Pulp Free

The news has been a buzz on some of the possibilities of Comcast starting to implement bandwidth caps for their cable modem users. Fair enough from the standpoint that many other organizations have reasoned previously. However - for the $30-60 most of us pay for usage doesn’t contain provisions for usage - if I want to have something downloading all day long I should be able to. I chuckled to myself and said - hey - no biggie - I’m with Charter and they never make the news…

Wrong.

“Eventually, we will go to a usage-based solution,” predicted Marwan Fawaz, CTO of Charter Communications Inc., last month at the CableNEXT conference in Santa Clara.

Bummer. I was really hoping for those new DOC SIS 3.0 speeds to come my way without shelling out the $$$. However, my real concern comes in with the details outlined for Time Warner from my favorite Tech Web site, Ars Technica:

Last week, we learned from a leaked memo that Time Warner Cable is preparing to roll out usage-based broadband service tiers to new customers in Beaumont, TX. The company has since confirmed its plans, with monthly bandwidth caps set at 5GB, 10GB, 20GB, and 40GB. Customers who exceed their cap would be hit with an undetermined per-gigabyte charge, but Bell Canada’s overage fees, which range from CAN$1.00 to CAN$7.50 per gigabyte, may give some inkling of where Time Warner’s overage fees will end up. Usage caps are a short-sighted response to capacity constraints, one that’s likely to hurt the company more than it will help in the long run—especially with new broadband options on the horizon.

So where does that put me?

On my most ravish month in December, 2007 - I somehow managed to pull almost 270 GB of data. If my math is right, 100% usage of my 5mb line (for 30 days) would get me close to 1.6 TB - So should I be asking for an 83% refund for bandwidth not used? Or based on the pricing from Canada, would I be charged some $1,750 for overages?

Guess we’ll just have to wait and see…

(I will say that I’ve been much happier with my Charter service since they came out and replaced the entire cable line from the pole to my house last year… Not a single day’s outage… Don’t give me something new to hate you for…)

A few months back I decided to move my Web hosting over to Media Temple for several reasons… More space, ability to host multiple Web sites on a single account (and not just with domain forwarding) along with a lot more disk space. However - the real cool part of MT is the usage of their Grid-Service (GS) platform. Lately my own Web sites have been affected by some performance issues just like when the Grid-Service was put online… Latent Web site performance, seemingly numerous maintenance windows, etc. Knowing that I really only pulled in just over 3100 visits from around 2100 users in November (13 GB transfer) really meant that such outages weren’t really that much of an impact on my low volume Web sites.

However - this observational story of mine comes in two parts…

Part One - What is Grid Computing?

You would think that with a grid computing model that MT has in place would allow individual Web sites for flip around to different servers and I should “never” seen an outage… So why am I impacted? Is it really a grid system? Well - MT doesn’t really release any information about the technical nature of their hosting plans… There’s some nice “feel-good” information online that really sells the product… But again - light on details.

Now, for my daytime job - I architect & engineer fairly large WebSphere XD clusters for a large financial company. Probably have $10M spent on software and hardware alone… We’re clustered all over the place, N+1, no single points of failure… blah blah blah - and it really seems to work… Most of the time… However - just like MT - we have single points of failure when it comes to infrastructure outside of the application hosting model… For MT - this now seems to be related to their storage systems. So with great designs - decisions as to what gets engineered for different components really make the difference. I’m guessing that a lot of effort went into storage planning at MT - but when you build systems like this for a living (or for a company’s hosting plans) - engineering efforts really just shift the bottlenecks from one system to another. Fix the application layer and you could start having issues with database. Fix the database and you highlight storage performance issues (see a trend here?). It’s a moving effort - and in terms of how technology works - your customers continuously see “issues” all of the time… You have to set the expectation that those items happen… That is unless you get yourself into a circular path of destruction (whaa ha ha ha!!) or if you’re Google…. Okay - next point…

Part Two - Taking Responsibility

Even before I moved my Web sites to MT I rambled a bit about how I liked MT’s company philosophy on taking responsibly. Today there was a note simply called “We Apologize” from Demian Sellfors - CEO of MT.

Media Temple would like to apologize to our (gs) Grid-Service customers for the series of issues relating to the (gs) system in the past few months.

and

The situation with the storage upgrade is particularly frustrating because the vendor supplied update was intended to fix issues - not create new ones.

This one hits me at work since we fight such items with our own vendors… However, the company I work for (and MT) have a responsibility to provide hosting solution to our business partners. Failures, no matter if by a vendor or by our own actions, are still our responsibility. In this case, MT informs their customers about what has happened, what they’re doing to fix it, and an apology for the effect their service problems have had on their customers. Granted, MT is offering 2 months of credited hosting to help lesson the damages… But I wonder - do most corporate management teams offer their customers 2 free months of service for such ongoing problems? Do corporate customers actually “pay” for their IT services? Could you even offer a refund? Providing ownership and accountability for what services are provide really drive home the benefits and drawbacks of IT resources when there are real dollars involved…

In either case - it’s once again refreshing to see in writing efforts by a company to just do the right thing. (I do wonder what’s happening behind the walls at MT… perhaps not all of their team feel disclosure is best for business… I, for one, champion transparency when put into the right context…)

I’ve come across a few pictures on my Internet travels that show before and after photos of glamor magazines and other such popular media distributions. This used to just be known as airbrushing the perfect skin for maybe somebody like Playboy or the likes… But digital is all but the norm now and my my my… you can do a lot with Photoshop. While I’ll admit to being pretty good back in the days of version 4 & 5 (that should tell you how long I haven’t been doing Photoshop work!) - it’s truly amazing what’s being shown as fashionable.

Now, I like a pretty face. There’s also some of that built in human desire to beauty. But I also think I now the differences in expectations from real to “too perfect”. So what’s my point? This Web site - iWANEXStudio - is a portfolio artist that turns pretty good into perfect. Question is - is it too perfect? You be the judge…

Couldn’t leave my Kelly Clarkson alone…

And one of the more striking ones…

Their Web site has these and others in a mouse roll-over for the full effect. I have to say - looks great… Realistic expectations? That’s another post. I leave you with this extreme YouTube video version (from a different person altogether…)

While taking in my daily RSS feeds, I came across a post from Matthew Mullenweg linking over to another Web post describing one of the better forms of communicating technical information to end users. A few months ago I read (also from a post on Matt’s site) about a hosting company called Media Temple that was developing a new way of large scale Web hosting based on GRID computing.

As an enterprise applications architect for a large financial company, I’ve primarily concerned myself with designing application hosting platforms that focus on scalability, availability and management automation. We started with 10 servers and 1 application and are now hosting 200+ servers with 170+ applications. I’ve been fairly successful with our designs and configuration for the last 6 years - but one thing that always seems to be a problem is diagnosing our failures, communicating collectively our direction for change and then implementing quickly. Sure, part of that is directly related to “big business”. There are a lot of dependencies, regression testing and risk assessment with any of our changes that essentially slow down our process… That’s why it was refreshing to read a public discussion from Media Temple that outlined their problems in an understandable way, explain why they made the choices that they did, develop a solution to fix it, and set an implementation date for completion.

Now granted, Media Temple is in the business to make money. Obviously they had to deliver a method of hosting that kept them competitive in a saturated hosting environment, provide trust for their customers, and shrink their time to market… But I was most impressed with how they communicated their assessment of their strategy. Too may times changes just happen… good or bad… and the end user just scratches their heads and assumes you know what you’re doing. Clearly one thing that annoys me more than anything else is not change - but lack of communication. I like to feel involved. I want to know what’s going on.

While I was curious about MT’s technology a few months ago and even thought about moving my own hosting to their services, it’s nice to know that MT takes is very seriously when it comes to their technology platform and does a fantastic job with their communications.

I happened to be checking out one of our local grocery store online Web site to see what their fees were for delivery and looked at their FAQ. Of course their fees weren’t listed there… (It was a different page) - but I found this nice tidbit of information. The question was typical in that, as a end-user, this scenario may happen.

Question:

When I click on the checkout button, I get no response. What’s wrong?

Response:

This usually happens when a customer is accessing Schnucks Home Shopping from their employer’s network. Many companies have a firewall which either prevents Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) traffic, or requires special browser settings to do so. The checkout procedure requires the use of SSL to protect your privacy. If your company uses a firewall, your company’s IS staff should be able to help you with your web browser settings.

Now - since I’ve managed several high volume Web sites in my career both from a technical side, a support side, and a customer side - isn’t that statement a bit presumptuous?

“It’s the customer’s fault. Have your IT folks fix it”

Um - yeah. That’s a pretty poor response. It could be a lot of things. SSL not being allowed through a corporate firewall is probably like number 49 on a top 50 list. Isn’t that a response coming out of the 1990’s? I would have to assume the number one reason for “I get no response at checkout” would be related to the application not functioning correctly and the Web site’s backend causing an issue.

My guess is that somebody in their IT department rattled off that answer for the marketing group, they didn’t know any better, and it’ll save their (probably a non-existent) Help Desk from getting any calls when their poorly written Web application falls apart.

Just my two cents - but I think Schnucks should try to be a little more Internet and customer savvy and reword their FAQ a bit.