Web developers who don’t understand how email works
June 26th, 2009More annoying that companies who don’t believe ‘+’ in an email address is valid, are ones that did until their site got redesigned, leaving you unable to log in and having to explain the problem to people that can only read scripts. I’m looking at you, MBNA.
Update:
CustomerService@MBNA.co.uk
SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:
<CustomerService@MBNA.co.uk>:
host mbna.co.uk.s7a1.psmtp.com [64.18.6.14]: 554 No
relaying allowed - psmtp
Update:
From: autoreply@customerservice.mbna.co.uk Subject: Customer Service Reply Thank you for replying to this email. Any emails sent to this inbox are not responded to. If you have a query about your account please check your account details online.
Some harsh realities
June 21st, 2009Recently BitFolk has been accused of overcharging for disk space.
In general I don’t try to defend BitFolk’s price-point - the unmanaged VPS hosting market is flooded and it is very easy to find stuff hosted out of the US or continental Europe for just a couple of pounds per month. Clearly I am not going to try to compete on price alone, yet BitFolk does sit firmly towards the cheap end which I feel is fair given that there isn’t a 24-hour team of support persons in nice business premises.
This particular complaint however seems to stem from the perception that “disk is cheap.” Well, yes, it is fairly cheap. That’s why we sell it at the “fairly cheap” price of £6/5GiB/year (10p/GiB/month), with no VAT added on top. Just because you can buy a 1.5T consumer hard drive for about 9p a gigabyte doesn’t mean that you should expect to find 1GiB of usable disk space on a server in a decent datacentre for anywhere close to that figure!
I try to keep costs down by using a configuration based around 4×7.2kRPM 3.5″ SATA disks with hardware RAID. I would dearly love to have a nice shared storage solution with 10 or 15kRPM 2.5″ SAS disks, or even to use them as local storage. Lack of disk I/O is the limiting factor for how many customers I can put on one machine. The problem is that the storage costs would be around 10 times as much and the target market (mostly people looking for cheap personal hosting) will not pay for it. They don’t understand why it would be desirable; for many of them it may not even be necessary since if they do only a little I/O they get the same performance either way.
So okay, if we resign ourselves to 4×7.2kRPM SATA disks and a RAID card as local storage, the next way to keep the price down would be to buy the disks with the sweet spot for price per gigabyte. At the moment that would be 1T. The problem now is that I’d end up with roughly twice as much disk space as I could ever sell on each server. I don’t get to keep adding customers until the disk space runs out — the I/O operations per second run out first. At the moment I can sell around 700GiB per server.
I thought I would not need to explain that 2×500G in a stripe with no redundancy would be insane, but apparently not, because I am told that some people “don’t need RAID.” I have to disagree, and I feel the ~49 or so other people on the server would also disagree when the first disk failure sees their service down and all their data lost (apart from the ones who have a backup strategy, right? No, really, why are you laughing?). Let’s not go there.
If you recall, I/O is what runs out first. So any sort of RAID-5 configuration is a bad idea because of the read-modify-write problem. The minimum number of disks and the most sensible RAID level then is a 4-disk RAID-10. Four 500G Western Digital Green Power drives will set me back around £165+VAT. You’re looking at around a further £225+VAT for a 3ware 9650 RAID controller. After the manufacturer lies are accounted for and an operating system is installed, there’s going to be about 930GiB of usable space left. We’re now at £390 for the lot, or 41p/GiB of usable space. Excluding VAT.
By the way, I am repeatedly told that Linux software RAID is good enough and I needn’t bother with hardware RAID (even a cheapy one like 3ware). I started off using Linux software RAID and still have one server using it, but that’s due for decommissioning next month. In general it does perform well enough. Unfortunately, hard drives accumulate errors and the only way to find them is to read the disks looking for them. The code for doing so on software RAID needs to be in the main operating system and the Linux mdadm package in Debian (and presumably elsewhere) handles it by means of a cron job that runs once a month to verify all the disks. Because it’s running on the host all the data has to go through the OS and while the machines are under moderate write load I have found that this verify process will take several days to complete and will impact I/O performance. In short it’s actually more cost effective to spend more on a RAID controller and put more customers on one machine.
Now consider the power usage. More than 60% of BitFolk’s recurring hosting costs are directly related to power. Disks aren’t huge power draws when compared to the CPU or chipset, but it’s not an inconsiderable extra cost and it’s often overlooked.
We’re already up to 41p/GiB cost price, but you may be thinking that this is no problem since at 10p/GiB/month, 700GiB sold brings in £70 a month, paying for all the disks and RAID controller after about 6 months. The reality is nothing like this. The full price has to be paid up front to get the hardware into service, but it’s going to be months before the server is full of paying customers. And if those customers don’t happen to want any extra disk space, then still around 50% of this capacity will remain unsold. The remaining capacity is not usable when the IOP/s have run out, but it has to be there from the start just in case there is demand. Does 10p/GiB/month start to look more reasonable yet?
If not, maybe you would be better off going to a really big cloud computing vendor who can take advantage of massive economies of scale to really drive the price down for you. Like say, Amazon S3 who will charge you $0.18/GiB/month for storing stuff in Europe. Plus $0.10/GiB/month more to write it and $0.14/GiB/month to read it.
Finally, the entire point of paying for a virtual server is that you don’t need to worry about the hardware. If it breaks, it’s BitFolk that replaces it, hopefully without you even noticing. If you are sitting there thinking “I could buy a 1.5T hard disk for 9p a GB, screw this!” then you just don’t get it. If from the outset you are prepared to manage your own hardware, and your needs justify purchasing an entire machine, then guess what? Don’t buy a virtual server on someone else’s hardware! Buy your own hardware that is set up exactly how you want (and please feel free to have no RAID and host it under your bed). With this mindset, pretty much every “* as a Service” product is going to look expensive to you because you have missed the point.
Busy family weekend
June 15th, 2009
My mother and her partner Alan came down to London on Friday afternoon to see a show (Oliver!) I’d bought them tickets for. We let them do their own thing on the Friday, though I was pleased to hear that their tickets were front row seats which they very much enjoyed. Despite me going through the details of how travel works in London in painful detail, they somehow still managed to end up buying two travel cards at £12.something each on Friday afternoon and then not needing them anyway, as their hotel was off Bloomsbury Square and the theatre was only at the end of Drury Lane. Tsk, tourists eh? 
Jenny and I met up with them at their hotel on Saturday morning and after some tea we set off for Greenwich. Journeyplanner suggested the 188 bus from just around the corner on Southampton Row so that’s what we went for, but I should really have known better — the traffic was pretty bad and it took over an hour to get there. Still, it was a lovely sunny day for a picnic in Greenwich Park, some Frisbee and then a quick look around the National Maritime Museum.
On the way back Jenny suggested we use the Thames Clipper from Greenwich Pier to get back to Central London. It was another £5 each but I really didn’t fancy getting onto crowded public transport in that heat so was happy to give it a try. I’m really glad we did because it was great; surprisingly quick, comfortable and good for seeing the sights. We got off at Embankment Pier, walked up to Lancaster Gate, a short bus journey back to their hotel followed by a rather rushed change of clothes then off for a meal at the Oxo Tower Restaurant.
I’d hoped we’d get a table out on the patio but we had to settle for one next to the window. Still the view was superb looking across at St. Paul’s Cathedral. I could really get used to the excellent service but perhaps not the steep prices! Worth it for special occasions though.
The night was finished up with a slow walk back along the South Bank to Waterloo where we went our separate ways.
On Sunday we met up again for a lazy afternoon lunch and rest in Russell Square Gardens people- (and squirrel-) watching.
Tonight we’re off to Windsor for a meal to celebrate Jenny’s brother’s birthday so I suppose I better get on with some work.
UKNOF 13
May 28th, 2009Today I made my way up to Sheffield to attend the UK Network Operators’ Forum’s 13th meeting. UKNOF is something I’ve wanted to attend many times in the past as there has always seemed to be a very interesting set of presentations, but I could never convince my employer to let me do so as my job was never particularly networking-related.
Well, these days I am my employer, so very little convincing was necessary! Despite the presentations having a lack of immediate relevance to my day to day work I still found them on the whole to be of very high quality and of benefit in understanding the wider networking world in which I operate. Not only that but it gave me the opportunity to meet a number of BitFolk’s customers in person.
The purse strings at BitFolk are necessarily tight at the moment though, so that meant just a day trip for me. I would dearly have loved to travel up on Wednesday night, stay 2 nights and come back tomorrow, but unfortunately finances dictated an eye-watering 4am wake up today for me in order to get the 6.37am train up to Sheffield from London St. Pancras and arrive in good time for the 9.30am start. Again I’d have loved to stay tonight and sink more than the two rushed beers I managed but here I am on the 19.27 back to London.
A London venue would have been easier for me, but that’s just being selfish. Sheffield appears to be a very modern, good looking city, and the people a friendly lot. More time here would have been good, and another visit very welcome.
Electric Works, the actual venue of the conference too was superb — such amazing acoustics in the conference room that I don’t think the microphones would even have been needed were it not for the recordings being made. Speaking of the recordings, it was refreshing to find a (free!) conference that takes logistics seriously. A decent quality wireless network, downloadable slides in advance of the talks, streamed and recorded video and jabber and IRC chat rooms were provided.
A fantastic effort by the UKNOF organisers, and Bogons and Portfast for the video streaming. Thanks to Yorkshire Forward for hosting and to Pingsta for the beers afterwards!
Exercise
May 27th, 2009Anyone who knows me will know that I don’t get enough exercise. Over the last year or so I have lost a bit of weight due to having a better diet and being a little bit more active. Now that I’m working from home almost all the time I thought it would be a shame to reverse the trend and start putting it back on through leading an even more sedentary lifestyle. Something had to be done.
I don’t get on with exercise for the sake of it at all, so the idea of going to the gym just does not appeal. I decided that two things I could probably bear to do are cycling and swimming.
Since Jenny moved in it’s become pointless for her to keep up her gym membership in Holtspur, so last week we took a walk down to Feltham Airparcs Leisure Centre to see what it was like. From the outside it looks a bit drab, run down and 1960s so I wasn’t expecting much, but in fairness their pool looked quite good. Jenny wasn’t overly impressed with the look of the gym but she decided to give it a go anyway, and when she did get around to it this week she found it was better than it looked.
I also bought a basic bicycle from Halfords and this morning I cycled the 1.5 miles to Airparcs and went for the early bird swimming session, then cycled back. It’s the first time I’ve been swimming in something like 20 years, but once I’d got into the rhythm it was fine. Normally the early bird session is from 7am until 9am but in school holidays it finishes at 8.15am, so I only got just over an hour in. I liked how quiet it was this morning — no annoying kids at all even though it’s holidays — so I hope it’s like that every week. I think there were 9 people there including me at the busiest time.
It’s a small step but I’m really pleased that I seem to be able to get along with it, and if the pool stays quiet like it was today then I could see me going up there for an hour or two several times a week.
Inevitably I look a complete tit in my cycle helmet as well, but I can just about ignore the odd looks I get from all around me!
Links for 2009-05-23
May 23rd, 2009Dear Lazyweb, where’s my power beep gone in Ubuntu?
May 17th, 2009Update: Solved! Someone pointed me to the “beep” track of the volume control, which was hidden and muted.
Last month I upgraded my ThinkPad R61 to Ubuntu Jaunty. Recently I noticed that I no longer have the beep when taking it on or off of AC power. I don’t know if it has always been missing since it was installed, or if it went away some time after. The beep still happens at all times prior to the kernel loading, so I don’t think this is BIOS or hardware related. The power applet does know when I am on AC power (or not), and seems able to estimate battery life reasonably well.
Anyone had that before?
