that is easy to scale. In my opinon, it is easier (and a lot more fun) to upgrade hardware och bandwith than correcting stupid design misstakes you did for 6 months ago...
Good luck with that idea!!
Also things I think are important, since I know the tech stuff:
1. Required Forms
2. The form of business (Partnership, LL Partnership, Proprietership, LLC, Corporation, Corporation [type]...)
3. Where to get reliable patent/trademark searches, and yes, lawyers are the best
4. Zoning
5. City/County forms
/* Signature goes here I am not a lawyer, but I play one in school */
And I order you and Slashdot to immediately seize and desist all usage of our internationally copyrighted phrase "... for dummies". We have court decisions backing IDG's exclusive right to address the dummies of the world.
Though, given how in line your advice is with other IDG publishings, we may consider giving you a book contract for this one...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Why not develop an all-in-one website for "innovators" to get retarded patents. That way when a company tries to patent something like putting your mousepad on the right side of your keyboard or something similar, you will get paid no mater what happens. It worked for Internic :)
Whatever you do... sue Microsoft over that damn paper clip!!! Argghhhhh!!!!!!!!!
Before you start a business you need to do a lot of planning. Places like startups.com can help you with that. You need to devide whether you are going to be a Corp, Inc., or LLC. Do I want to give up equity in exchange for deniro. Do I have the money to start this? Do I have the money to support myself while my business is loosing money? Am I a manager or an engineer? Do I want to bring in experienced managment to help me run it.
Rob was one of the lucky ones. He just had a good concept and worked hard. Most people aren't that lucky!8 out of 10 startups fail, and not in a blaze of glory. (Anyone remember Pen Computing.)
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There are alot of good resources out their:
My favorite three:
SBA Online: Small Business Administration
- http://www.sba.gov
My Favorite Venture Capitalist: Garage.com http://www.garage.com
They have a ton of resources for those thinking about getting started.
SCORE: Service Corps of Retired Executives
You can talk to people who have been their done that. Over email or in person. There free too.
Cheers,
WFE
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I run webhosting services for other businesses, and my setup is thus:
6 Ultra Sparcs 3 main servers and 3 replicated. The raid is shared for each pair, with an automatic failover running on a serial line. Each Raid is Raid 5 with a hot swap for 22 GB on each raid. I have a graphics domain, a db domain, and a main domain. All scripts run on the main server, the DB server runs as little as possible and all maint tasks are run through the Graphics server. Each Sparc has 256MB of RAM.
All of these are running on an FDDI ring to the router.
Firewall: Linux server on a crappy P100. Also serves as the Samba server and PDC for NT. Also rigged for auto failover to another P75 that is replicated on a daliy basis. (Cron)
3 Win NT workstations for design and input. Nobody, and I mean Nobody! but me ever sees the backend of my site.
Backups: Full backups every night to a DLT.
I also have a Cron Job that knows which processes should be running, and if it can determine it, kills processes it does not expect. If it cannot, it send mail to notify me.
Read all the Hacker FAQ's and find out where the obvious hacks are. The lamers that read these to get started are generally about 90% of the attacks you will see as an admin.
3 T1 lines. I know that a T3 is a better way to go, but with the pricing here, it's about the same price to get 3 T1's, and if 1 line goes down, my site is still operable. I experienced an outage due to the Telephone company about 2 years ago that had my sites off line for 48 hours.The money I had to reimburse my customers more than justifies the decision.
Startup: Well, luckily I got started before everybody thought they could make a million off the internet. It is all a question of how much money you have. What can you afford?? My initial setup was just a single Sparc 20, and I grew it from there. (And those were brand new then!) Draw up a business plan. Expenses out + 10% + capital investment yearly + time cost. Now look at this number and ask yourself if you can make more than this on your site. If not, scale back and redo the calculation. You need high margin to make it in this business.
Selling space to local concerns is a nice way to defer some of the initial setup costs, and you won't be using all of that disk space to begin with. (I hope! =|:>) If your admin skills are up to it, I do not reccommend renting space, due to possible restrictions from the provider. It's thold computer joke, "How much for a really good computer?" "How much do you have?"
Without knowing more about what you are trying to achieve, this is the best I can do.
~Jason Maggard
Really, determine your needs. Break the problem down into smaller pieces. Think top down design. Remember that certain technologies work better for certain tasks.
Consider using a multi-tier infrastructure if you are interested in a quick dynamic site. Consider perl, PHP, and Zope, which are all great technologies. If you consider using Perl and Zope, you might want to consider using XML-RPC to get them to work together. This is what I am working with. Try, though, to design with the future in mind - if you design modularly, make sure that your site will grow with you and that you can replace certain components in your architecture as they start to not meet you needs. Sean
That's my advice. Patent something silly, like ecapsulating network packets in other network packets, or patent web shopping carts. Make sure that your patent application is vague and covers many things that have been in common use (and maybe even standardized by IETF or someone else) for a decade or so.
Hey, everyone else is doing it.
I guess your other option is to announce monumental losses then go public and cash out.
The advice here is basically worth what you've paid for it.
I'm serious - you need to do way more homework than what you've related.
The "easy pickings" in the .com market have been taken - its going to be hard slugging from here on in, so don't think you can just set up a redhat box and start charging for banner ads.
In matter of hosting a web site, I don't think you should focus on the server. The content is what people will really look at. I have no idea what kind of machines /. is running on (but I know who makes them), and I don't care about load balancing, redandoncy or if their routers use BGP as long as I can read /. .
... of course). Think about having a file server, independant from your web servers.
Saying that, I think that whatever you use, get ready for scaling. I was surprised that nobody talked about NIS (Yellow Pages). It is a must to have on a network (Unix
There are a lot of techniques you can use to get ready for scaling, but in my opinion those two are the most important.
Good day!
Looking for a great online backup: Green Backup
Well I work for a hosting company doing the job of architecting some sites, mostly startups with no idea what they are doing on the hosting side. here is what we usually do for our customers and what I usually recommend. Every site is different so if you want more info just send me some e-mail, my address is at the end.
:). Make sure your bandwidth is measured as an average over the month. And make sure the provider does not make you commit to a CIR and BIR! This is not a good gauge of bandwith because they make you commit to a certain bandwidth charge and limit your burst rate. if you go over you pay a hefty premium.
:). We incrementally backup every night and then full backups every Sunday. Keeps all of our data nice and safe.
We usually begin start-ups with a basic configuration of 2 Compaq 1850R's, any rackmount small 3U or smaller server is good to start with, make sure its rackmountable so it can be co-lo'd at most places. We choose these machines because of their small footprint and ease of maintenance. They can also pack dual processors, 1G ram, and enough for 6 18G drives. With hardware the smaller the better, its saves money on rack space.
The front end machine is run as a web server,and an app server if you have an application. The second machine is used as a backend database and it is on a private backend private LAN. This makes it easy for the web server to access but harder for hackers to get to it. We have a remote access solution to administer all of these machines from a secure backend network connection. We scale this configuration by first adding a webserver if traffic warrants. We load balance the webserver usually with hardware based load balancing, Cisco LocalDirector, Arrowpoint, F5 Labs etc etc. This works quite well and has very good performance. FOr the database Server we usually will add another for failover. We regularly use Veritas Firstwatch for failover. I have worked with Firstwatch and it is a really great product. Its been implemented in many large financial companies. I cant wait till this comes to Linux, it will be a big jump. Veritas Symmetrix allows you to have two separate machine both with the ability to fail over each other. The major benefit is that both servers can be working on a SEPARATE database so the machine is not wasted. We also use the Load balancing switches to do some fail over, this also works well but we havent done it many times. We also have some implementations of Oracle Parallel server, but these were a bitch to setup and they took a longtime,greater than 2 months!
You have to think about the network, how your connected to their network, how big is your connection etc etc. Make sure you get the provider to give you a list of private and public peers that they have. They wont give you all the information all the time but push them and they eventually give you a lot. An NDA is usually all they want
u
The network is protected on the front end by Access Control Lists. These access control lists block all ports except for 80 and 443 for most customers. We implement a firewall on a separate Sun machine for customers who want more security. The problem with this is that it usually acts as a single point of failure for the entire site, with two webservers and one database server you can lose one server and still serve static content. With the firewall you lose one machine and your whole site is down! So we often load balance and fail-over the firwall boxes.
As for backup we backup all the machines to a large backup array every night. We do over 700 machines a night for over 150 clients so it is very traffic intensive, but it saves changing tapes all the time,the robot does it
You should definately go to the datacenter!! See what their engineers have to say, how the offices are set up etc etc. These companies must be the highest professionals, of course they dont have to dress like them they just have to act and talk professionally and knowledgably. Make sure they have a good disaster recovery plan and ask for papers on it.
The one thing that you should definately remember and that is to Always get Service Level Agreements and Descriptions for every service they are performing or saying they offer. This is what they will go by in the contract so read em and get the truth about the service.
When picking a provider there are lots of things to consider. There are so many of them now and there will be many more adding on, not all of them are the same and many are not good at all. Here is a list of some providers to look to and compare:
Exodus
Digex
Navisite
GLOBIX
HarvardNet
SureNet
USI
GTE
The best providers are usually the ones with Managed services where they manage the O/S and web server for you. They leave the content and other apps up to the customer.
I am putting together a page on choosing a provider so if anyone wants to help out with suggestions let me know at:
johncrisp@hotmail.com
Thanks!
Make a site and browser plugin software that manages users bookmarks accross the web. I have 4 browsers each with their own bookmarks. The user logs into your "Portal" sees ads ($$$) and gets his/her bookmarks centrally located. As extra $$$, (and a privacy taboo) data mine the users bookmarks and sell the info for demographic moolah.
Hedley
You WILL want to colocate. End of story.
Use RAID 0+1 and learn how to set it up yourself in software if you're running a database.
Don't run a database where it isn't necessary; they're slow. Replicate them where you do run them, and develop a real backup strategy.
Run what works best for you -- Sun, FreeBSD, Linux, NT, whatever. Ignore the bigots, they're not the ones risking their financial futures on a venture. But don't get suckered by marketing.
Favor security over convenience, but don't lose sight of what it is that's valuable enough to secure. In other words, don't go to either extreme. (it's very easy to forget this!)
Good luck.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
One of the best ways to learn about business in general, which you will need these skills for, is to examine other companies and see what is it about their "vision" that makes them sucessful. Carleton (Carly) Fiorina, the new CEO of HP had, in my opinion, a very good keynote address at comdex (I recommend you listen/watch it if you've got about an hour). According to her (and she's been throught more business education than most people I know, so I believe it's worth listening to), the next generation is bundling services to products - as much as web-based businesses would like to (or the one's I'd like to start anyway) have super-low overhead, and little need for research, I believe research is the biggest piece of a company.
6.) hire another guy to do grunt work like backups etc. thay you've been doing till now. :)
or think of a great way to automate the process, write some cool software to offload the grunt work to your silicon workers
In a start up logistics is also a problem. Any code or tools you create to leverage your logistics will help. An automated database back tool is one. I know, 'cause this is exactly what I did.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Post more. I want to study you.
For most startups, it's all about one thing. Pizza. But almost as important as that is money. I'm sure you're going to get some really good suggestions here, and you should definitely look into them. But they're gonna cost you. Two things work in your favor here:
1) There are tons of venture capitalists out there just dying to throw money at startups. Its helps if you have a great product, but all you really need is good ideas and even better marketing. But you've got to find them, and every time you get money from VC, you give away a little bit of your company.
2) Nobody expects much from a startup. This is definitely a good thing. People will accept that you don't have the best equipment, the most stable code, etc. And features? You just keep telling them it will be in the next release, and they'll believe you. (They'll believe you more if you actually put the things in the next release.) What I'm trying to get around to is you don't have to have the best setup or the greatest equipment. Look at what's out there, but don't blow a bunch of money on something because you think it might be a little bit better than the second choice. (Do you really think you'll have enough traffic to require a T3? Most don't.) Don't be afraid to kludge. You have an old 486 you want to run as a web server? Great! Wanna use a Sparc2 as a file server? No problem! If it's enough, go for it. Sure, it might take some work, but remember, your own elbow grease is free. No need to waste money on a brand new PIII if you can get by on what you've got. If you're like most startups, and I bet you are, your resources are limited, and there will be plenty of costs you don't expect. (I wish I could say what some of those cost would be, but then you'd expect them, and they would no longer be costs you don't expect. You know how it works.) Weigh every purchase carefully, and try to stretch your money as much as you can.
Send that post up. It is *VERY* good advice!
Compaq has lots of good (free) information in their ActiveAnswers section. Specifically referring to Linux & Apache
Basically you seperate the web servers from the data from the application servers (cgi). Their testing revealed that it scales very well (adding a server under DISA typically created more benefit than if each server was self-contained). This will probably require more hardware initially but will allow you to add power where needed.
As for bandwidth, more is always good, but you should be able to use tools like mrtg to help you determine if you've got the optimal + headroom or not. If you can co-lo you might reduce some of the initial expenses (no need for a data room, getting the telco to bring the pipes in, power, etc) but you'll probably lose some flexibility.
To misquote Churchill, never has an operating system (FreeBSD) used by so many been administered by so few. - NetCraft
I couldn't find an email address for you, so I'm just replying. I'm happy to host, for free, community/discussion-based websites on one of our servers, a (soon to be dual) PII 400 running Solaris 2.6 with two mirrored 9 gig SCSI drives(sorry guys, the Linux software raid tools just don't cut it yet). We've got an OC-3 and multiple redundant connections through Tier 1 providers (east coast) so bandwidth is not an issue. Right now, the server run a few mirrors, but basically has 0 load.
Stuff like MySQL/PHP/Perl is fine, and backups are done a pretty regular basis.
If you, or anyone really, is interested, just fire me an email at john@webmeta.com, I'll be happy to help out.
-John
It's about the content, stupid Ultimately, the growth and popularity of your site is determined by the quality of its content, not its looks. Don't worry about looks until much, much later. Too many people shift too many resources too early into good looks. Remember, you've got finite resources. I've seen many sites fail because they spend all their effort getting the look just right, and never get the content right. Marketing types fret a lot about protraying the right image and all that crap; they have to fret about something because they rarely understand any of the actual details.
All code has bugs This simple law of programming applies to websites. Whatever ideas you have now about your website are not complete. Slashdot is always tweaking its content to create a better user experience. This actually dovetails with the point above: too many sites get customer feedback about things that need to be changed, but cannot because it would break the cool graphics, or the master design. Design your system NOW for constant tweaking, or you won't survive.
KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) People get enamored with the latest technologies and build websites that require the latest browsers with all featuers turned on. If you do this, you'll kill your site. Test with Lynx and make sure it provides an adequate (though not wonderful) user experience, then it'll likely work for everyone else. Cool stuff like Java, plugins, scripting, etc. are nice for sprucing up sites a bit, but if you depend upon them, you'll kill your site.
Focus! This is how marketing departments kill good work. Engineers try to create very focussed products that solve specific needs well, marketing tries to broaden the product's appeal, overloading it with features that end up satisfying no-one. Start broadening your appeal only after you've created a solid user base. For example, our company does business with another company that we have to help figure out very basic issues, because they aren't focusing on the technical problems but the "story" of where they are going. If they don't clean up their act, they will fail.
RAIL Redundent Array of Inexpensive Links. Grab two DSL lines from independent providers; that's all you need for a really popular site. Of course, that's assuming that you've followed the KISS principle above -- a lot of sites have huge graphics that quickly eat up bandwidth. You could easily maintain 20,000 hits/day and not eat up a 384-SDSL link. The chief problem isn't bandwidth by reliability. Even hosting companies like AboveNet and Exodus go down when backhoes take out their backbones. A RAIL solution solves this problem: DSL lines are a lot less reliable, but two DSL lines (from different vendors) are more reliable.
Backups You MUST have offsite backups. Also, assume any machine connected to the Internet will be corrupted (i.e. static content should be kept internally and regularly mirrored out onto the Internet servers).
Hacking um, you WILL be "hacked". Plan for it. I mean it. For example, your servers front-ending your site will easily be hacked, but if you plan on that contigency, you can usually harden your database server against further incursion. Don't believe me? Follow these steps: (1) go to Yahoo and search for "wwwboard passwd". (2)about every other link will be a pointer to an WS_FTP.LOG, which you replace with the file "passwd.txt" (3) run these passwords you get through a 'crack' program (4) poof, you thousands of passwords with only a few hours worth of work. Note: in this example, firewalls don't help.
Platform The underlying platform is irrelevent, in both security and performance. You should strongly consider PERL for dynamic content, only because it is the most used (and consequently, when you hire people to work on your site, this is what they'll know). Geeks like to fight over the most technologically elegant solution, but issues like hiring experienced programmers that can maintain it are far more relevent IRL.
Manage growth You will be too optimistic about growth in the beginning, and too pessimistic at some later date. You'll do a bunch of stuff that you think will drive people to your site, but they will fizzle. Then out of the middle of nowhere something happens and hits shoot up 10 fold. Be ready for both (watch cash flow and don't overspend now, but be ready to upgrade capacity at a moment's notice).
HITS Note that one of the Internet scams is people that promise to drive hits toward your site. This is all crap: all such techniques are publically available, and since this is your core business, you need to learn all of them yourself.
Outsourcing Outsource everything that isn't your core business. This is the Internet baby, you don't have time to build a company. You can't hire people fast enough, and you can't hire good enough people. You also don't want to be giving stock options out to people that don't directly influence the companies growth. For example, don't have a human resources person doing health insurance, outsource it to a consultancy. Many of the .com startups use this approach and have surprisingly few people when they go public. Conversely, the previous section is a good example: when it is your core business, DON'T hire consultants or outsource it -- do it yourself.
There's more, but I think this message is getting long enough.
If you think you have a good idea, just throw
it up on whatever you have available. Find out
if people agree with what you think makes an
interesting web site before you worry about
server architectures and network design.
Slashdot started as just some interesting tibits
of tech news that some guy stuck on his homepage
from time to time.
Please direct me to where I can get boxen like the one you got for cheap... 8 procs system for $250???!!!! Wow! I'd appreciate if you can post the link. Thanks. Mike
From what I've seen, I believe that almost all (maybe even 80-90%?) "good domains" (e.g. common words, or 2-4 letters long) fall under this description.
Now that it's more difficult to register without paying, perhaps a great many new domains will become available. As far as I've seen, though, these domains are always registered by somebody else within hours or minutes by someone else.
Disclaimer: this is a theory, based on observation but not proven by empirical testing/sampling.
-
<SIG>
"I am not trying to prove that I am right... I am only trying to find out whether." -Bertolt Brecht
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
When's your IPO?
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
Damn, I've been meaning to take this idea commercial for quite some time now. There are actually a couple of sites out there that do that already but the implementation sucks. Another twist that I wanted to add is collaborative filtering. You know, if your bookmarks are mostly like mine, then you'd probably be interested to look at some of my bookmarks that you don't have yet. Also you could set things up such that your users can earn karma points, and those with a lot of karma will have their bookmarks propagate faster through collaborative filtering. Karma points may be based on how technically savvy a user is. If you provide a number of increasingly complex features, then those users who utilize all the complex features on your site to their fullest potential are obviously more experienced. Therefore, their bookmarks are probably worth looking at, and should trickle down the collaborative filters faster than an average Joe's pathetic bookmarks.
I'm not sure a browser plugin is such a great idea though. Why would you want to discriminate against users with non-MSIE or non-Netscape browsers?
My list of suggestions:
1. In the begining co-locate. Not only is it less headaches but small tasks like DNS etc are handled for you. Plus if you chose a co-locate carefully you will get a tremendous knowledge base you can draw from. Also if you get a hacker you will have tons of help smashing the fool.
2. backup on and off site! The offsite provides you security period. The onsite means you can have a setup where two drives are available for booting (using a sync software package) and if it drops just have the guys working at the co-locate reboot you into the other drive.
3. Print contact info, reboot instructions etc out and paste it permanently on your server. This makes it easier for people to contact you or assist you if needed.
4. If your going to run Unix or Linux make sure the service isn't an NT house. That way you don't have to explain the 3 finger salute 20 times to the tech on the phone.
5. CONCETRATE on the quality of your html the headaches you will save by doing it right the first time are imense.
6. Don't waste money on gee wizz and wizz bang. A 4.3 gig hdd is probably 10 times larger than you will need. 64 megs of ram should do in the beginning but 128 is better. Make sure all the fans are ball bearing (it'll save you in both maintenace time and in burned up cpu's) In fact extra case fans are a plus.
7. Don't waste money on a monitor or a keyboard at a co-locate. Most of the ones worth a dang have "crash carts" with monitor and keyboard.
8. Unless you plan on doing a lot of onsite installs don't waste money on a floppy drive or cdrom drive. If you need them just carry an old one with you.
9. Make sure your OS you choose is remote configurable and maintainable. It'll save you both time and gas money if you can fix small problems from wherever you are.
10. Pay attention to your log files. Not only are they a wealth of info but if the dang things get too big your system goes gaga (great technical term isn't it) Develop the habit of daily checking/downloading/deleting the files.
11. Blanket banner adds are a waste however trading links and customer targeted advertising still bring in a large amount of viewers.
12. Don't skimp on motherboards fans powersupply, ethernet, cpu and ram. Do skimp on vga, don't buy sound, cdrom or floppy.
13. Find out the amount of space you will have in inches BEFORE you buy the case. Nothing like buying a 10 inch wide case and finding out you will have 8 inches of space.
14 Install a 10/100 meg ethernet card that way if your connection is to a 10 meg lan and you get upgraded to 100 you don't have to take down the site.
15. Remember having a good website is like having a happy baby. The more attention you give it the better it will turn out.
Hopes this helps.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
I didn't see too much about this, so this might or might not be long (depends on how I feel).
I just bailed from an internet startup, and man, have I got some lessons learned (Right, Pat G.?)
[Hint: *cough* CBLT *cough*]
I think for quite some time they were serving everything off a 6 way PPro 200, w/ another machine running MySQL. Don't do it!
Version control is your friend. Have a dev, stage and live environment. dev and live doesn't cut it.
If you think you will ever need serious RDBMS capabilities, don't use MySQL. Buy Oracle. Yes it will cost you, but it will be worth not having to migrate from one to the other.
Program for maintainability. You are going to have turnover. You don't want one person to cut crappy code and then leave. You will then have to rewrite that code. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.
That's it. I got nothing on network capacity, security, etc. I'm just telling you what I saw, and what I saw that sucked.
Do anal-retentive people hyphenate 'anal retentive'?
Pair was a useful and pretty inexpensive service before I was committed, and it was great to have access to SSL and MySQL without having to sweat the details, but my next setup looks to be a ppc-linux system at above.net.
bumppo
- company iq==(total employee iq/employee#)
own the data
- owning/possesing the data allows you to do lots of things with it. Data hosting is a core activity of ASP's. Own/posses the data, you can do lot's of neat things with it.
complete the data loop
- from customer/user input into a database, useful information is filtered back to the client using the Internet and it's protocols.
use the internet protocols 2 your advantage
- smtp:
develop a minimal rock solid product.- email back results of non-immediate jobs
ftp:
- allow large files/data that can't be email to be accessed.
http:
- presentation layer of services
xml:
- new one but such organisation could revolutionise your text file storage.
extend and leverage your logistics.- by using the internet and your database, development tools to automate functionality: ie: web backups of databases the transfer DDL, BCP data, codebase, log files from different areas on the site to a centrally located removable hard disk or Jaz disk: I've don this myself.
- one that does not crash or crashes minimally. Customers wont praise you but will let you know if it does not work.
give your customers a cheap basic product to start with.
- dont give a cost hurdles for customers to adopt your product.
leveredege existing binary products
to use Internet facilities with objective of upgrading customers to the web.- migrate those binary products to use internet protocols with the idea of upgrading all/most of your services to the web.
Become your own ISP
with control of web servers, DNS, databases ISDN internet link etc.- you have full control of your domain, you can do everything you possibly can.
Maximum bandwidth decides you maximum audience.
- bandwidth dictates the speed, reliability and user experience: Use slashdot growth as an example.
Fund initial expansion without going into debt.
- dont waste money and go into debt. Finance growth on profit until venture capital is possible.
Have bloody lots of fun
- if you cant code what you want, play the games or build robots, code some great code you wanted to do you will not enjoy the work. Play hard, work hard.
Dont give up
- startups fail, dont let this stop you. Check out what happened to Crack.com. Do you think these guys are giving up. Wonder how long ddt and jt are back building FPS or RPG post Transmeta and JiJit? failure makes you smarter!, comebacks make you legends
try to use a higher level dev languge
, use the source!: scripting not binary- binaries are hard work. The develop, compile, build, create install, release cycle is way to long. Scripts are the way to go. Error, just go to the script (text file) and make a change.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I know that you don't want to think that anything bad could ever happen to you and those others in the startup with you, but, in my experience, its better to deal with a small unpleasantness now than a whole lot in the future.
Month 1: I wandered into a startup company owned by myself and three other individuals. We didn't have any contracts. None. Hell, we didn't even have a contract with the ISP that was hosting our box. We were easy going and excited to see that things were getting off the ground. That was month 1.
Month 2: One of the startup members declared himself CEO (sounds rediculous for a 1 month old company). The co-owner that was administering the box removed the rest of our administrative priviledges and gave them to the new "CEO". Well, not that big of a deal except that the rest of us (myself and on other owner as well as another fellow that had come on board to help with content development) didn't really like the direction that he was taking things. So we, voiced by myself, complained. And he and one other co-owner didn't like it. Arguments ensued and some nasty emails flew around. This could have all been avoided if we had some sort of agreement, not even a contract, but at least a basic writen agreement as to what each of our functions in the company would be.
Month 3: Not having a contract with the ISP hosting our box bit us in the ass. Not all of the ISP owners new the box was there, evidently, and they wanted it gone. So one of the ISP owners, the one that agreed to host our box, said that if we didn't deal with the 1500% increase in price (yeah, that's actually the right amount!), that we had to have our box gone by that afternoon. Well, we couldn't get there that afternoon but when we did get the box back the next day, the warm fuzzy ISP owner had fdisked the whole damn thing. Gone was 3 months of development work. Gone is the company.
If somebody had told me before all of this that we needed to draw up a written agreement, I would have told them that they were crazy. But now, I wouldn't even think about trying a start-up venture without one.
something clever
Check out
www.vlab.org
www.deja.com/~vlab for good resources.
Pork is not a verb
http://www.nsiregistry.com/ is the place to check domain names from now on. .org, same as kabong), a real lame-ass e-commerce site.
It provides NSI and CORE WHOIS lookups in one place. It will not give complete doamin info, but it will tell you where to look if the domain is taken.
And yes, don't mention domains til ya get 'em. I never thought kabong.com would get taken, but someone did, because they also registered kabang.com (.net
I didn't want to hassle them to get kabong.com from them, so I settled on donutloaf.com.
Remember: There's always room for DonutLoaf!!!
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I used to work for www.bomis.com. Here's what I would suggest: Get yourself a relatively cheap machine to start out. A nice little Athlon 600 with 256M of RAM and a 4.8GB HDD. That'll give you plenty of space for content and such a box will handle zillions (well, a few million) pageviews. You don't need to go with the big $50,000 enterprise-class, Quad-Xeon with 2TB of RAM machines. Get your domainname, promote promote promote promote. Be -very- attentive to your users. Always design in a way that you can move the entire thing to another machine with another domainname just by changing a couple config files. Never hard code in any addresses. Think long and hard about traffic direction. You want a way to say: 'Send 30% of traffic to box 1, and Send 25% to box 2, and Box 3 is a stud, so send the remaining 45% to him.' Also, if you're going to have anything searchable, try to write a way to have a database in some central location. Where be it an NFS or a database server.. just try to make sure you can access the database on multiple machines. Or, at least, write a cron to drag it to machine 2 when you add a machine 2. Write everything to regrow itself. Have cron jobs that rebuild everything for you. If your /home/httpd/html/ directory gets rm -Rf'd, it should rebuild itself. If such happened to Bomis, Bomis would simply heal. --Johnny Wales Developer, Bomis Browser Developer, Bomis Webmail
I know most of these probably have been covered, but here goes:
Trademark every name you don't want stolen.
Register your domain ASAP. Do not wait.
Print out source code, et al, and get it signed by a notary for copyright proof.
Backups are the lifeblood of your business. I read that half of all businesses fail if they lose their core business data. Make SURE you can restore from any and all you have. Try testing both backups of the system, and the database. Make sure to take some backups offsite, and keep the tapes locked up securely.
Also, make sure you can restore from a different tape drive in the same family. I had a tape drive of some off brand which could backup and restore well, until it failed... then its tapes were unreadable by its replacement. Loss? A source tree, with mainly drivel on it, but a loss nontheless.
Tape drive recommendation? DLT. Nothing else comes close to being able to match its reliability. Things may be different now, but this is MHO. DLT's are excellent for backing up home boxes. They used to be pricy, but there is a manufacturer that makes drives which adhere to the DLT4000 spec for $1000, but I forgot their name. Ack!
If you are going to do this right, you need to start with the basics. Make a buisness plan with an expected market share and revenue projections. From the market share projection you can estimate the traffic load, from the revenue projections you can calculate you availability needs (HA, mirroring, etc). With this data you then calculate your network usage, memory, CPU, disk I/O rates, storage, and backup window/rate. You should also look 3 years out and make sure you can scale to your 3 year needs without significant impacts. If feasable, lease the hardware and get a technology refresh clause. Distributed V.S. monolithic archetectures is a trade off between price, administration, and scalability. Monolithic can be easier to administer (lower total cost of ownership), but more expensive. A monolithic architecture can also melt down with less traffic. No matter what you do, if you do not engineer your archetecture (monolithic or distributed), you can easily run into severe bottle necks. If you are doing a big site, Brian Wong has a good book out on capacity planning (ISBN 0133499529).
I really can't agree with the ideas of hosting it yourself/building a network for it.
It's always been geek fantasy to have the T1 to the house. Fantasy is rarely practical.
It will cost you in the neighborhood of $1500-$2000 a month for a t1.
A t1 really is not that much bandwidth. I've worked for a few companies that do webhosting like iuinc.com (I don't work for them now, just host servers there). Hosting with a mid-sized hosting company is a much better solution.
The problem with doing it from your home/business means you have to have somewhat of a datacenter in the building. This requires a lot of Hardware :
This is all very costly.. You also have to put
into account the money & time it will take you to purchase, configure, test, and put into production, all of this hardware. Then maintenance
is a big hassle.. maintaining the systems is one things.. but rebooting @ 2am when you're
away on vacation? dealing with the telco/bandwidth provider when something goes wrong.. a web-hosting company
charges a small premium basically for hosting, and saves you a LOT of $$..
It is much more effective to host your server at a company who solely does that. You can expect to pay $200+ for that, plus between $8-$15 per gigabyte of transfer. That's great, if you only transfer 30 gigs a month.. that's $500 a month.. compared to $2500-3000 for your t1 & redundant t1 + hardware costs of doing it yourself.. money better spent on advertising, site development, video games..
I'm currently in the process of doing the same thing, setting up a small hosting company.. to deal with people I meet @ places I work with (a good point to getting business like this is people you meet, interact with.. at clubs, bars, computer stores, libraries, etc).. know less than a ny times journalist about the internet.. and for your well-developed server, and highly knowledgable self, they'll gladly pay $50-$100 a month for basic hosting.. since you can provide for them a lot more than a large hosting company can. I've got a friend @ sony music who does web/e-commerce design on the side.. and got me to do it because he gets 2-3 clients a week asking him for a place to host.. and refers them somewhere else @ $70 a month for basic hosting..
I'm finding it a better idea to build two servers, setup a good tape backup system, connect them to a raid (i'd like to go nas.. but it's not cost effective yet).. and write some good easy user-management cgi's in perl for my customers to do their own configurations.. so i'll just be sitting back, getting the occasional new customer.... and hopefully soon be paying for a t1 to my house (I am a geek) that I won't have to share
"And how can this be? For he is the
This is about everything I have to say after a few years in this strange business.
Every week I have people coming to me, asking how they can start their small internet business. These people mostly dont know anything about HTML, TCP/IP and cant even spell "URL" correctly.
If you dont already know about routing, co-location, load balancing, databases, security, backup and DNS, and cant afford hiring the people who do, please try something different and learn about all this technology before throwing your own money into it.
Youd be spending nights trying to figure out all this tech stuff, while seeing your money drain away at the same time. Bad thing (tm), IMO.
Its not about "potential" only. The "real work" also has to be done.
Having lived in two small towns in AZ (one pop:25K and the other pop:50+K), the cost of bandwidth is an issue, particularly local loop.
:)
In the first town, there is only one source for local loop and that's the local Telco - an independent (with the highest rate of return to it's investors of any utility in the nation).
The college I worked for was quoted over $3,000 (that's right, over three thousand dollars) per month for a T1. That's T1, not T3. This is the going rate as the local loop is to Phoenix -- not quite local in my book. Of course, when they're the only game in town, they can ask whatever they want, right? Can anyone say "monopoly"?
Also, no DSL and the Cable modem thing is just new and not yet bidirectional. There are only three ISP's of which I am aware -- one is the local Telco, another is a guy who buys bandwidth through the local Telco and the third is the Cable company.
I haven't been involved too much in pricing here in the second town, but I hear (anecdotally) that the prices are considerably higher than the "big city" price, but not on the order of 10X "big city" like the first small town.
So the difference between running a T1 and co-locating a box somewhere in the "big city" could add up to some significant money if you try to operate out of small towns.
I can make a lot of driving trips to Phoenix to fix something for the difference between $300 and $3,000 per month. Hell, for that kind of money, I could keep someone on retainer to fix whatever goes wrong. On second thought, for that differential, I could keep a second full box ready for hot swap.
Russ
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
I think you'll be best off going with rackspace.com for several reasons:
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
1) Buying hardware means you have to spend a lot to get a system that can scale up to the maximum capacity you anticipate, or go the cheap route and risk having to replace the system rather quickly. RackSpace offers leased solutions that you can scale up by just adding a few dollars to the monthly fee. Start with the single processor 300MHz/32MB machine while your site is growing and audience, and when it starts lagging, just pay an extra $50/month and you move to a nice 450MHz/64MB machine.
2) They have three separate T3 connections to the three major backbone providers. The are located in the middle of the United States which means they can avoid most of the MAE lag points. They only charge about $6/month for 2 gigabytes of transfer, which is all a startup web company is going to be using. DSL can easily handle this traffic, but what happens if your site gets SlashDotted? It'll get taken out quick. And you'll have to scramble to find the money to pay for a T1 in case it happens again. RackSpace can give you the whole damn T3 is you need it, and simply charge you for the data transfers.
3) Their facility is located in a geologically stable area, unlike the West and East Coast. The only think they worry about is power failure, and they have giant UPS systems and backup generators. Your hardware will be kept cool and safe, and if something breaks, all the hardware is identical so they just pull your drive and put it in another box and away you go. They can even do tape backup for you and rebuild a box if the drive dies.
4) They offer Cobalt products, which are incredibly easy to setup and manage. You could literally be in the ISP business for around $200/month with maybe an hour setup time.
Both Cobalt and RaskSpace are SlashDot sponsors, and they are both Linux solution providers (although RackSpace can really put any OS you want on your box, *BSD or NT).
I'm also starting a web business and after months of investigating, I decided that leasing a RackSpace solution and getting myself a decent DSL connection to remotely administer it was the best way to go. Oh, you don't have to do everything by remote...if you send RackSpace a CD, they can load it for you. That'll save you about 650MB worth of transfer costs.
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Good Lord, I have to deal with customers just like you all day long. They know a little bit about DNS, or a mail server, or what have you, and they set their server up, and when they get 20 emails in an hour from customers saying they can't use their credit card on the site, and I get screaming frantic phone calls and emails "The site is down!!!!". Well, genius, if you'd have actually checked into round-robin DNS, it just serves IP after the other, with no checking...so if you have two IPs on one domain name, and one IP stops responding, half of your users' lookups are going to fail. HALF. God, I hate this "well it looks like a good idea, let's go with it!" attitude among the not-so-well-informed. You know, those Brainiacs that want to set up their own DNS even though they have but a single domain with a single host. The guys who set up their MS exchange servers to do store-and-forward. I could go on and on, but either this is an old story to you, or else you're getting mad at me for saying customers shouldn't run their own DNS and why can't I run my own DNS, I just installed RedHat and it comes with DNS on it!!!#@#@$
I don't agree. Banner ads can be affective they are 1) relevant to the audience 2) placed so that they stand out. Slashdot actually does a good job of both, so I actually look at the ads on this stie.
You can't just throw any banner anywhere and expect instant success.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
"Become your own ISP"
:).
Yow. It's true that access to your data is important, but one of the main fallacies of ASP's is that they are slow. You want the customers to have an as fast as possible experience. Providers such as exodus and level3 offer very good data center services including backups, closeness to the end user since they can set you up with round robin dns using more than one data center, their expertise in dealing with 100's if not 1000's of companies (who likely need similar solutions), redundancy and reliability (can't stress that enough for the ASP market). You seem to get it with "Maximum bandwidth decides you maximum audience."; so I guess you're just trying to tailor your post to the person who asked slashdot (though I doubt it had anything to do with ASP's
Instead get a t1 (or other decent dsl/wireless/whatever) connection so that you can update your data/files/databases/assets faster. You don't have to be in physical control of the hard drives to have actual control over the servers. Just make sure the data center is close by -- otherwise you'll be paying huge service fees to these companies.
"develop a minimal rock solid product"
And how will that help you differentiate your product from the other 3000 so called revolutionary ASP hopefuls? There is so much room for improvement in the ASP market, it's scary.
"leveredege existing binary products"
This is the main problem faced. The web browser is often terrible and slow and doesn't exactly enable this server side computing paradigm. There are a limited number of products at this time that you can pattern yourself after. It's better to look at the needs of a certain industry or the similarities between a group of geographically separated company/companies. Take into account the current technologies they are using and integrate them. Don't try and emulate them unless you can do it just as well or better. Example: It's better to just send word or pdf files than to concoct some online format. Just include features that will bring them closer such as comment and message board systems for revision and peer review.
Some open industries for such include:
a) general family and friends networks. This includes file sharing, message boards, photo galleries, electronic greetings, possible calendaring with events/birthdays/special occasions and possible e-commerce tie-ins. News headlines are usually included as an extra spice. Examples: familypoint and visto
b) distribution networks
communication is key here, as is numbers, schedules, private and secure messages, and strategy planning.
c) geographically separated offices
Just about every local communication plus to touch base, actually feel like a community (often not possible over phone and e-mail). This is treading into lotus territory but these kind of applications can be easily modified to suit a particular business model (instead of the company modifying practices to effectively use notes). Contract or remote developer to developer groups or developer to q&a relationships (bug tracking, design issues, ui, specifications, dates, etc etc)....
c) I'm bored, won't finish.
Specialization is especially needed. Law, accounting, investment and banks, retail sales and advertising firms serve as some examples.
If you're an up and coming ASP, then make sure to try and circumvent the obvious failings of centralized, typically slow services. You may be in the wrong market altogether. Solutions with hardware tie ins may be many times more appealing to medium to large sized companies.
"Fund initial expansion without going into debt"
Easy to say, hard to do. Without a tremendous idea or a reputation to get funding, there are some major barriers to entry (bandwidth, support, contracts, research).
"try to use a higher level dev languge"
Agreed. Optimize for speed as per forecasted need. Embed c in perl or create ISAPI or apache c modules. Be sure to optimize database transactions and often used dynamic content includes.
"complete the data loop"
Oh my god, someone who understands. User input and needs are very important. This is especially true for established businesses. If you're not willing to meld your process to meet their needs they are just going to go elsewhere.
xml; Is interesting, though similar things can be done with server side interpreters such as perl, php, python/zope and/or corba, whatever.
Of course, all these statements are incredibly obvious and equally brain dead easy for any knowledgeable developer to pull off. The hard parts are in the market research, establishing industry relationships and input to meet their needs, funding, pr/hype, and luck.
Don't worry, I'll slap myself silly for ranting.
----------
I agree, we use AboveNet... so do sites like www.apache.org.
MAP OUT THE SITE HIERARCHY: before embarking on the HTML-coding, take some hours to organize your site. Web navigation (and maintenance) benefits greatly from a though through hierarchy.
First look over the catalogues and organize the site content according to file format etc. For example:
USE LOGICAL FILE NAMES: Next thing is to name the pages logically. For example, I name orphants to an About page (about.html) about_contact.html, about_people.html and so on.
It's a good thing to name thumbnails to images imagename_thumbnail.jpg (so sshot_991115-1.jpg becomes sshot_991115-1_thumbnail.jpg). This way its easy to multiple images and link them to their corresponding thumbnail getting it right without a nuisance.
WRITE HTML-CODE DIRECTLY: if you can, try to avoid editors. Its really the quickest way to work, once you get the hang of it. And you can keep the source clean and minimal.
USE EXTERNAL STYLESHEETS: by using stylesheets you can change the look and feel of a site changing just a single document.
Also try to avoid in-line style tags like . Instead use stylesheet classes. This makes life a lot easier, and its quicker to create and update.
KEEP CONSTANT BACK UP OF SITES: making constant changes to the site will eventually result in a bad move. As soon as you've made a change to a document, update its back up as well.
Good luck!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This sounds good for something that I want to do. Do you have any suggestions about which service provider to use?
... when doing domain availability lookups. Listen to what Pope says (ahem, we'll discuss the issue of contraception another time ;-). As much as we love to hate the NSI their WHOIS databases are supposedly top-notch so _use_ them - and only them - for lookups. Some commercial domain trading companies apparently scan their lookup logs for potentially profitable domain names.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
- How do you find your customers?
- How do you get paid?
If you can answer these two questions, then you may have the 'marketing' part of your business plan under control. Try explaining it to a 60+ -year-old executive business veteran from some other industry and see if they 'get it.'Since you're starting a Web-based business, it is tempting to think of this as "how will our customers find us?" (ie, 'I need higher rankings in the search engines!'), but this is not the same. You need a coherent, complete, and sustainable strategy for generating a steady stream of new, paying customers. The inputs to this process must be under your control, so that you can scale them up (or down) as your business demands.
You need to be able to articulate what exactly you will be paid for, and by whom. You also need a specific pricing model, as well as how customers will pay you (ie, credit cards, POs, pay in advance of services).
Here are the other one-liners that I'm carrying around in my head for when I start my next business:
- You need real capital.
- If you don't have capital, this is just a hobby, and that's OK.
- Have a partner; there's a lot of work to do.
- Make a plan for dealing with the fact that you'll never see your significant other.
- Make 'shareholder' agreements the same day you form the business.
- Keep your fixed costs (rent, internet bills) low.
- Some particular thing makes your business special; offload and outsource everything else.
- Buy every relevant book from NOLO Press, everything written by Guy Kawasaki, and For Entrepeneurs Only. Read all.
- If you're going to be > 10 people, the first person to hire is the person who will hire the rest.
- Hire veterans of other real-world startups, not newbies excited about the idea of startups.
- "You will hit your sales projections -- a year later than you planned." -Sam Farber, founder of COPCO and OXO/Good Grips.
As for technology issues, start small, and favor the maintenance-free (for you) options. In business terms, it doesn't take that long to get more bandwidth, or a faster server, or whatever.Like maybe $1 million in the company bank account, and another million standing by. An underfunded business will fail because it won't be able to spend money fast enough to get to critical mass.
Knock off work at 5 PM every Saturday, and go out for a date. (This 'date' lasts until AFTER you've had coffee Sunday morning.)
What happens if a major shareholder dies? By default, their spouse gets full voting control of their stock...is that what you want? Be deliberate.
Use ADP for payroll.
Use an outside design firm.
Use Quickbooks or Peachtree for accounting, whatever your accountant recommends.
Find a lawyer you can talk to, preferably one who's a bit of geek.
Ditto a patent attorney.
Hire someone who's 'built a team' before.
The vets understand, and have wisdom to offer (doesn't matter whether their old ventures succeded or failed).
Did I mention that you need real capital?
Your time is precious -- be very, very careful how you invest it.
-Mark Kriegsman
Founder, ClearWay Technologies
I currently run a techy web site (www.nerdperfect.com) which was started as a hobby. I dropped less than $2000 on the entire thing (including server), and am self hosted using a 1 megabit DSL-type connection.
Thus far, the thing hasn't been overly popular (around 80,000 hits this month so far), but there's no worry about having to impress investors or recoup a huge cash outlay, so I can just plug away and build up a loyal readership slowly.
It takes a large portion of the pressure to succeed away when there's nobody breathing down your neck to show certain traffic numbers. I am free to provide content which I feel comfortable with, as opposed to what advertisers or investors want to see. I believe that this freedom shows on the site... I look forward to updating the thing.
If NerdPerfect ever becomes very popular, great... if not, I can just walk away. Doesn't this sound like a better deal than trying to force your project down everyone's throats just so you can break even?
-SG
NerdPerfect... breakfast of champions.
I read slashdot daily, and I have never looked at a single ad on their page, let alone clicked on one. Sometimes I even block them. I'm the audience they're targetting. I run a linux based web server and read this site every day. Not a single ad has penetrated my skull in about 2 years of reading.
they sold their stock too early.
There are ads on /.? ;-)
photo.net
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
From what I can tell, it is the successor to the NSI WHOIS, and the domain name is actually owned by NSI. I'll get to reading all those official-looking papers when I have time, but this should encompass all authorized registrars' WHOIS under the Shared Registration System that started this year.
Backups! Stick tape in. Cron job. Forget! Right? WRONG!
Facts:
1. It usually takes longer to restore than it takes to backup.
2. It usually takes longer to backup a 1GB DB than a 1 GB unix file (assuming online backups).
3. It usually takes a lot longer to restore a 1GB DB than a 1 GB unix file (due to transactions, logging, pages, indexes etc)
Do yourself a favor and when your site gets big enough that it would really hurt if it went down and you need to do a restore - spend some time and find out how long it takes to restore. I'll bet that you'll be surprised.
Secondly, when evaluating tape drives - be extremely skeptical about their performance claims when the real world problems hit. I've had DB restores take two to three times longer than similarly sized unix file systems which were still no faster than half the advertised read speeds.
Suggestion: Look into 8mm Mammoth, AIT and DLT7000 formats. Some people like the Onstream and VXA formats too but I have no experience with them.
You won't know you haven't spent enough on defense until you lose a war - Thatcher
The best way to help insure success is to get some outside help. Find someone who has experience with a large or semi-large website and seek their assistance. Their experience will help forsee potential pitfalls and problems. Another suggestion would be to control growth. Don't jump right in and expect the world to be beating down the webserver. Take your time and concetrate on the site and it's customers, not on Venture Cap or when you plan to go IPO. This is a common pitfall today. So many people want a peice of the Internet pie that they don't take the time to concentrate on the task at hand- building a great web site. But on to the architecture. I disagree with most previous responses when it comes to bandwidth. Don't go and buy a t-1 for one website. For the same price you can host with a high end hosting company like Fontier Global or UUnet and get not only hosting but content replication and load balancing services wrapped in. Here are some key questions to consider: 1. Content - does the site have the ability for content producers to add content easily? 2. Scalability - Does the site architecture have the ability to scale easily? When do you forsee this? (spec this out as it's very important) 3. Administration - How easy is the site to maintain? Make sure the architecture is easy to maintain so you can focus on more important issues (who wants to remove/add users all day when it can be automated?) These are not all the questions you should ask but they are a start. Again I'd recommend either hiring or finding someone willing to volunteer with exerience in building large scale sites. HTH,
I was amazed at the number of comments that advocating starting a complete company, building arrays of servers, setting up massive bandwidth all at once, before getting the first hit.
/.. ESR's statement that good software comes from an itch that gets scratched is paraded around frequently. Note he doesn't say to amputate the limb with the itch, he says to scratch it. Do the basic work: get a domain ($70), some 3rd party hosting with unlimited bandwidth ($10-20/month), and set up the site. If it is a wild success, you haven't had any extreme charges for bandwidth, you know it is a good idea, you have the domain, and you've only spend $200 plus your time. You can then move the data and operations to a colocate or your own server, you've got the traffic logs to show to advertisers and VC's, and the transfer to new hardware/bandwidth can be done transparently to the users.
That really suprised me given the opensource/free software slant of most users of this site. That kind of buildup is the much like many of the vapourware sites/companies that get torched here on
If 8 out of 10 startup's fail (stated above and fairly reasonable stat), why is everyone suggesting blasting away from both barrels from the beginning?
LetterJ
Writing Geek/Pixel Pusher
jwynia@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~jwynia
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
The easy pickings are taken? Come on... you're not being creative. Think "outside the box" and whatnot. He could make a killing off of any one of the following:
.mod rips, vivo movie files, Atari ST emulation on the Amiga, etc.) and base your site around that. Await IPO riches within months. a il.com! (every Vulture Capitalist's wet dream) :)
1) Pornsite or premium pornsite referral "free" sites (maybe like Persiandoggy.com)
2) Porn, All Advantage, and Pop-up laden l33t-W4R3Z/H/P/C/V site
3) Three words: Books and CDs!!!
4) Geek-chic technology weblog with user comments (*cough*-moderated up/down-*cough*)
5) Application Serving and Leasing (similar to #2 above but you can charge more than banner clicks)
6) Take any technology with even an iota of support (e.g.,
7) CalendarReminderGroupwareOfficesuiteMessagingWebM
7) Slashdot.nu
8) Open-source hot tub party live WebCam (Rob sips bubbly w/ Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman
9) name your site (i.e., whatever.com), put the word "Planet" in front of it, sell domain to Gamespy Network for a mint(Planeteatmydrawls.com)
10) webzine (yeah, we ALL know how lucrative that market is.
Just the random and meaningless mutterings of a MereMortal(tm)
It does Intelligent DNS resolving based on load, and some nifty things with HTTP to make sure persistent connections go to the same server.
Its cool, but I still want to know who is using it. It's not exactly "visible" to users.
Offsite backup can be as simple as carrying a second copy of the backup tape home every night.
My favorit offsite backup place (a friend uses this one) is a local coffee shop. My friend goes there every week day and knows the owner. So he made a deal and they let him have a small box under the counter. He brings his backup tape in each day when he stops in, and takes the oldest tape back with him. He has about two weeks worth of backups in the box.
Forget about floating point speeds.
Look for a system that has high data throughput in the disk and network IO subsystems. This will be harder to do because most companies don't publish these specs in easy to find places.
For a DB server (a web server is really a very simple DB), get high throughput disk controllers, and lots of very fast ram for disk and DB caching. If you want to do lots of active pages, get a processor with high integer performance and large primary and secondary caches. Remember for the most part you will be limited by the speed of your ram memory and disk throughput.
On disks: USE RAID even if only in software. RAID 5 has a penalty for writing, but is very fast for reading. Typically all disks are involved in a block write, but only one needs to be read from to retreive a block. If you need to lots of writing, look at doing simple RAID 2 mirroring and striping across many disks. This will require twice as many disks, but it is much faster for writing many blocks at once.
This is really a reply to several comments, so my choice to put it here is a bit arbitrary.
As a person who is looking at a bunch of web sites every day (i.e., typical end user), I have a couple things to say about what I like in web sites:
I, as an end user, feel that I am devoting too much time to writing this comment. I gotta go.
Kenneth Arnold, web surfer
PS - I guess this took more of the form of a web page design lecture, but I don't have time to go back and change that.
Good luck, future webmaster(s)! Tell me/us the site name when it is done, and we can test how well your servers stand up to the Slashdot Effect.
At home to speed backups and make them more robust to failure I use a backup archive server box. I went to this after dealing with the hastles of trying to backup multiple boxes with only one tape. The backup/archive server gets backups of all my systems daily. Each system NFS mounts it's archive file system, then does a tar backup with the output files going to it. So the output files aren't over 2 gig I pipe the output of tar through split to break it into smaller chunks. After all systems have backed up an automated script runs and saves the tar files to a big tape. After that it compresses all the files. Before backups start a script runs that checks to see if 150% of the previous night's backup volume is available, and deletes the oldest backup sets till that is available.
For restoration I have a set of boot/root floppies that have the needed programs to rebuild the systems from files on a NFS mounted partition. I used Debian's boot/root floppy building package to make them. Currently restoration of a system takes about 10 minutes of my time to start the process, the time to restore the data, and 5 minutes at the end for a reboot. For my main system that has 5.5G of system/data on it it takes about 1 hour for a full restore.
The "archive" portion comes from my mirroring all software I use locally. That takes up about 10G out of the available 70G.
As for hardware, it's a lowly P100 with 32M RAM, 4 - 20Gig IDE disks stripped, and a DAT-3 backup tape drive. With spare hardware lying around, one cheep PCI SCSI-II controler (for the tape drive), 4-$270 IDE disks (now $187 each), and moving the tape over from my primary system I set it up.
One could use this method to backup either locally hosted or colocated servers. You could do backups more often, and only nightly backup to tape.
Checkout Overland Data http://www.overlanddata.com for DLT and tape libraries. They have world class systems and customer support.
I had problems with the "Stick tape in. Cron job. Forget!" so I sat down and worked hard to build a set of scripts that did their best to produce a good backup that is restoreable. I ended up using a backup/archive server (see post #207 below). Any part of my system that fails, sends me a failure message. All sucessfull backups generate a notification email with details.
Do yourself a favor and when your site gets big enough that it would really hurt if it went down and you need to do a restore - spend some time and find out how long it takes to restore. I'll bet that you'll be surprised.
I say do this at an earlier date. It's never to early to know how long it takes to restore a system from backups and to make sure your recovery procedures work. I can rebuild my primary box in an hour. This includes 4.5 gig of data plus another gig system code and data. My limit is the speed data can be pumped over the net from disk to disk. From my tape drive it would take close to 3 hours.
The one script I need to write is a grab all new/changed files script and place it on the restore floppies. It would tar up all new/changed files and dump them to the backup/archive server before I restore the backup set. I can then choose the new/changed files for the current day to restore.
(to offset the other responses on this thread)
/. and a couple of times I've purchased the advertised product as well. I like advertising, actually. There's cool stuff out there to be had, and I want to hear about it! I can glance at tons of ads, but I don't have to think about the ad unless it catches my attention want to.
Some users are never going to click through on the ads, and try to avoid looking at them entirely (or use junkbuster). This behavior, while not particularly surprising or excessively uncommon, qualifies as extremist.
I don't usually click through on advertisements (espescially the annoying/dumb kind that don't have the name of the company they're advertising for) but I have clicked through several well-targeted ads on
Of course, this is slightly off topic, since we don't even know if the querant would like to run ads.
Want colocation in downtown Boulder on multiple T3's from ICG? I'll hook you up. scott@x13.com
If you're doing more than playing, use co-located hosting (e.g. exodus.net), it's a lot cheaper than buying bandwidth. They will change tapes for you, and if you use anything other than NT you won't need to go down there apart from collecting offsite backup media.
If you intend to make a serious business out of it, and raise venture capital, first thing is to form a balanced team. For Slashdot readers, this means, find some MBA's and marketing types. DO NOT form a team of all Linux hackers. DO plan to own most of the founder's stock. DO NOT expect to be CEO; recruit someone who knows how to write a business plan.
VC's don't care about technology; given the right credentials they will assume you have that covered. They care about how you will make a $1bn company and make yourself and them lots of $$$.
If you need advice in this area, email me offline.
Im in the middle of my second startup in the role of CTO (really lead programmer). The first was a network of kiosks. The current one is an internet services for various parties in the health care industry (www.healthx.com). Ive found that the biggest problem for us programmers especially with a new product is the natural evolution of the requirements. Bottom line is the sales people like to sell. (doh!) They do anything to get the sale including saying yes all too often. This often results in an influx of new requiremnts that tend to defocus you from the the core orginal functionality. It can really bog down a dev team. I totally disagree with the CONTENT being the key these days. People want to DO things. The content market is saturated with web start ups that provide great content but few have really provided good robust applications that bring various industry partners together working with the "new" medium. Health care content providers are a dime a dozen. Internet health care application prodivers are less common and the majority of the procucts are pure vapor. That coupled with the investment money being thrown at internet health care companies makes it a GREAT place to be. Not to be too self serving but I always have an eye open for talent interested joining my team.
WRT how you should backup - Think about it from your customers/users point of view. How stupid will you feel if you have to explain to them that you can't recover data 'cuz the tapes were on site and happenened to get damaged when the water main broke (or whatever)? Also, always do your backups, if only because if you do them you'll never have to use them, but if you miss a day for vacation disaster will strike. Trust me, it happened to me and accounting is still irked about re-entering all those invoices.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks