Web Hosting and Power, Resource Issues - Painful Infrastructure Spending
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As a web host, it’s natural to wonder if there’s some way around this kind of painful expenditure. The point you need to keep in mind is that this is infrastructure spending. The growth of your business is going to require that you make these kinds of outlays if you want to remain in business.
Actually, it’s a little worse than that. You need to spend this kind of money not just for your main infrastructure, but for providing a back up should the main servers fail. That failure can happen even if you maintain your servers perfectly.
To illustrate this point, in late July, San Francisco experienced a major power outage that affected many businesses. PG&E estimated that 30,000 to 50,000 of their customers, many of them data center providers, went without power in the face of the outage – even the power company itself! Web hosting site Hosting.com wrote a smug press release saying that their own data center located at 630 Third Street “remained fully operational and online throughout the duration of the outage.” The company has data center facilities in Kentucky, California, and Massachusetts, so one assumes they have excellent redundancy in place. The point is, if your competition makes hay out of the strength of their infrastructure, you can’t afford to skimp on yours.
On the other hand, there are ways to reduce your power consumption by as much as 50 percent, according to Uptime. Make sure all servers have their power saving features enabled. Turn off servers that are no longer being used. Check your software for bloat; get rid of the power and resource hogs and replace them with more efficient applications. And consider server virtualization, a technique that permits the consolidation of server software onto a single box to free up data center capacity. It will only delay the inevitable, but it’s certainly better than nothing.
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