We're currently doing something like this now. Customers can host WiFi on their DSL, use others, and get paid when theirs is used. It's VPN secured, so users know that the host can't sniff them.
Host a WiFi Hotspot using your existing Sonic.net DSL
connection and WiFi hardware, and get money from Sonic.net every time
someone uses it.
Details
WiFi wireless Internet access is growing at an amazing pace. Last year, for
the first time, laptop sales out-paced sales of desktop PCs, and many new
laptops include integrated WiFi. Hand-held and even desktop systems can use
WiFi for Internet access.
WiFi access equipment is selling at an amazing pace, as home users leverage
WiFi to unwire their households, making high speed Internet access available
throughout the home.
Meanwhile, thousands of people are using DSL from Sonic.net - and, in many
cases, also deploying WiFi on their DSL connections. Hundreds more are
coming online with Sonic.net every month.
Notably though, the average DSL connection is utilized to just 1% of it's
total bandwidth capacity!
Sonic.net has now made it possible to combine these two rapidly growing
Internet access areas, allowing DSL customers to share a small amount of
their total bandwidth by using WiFi, and letting all Sonic.net utilize
each other's WiFi Hotspots in a secure and managed fashion.
Sonic.net DSL customers can share their connection over WiFi, and will be
compensated with a pro-rated daily share of 50% of the Sonic.net basic
Internet service fee for any others who use it. The end user pool is huge,
as Sonic.net has over 30,000 end users currently, and any of them could
utilize your link if they happened to be nearby.
End-users who utilize your link will be required to use a VPN (virtual
private networking) tunnel and authentication, so they won't be on your IP
address space. They'll each get a dynamic IP of their own for their
session. This protects you from any potential liability should they do
something improper on the Internet. Also, the pool of users are known
Sonic.net members, so they're not likely to be doing bad things.
The VPN tunnel also assures the WiFi end-user that they've got a secure
connection, all the way to the core of Sonic.net's network. They don't have
to trust the host not to sniff their traffic, it's all secure as part of the
model. The host also benefits from VPN, as their own use of their WiFi is
also encrypted - no more hassles with exchange of inherently insecure WEP
keys, MAC addresses, etc.
There's a bit of a financial incentive for sharing this abundant and unused
Internet access.
For each day that a neighbor or passing Sonic.net customer uses your link,
you'll get 50% of their pro-rated daily basic Sonic.net fees - so, that
would be about $0.31 per day, or $9.47 per month. If a non Sonic.net
customer wants to make day use, they can pay $3.50 with a credit card, of
which you'll receive 50%, or $1.75. All of these credits will be posted to
your account, and will offset your own DSL costs, leaving you with a lower
monthly bill. If you had some dedication and enough WiFi users, you could
even turn your DSL line into a profit center!
If a Sonic.net customer makes use of more than one Hotspot in a day, the
hosts of each of the Hotspots split that customer's share of fees. If
Sonic.net enters into roaming agreements with other Internet or wireless
providers in the future, you may receive additional settlement funds of
different amounts.
Sonic.net pays for all credit card transaction processing costs, costs for
support and marketing, etc.
Basically, we're taking open community WiFi sharing of DSL and making it
totally integrated by offering "Sales, Security, Settlement and Support".
... and in gas stations, as a matter of fact. I was quite surprised to find yesterday when filling the tank that the local Cheveron station had a $14.95 Napster card, good for downloading, unlocking and burning 15 songs. Of course, you can do the same thing online, but this allows for payment with cash instead of credit. This makes the new AUS service not the first to offer in-store vouchers for music downloads.
Colocation or contracted file hosting is probably your best bet. You'll pay by the gigabyte, or by peak utilization. Careful as you quote this - a 95th percentile means that they bill you monthly for the PEAK after tossing out the top 5%. For a site which is pretty even all month long, this works great. However, if you're serving a single file, once in a while, and expect heavy traffic only then, you do NOT want to pay on 95th, as you'll pay for your peak utilization all month long.
Be sure to tell your colo or file hosting provider what your projected usage is, and how many megabits you may want access to, to assure that they can handle it. You may also want to make a courtesy call a day or so prior to each launch to let them know what to expect.
Remember when Eddy Van Halen got tounge cancer a couple years ago? THAT was a busy weekend for their website, which we host. Of course, they didn't have any warning, but boy-o, that was bigger than any slashdot effect that I've ever seen. We also host O'Reilly (the computer book folks), so we certainly see plenty of slashdotting.
Shop around - but keep in mind that buying from someone near your intended downloader may help you with both latency and costs. The SF Bay Area has the best pricing for bandwidth, and the lowest latency connections to the highest number of users - that said, if your target market is on the east coast, you should be in Hearndon, VA or NY or Boston.
SSC, one of the first publishers of Linux resources including Linux Journal, publishes a number of "Pocket References" including the "Linux Command Summary". It may meet your needs. Info at:
A useful online tool, when paired with man pages, is the 'apropos' command. It can be used to search summaries of command functions to find the right command, then you can read the man page for that tool. For example:
# apropos search
apropos (1) - search the whatis database for strings
find (1) - search for files in a directory hierarchy
lkbib (1) - search bibliographic databases
lookbib (1) - search bibliographic databases
manpath (1) - determine user's search path for man pages
whatis (1) - search the whatis database for complete words.
zgrep (1) - search possibly compressed files for a regular expression
So, you can read these descriptions, and if one sounds like the tool you're looking for, call up the man page for that particular utility using "man".
For those missing man pages on the system, you can use my (somewhat outdated) man page web gateway at http://www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/man.
Happy Linuxing!
-Dane (last seen driving the North Bay backroads in a red 2001 Porsche Carerra with the California license plate "LINUX")
Some ISPs support multicast, at least within thier own networks, but it's not widespread on the Internet. For example, we've been trying to get a multicast link working on a Cable & Wireless T3 for over a year, and while they list it as a feature in their sales literature, it's not really available for delivery.
Multicast is ideal for streams where you can join and leave at any time, and for that reason it's being used mostly for audio and video.
The primary use I see for multicast in the near future might be Usenet news. It's clear that Usenet is going to continue to grow, and it's already gotten to crazy sizes at about 175 gigs per day. Various multicast streams containing different Usenet hierarchies would allow many end sites to take in news groups that they wanted in sections, without straining the backbones.
A more realistic solution for the problem you're currently having with your huge download is probably edge caching. While it's not without problems, it would allow your ISP to avoid taxing the remote FTP server and the bandwidth after one user gets the file.
Multicast and/or caching of any sort of content work well when you have the following:
A large number of users
At a small number of points of access
Accessing a small number of data objects
That are large in size as compared with available resources
Slashdot Mirror
Here's details: http://www.sonic.net/hotspots/hosting/
Here's text from that page:
Summary
Host a WiFi Hotspot using your existing Sonic.net DSL connection and WiFi hardware, and get money from Sonic.net every time someone uses it.
Details
WiFi wireless Internet access is growing at an amazing pace. Last year, for the first time, laptop sales out-paced sales of desktop PCs, and many new laptops include integrated WiFi. Hand-held and even desktop systems can use WiFi for Internet access.
WiFi access equipment is selling at an amazing pace, as home users leverage WiFi to unwire their households, making high speed Internet access available throughout the home.
Meanwhile, thousands of people are using DSL from Sonic.net - and, in many cases, also deploying WiFi on their DSL connections. Hundreds more are coming online with Sonic.net every month.
Notably though, the average DSL connection is utilized to just 1% of it's total bandwidth capacity!
Sonic.net has now made it possible to combine these two rapidly growing Internet access areas, allowing DSL customers to share a small amount of their total bandwidth by using WiFi, and letting all Sonic.net utilize each other's WiFi Hotspots in a secure and managed fashion.
Sonic.net DSL customers can share their connection over WiFi, and will be compensated with a pro-rated daily share of 50% of the Sonic.net basic Internet service fee for any others who use it. The end user pool is huge, as Sonic.net has over 30,000 end users currently, and any of them could utilize your link if they happened to be nearby.
End-users who utilize your link will be required to use a VPN (virtual private networking) tunnel and authentication, so they won't be on your IP address space. They'll each get a dynamic IP of their own for their session. This protects you from any potential liability should they do something improper on the Internet. Also, the pool of users are known Sonic.net members, so they're not likely to be doing bad things.
The VPN tunnel also assures the WiFi end-user that they've got a secure connection, all the way to the core of Sonic.net's network. They don't have to trust the host not to sniff their traffic, it's all secure as part of the model. The host also benefits from VPN, as their own use of their WiFi is also encrypted - no more hassles with exchange of inherently insecure WEP keys, MAC addresses, etc.
There's a bit of a financial incentive for sharing this abundant and unused Internet access.
For each day that a neighbor or passing Sonic.net customer uses your link, you'll get 50% of their pro-rated daily basic Sonic.net fees - so, that would be about $0.31 per day, or $9.47 per month. If a non Sonic.net customer wants to make day use, they can pay $3.50 with a credit card, of which you'll receive 50%, or $1.75. All of these credits will be posted to your account, and will offset your own DSL costs, leaving you with a lower monthly bill. If you had some dedication and enough WiFi users, you could even turn your DSL line into a profit center!
If a Sonic.net customer makes use of more than one Hotspot in a day, the hosts of each of the Hotspots split that customer's share of fees. If Sonic.net enters into roaming agreements with other Internet or wireless providers in the future, you may receive additional settlement funds of different amounts.
Sonic.net pays for all credit card transaction processing costs, costs for support and marketing, etc.
Basically, we're taking open community WiFi sharing of DSL and making it totally integrated by offering "Sales, Security, Settlement and Support".
There's also another benefit
... and in gas stations, as a matter of fact. I was quite surprised to find yesterday when filling the tank that the local Cheveron station had a $14.95 Napster card, good for downloading, unlocking and burning 15 songs. Of course, you can do the same thing online, but this allows for payment with cash instead of credit. This makes the new AUS service not the first to offer in-store vouchers for music downloads.
Be sure to tell your colo or file hosting provider what your projected usage is, and how many megabits you may want access to, to assure that they can handle it. You may also want to make a courtesy call a day or so prior to each launch to let them know what to expect.
Remember when Eddy Van Halen got tounge cancer a couple years ago? THAT was a busy weekend for their website, which we host. Of course, they didn't have any warning, but boy-o, that was bigger than any slashdot effect that I've ever seen. We also host O'Reilly (the computer book folks), so we certainly see plenty of slashdotting.
We're at: http://www.sonic.net/sales/colo/
Shop around - but keep in mind that buying from someone near your intended downloader may help you with both latency and costs. The SF Bay Area has the best pricing for bandwidth, and the lowest latency connections to the highest number of users - that said, if your target market is on the east coast, you should be in Hearndon, VA or NY or Boston.
-Dane Jasper (Sonic.net)
Well, there's only two possibilities, it's either the Redhead or the cucumber, right?
http://www.ssc.com/ssc/productlist.html.
A useful online tool, when paired with man pages, is the 'apropos' command. It can be used to search summaries of command functions to find the right command, then you can read the man page for that tool. For example:
# apropos search
apropos (1) - search the whatis database for strings
find (1) - search for files in a directory hierarchy
lkbib (1) - search bibliographic databases
lookbib (1) - search bibliographic databases
manpath (1) - determine user's search path for man pages
whatis (1) - search the whatis database for complete words.
zgrep (1) - search possibly compressed files for a regular expression
So, you can read these descriptions, and if one sounds like the tool you're looking for, call up the man page for that particular utility using "man".
For those missing man pages on the system, you can use my (somewhat outdated) man page web gateway at http://www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/man.
Happy Linuxing!
-Dane (last seen driving the North Bay backroads in a red 2001 Porsche Carerra with the California license plate "LINUX")
Some ISPs support multicast, at least within thier own networks, but it's not widespread on the Internet. For example, we've been trying to get a multicast link working on a Cable & Wireless T3 for over a year, and while they list it as a feature in their sales literature, it's not really available for delivery.
Multicast is ideal for streams where you can join and leave at any time, and for that reason it's being used mostly for audio and video.
The primary use I see for multicast in the near future might be Usenet news. It's clear that Usenet is going to continue to grow, and it's already gotten to crazy sizes at about 175 gigs per day. Various multicast streams containing different Usenet hierarchies would allow many end sites to take in news groups that they wanted in sections, without straining the backbones.
A more realistic solution for the problem you're currently having with your huge download is probably edge caching. While it's not without problems, it would allow your ISP to avoid taxing the remote FTP server and the bandwidth after one user gets the file.
Multicast and/or caching of any sort of content work well when you have the following:
A large number of users
At a small number of points of access
Accessing a small number of data objects
That are large in size as compared with available resources
--
Dane Jasper
Sonic.net