Nontrivial Exercises

Call to Hosting Companies: Enable Your Customers’ Success

I mentioned that the MacCast was one of my favorite podcasts for hearing about and learning about Mac-related info, news, tips and tricks. Adam Christianson puts a lot of work into each show and is obviously very passionate and diligent about sharing what he knows with all his listeners.

You may have heard about his hosting problem last week - it seems that one of the posts on the MacCast blog was dugg last Wednesday, and created a huge increase in traffic in the course of just one hour. The traffic was apparently so significant that it caused the shared server that is hosting his blog to start impacting the service of the other websites on that server.

Adam has hosting service from GoDaddy, and apparently their policy is to simply shut down a particular domain if it starts to bring down or negatively impact the shared server it’s on. This is exactly what happened to the MacCast domain last Wednesday, but Adam was never informed. He eventually found out and for now he’s upgraded his service with GoDaddy to a dedicated server to eliminate this from happening again. He’s also upgraded his cost per month by 900%.

Apparently this sequence of events is not rare and certainly not unique to GoDaddy. From the hosting company’s perspective, it’s only reasonable for them to temporarily shut down a domain if it resides on a shared server and if it starts to negatively affect the service of other domains on that server. They can’t let one site’s sudden increase in traffic negatively impact other paying customers, can they? Sure it’s inconvenient for the domain with the spike in traffic, but hey, that’s part of the hosting agreement.

But is that the best way to do business? I think a subtle change is required in the approach to hosting service to truly meet the customer’s needs.

As a hosting company, you provide a service to content creators and publishers to put their content on the Internet. You provide a platform on which they build and display their content. Without the platform, the content is meaningless because no one can access it.

Presumably, the goal of the content creators - i.e. your customers - is to attract traffic to their site and to varying degrees, depending on the purpose of the website, to increase that traffic. Thus, success for your customers is increased traffic.

But what you do when you shut down your customers’ domains when they experience a spike in traffic is to penalize them for achieving their goal. A truly successful hosting service must figure out a way to partner with their customers to allow and enable them to succeed.

Here’s my suggestion. As far as I know from the little research I’ve done, no one currently offers this service.

For your shared hosting plans, offer an optional service to automatically manage traffic spikes by quickly replicating a specific domain on a dedicated server and temporarily transfer traffic to that dedicated server. You could charge $2.50 - $5.00 a month for this option, then charge a specific rate per hour or day that the dedicated server was in use. If traffic levels tapered off to a more predictable and manageable level after 8 hours, then the customer could make the call to go back to the shared server, assuming the hosting company determined there would be no impact to the server.

Technically I don’t think this should be too difficult. It would require some utilities to quickly replicate a domain’s storage on another server, but this is just some intelligent copying. I’m guessing that on average, sites that would be affected by a traffic spike have less than 1GB of storage. You should be able to transfer 1GB in less than 1 min (that’s only 133 Mbit/s). Add an additional 1 minute for changing your internal DNS tables. Then, add a 5 min timeframe for detection of a true traffic spike event (you would need to be detected through software monitoring of traffic levels and possibly through CPU monitoring of the server). You have a 7 minute maximum downtime and possibly less. If you have only 1 such event a year and actually have a 7 minute period of downtime, that’s still 99.9987% availability for that domain for the year.

As a hosting company, you get additional revenue - first from the monthly service charge of having the service available, and then from the specific events when you have to temporarily move a domain to a dedicated server. Your customer is satisfied because it’s likely that he or she will never even be aware of any downtime, but will be aware that you could handle the sudden increase in traffic without any problems.

Additionally, you have the chance to upsell your customer to a dedicated host if the traffic appears to be steadily increasing or leveling off at a higher level - they would already be on the dedicated host. You would of course need to invest in additional servers to handle all the temporary scaling up.

Perhaps I’m over simplifying some of the technical factors. But even if I am, technical factors can be overcome. It’s the fundamental approach of enabling your customers to succeed with your service, rather than penalizing them for succeeding, that makes the most sense to me.

Why wouldn’t you want to offer this traffic increase protection to your customers? Who will be the first hosting service to offer this (if one isn’t already)?