[simonmartin]

Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone can tell me who the very large global hosting companies might be.

Apple uses Akamai, there's Exodus/Cable and Wireless, who else are the heavy hitters?

Thanks

Simon

[Camelot]

Akamai aren't so much a hosting company as a content delivery network - Apple pushes content out from their servers across Akamai's network, but Akamai don't host Apple's servers, per se.

As far as the 'typical' 'tier-1' co-location/hosting companies are concerned, the choices now are much smaller than they were a few years ago. Pretty much, the remaining hitters (in my personal preference) are:

Exodus/C&W
WorldCom (UUNet)
ATT
Sprint
MFN (AboveNet)
Level 3

Of these, only ATT, Sprint and Level 3 have avoided Chapter 11 (although, IMHO, how Level 3 have avoided it, I don't know...)

In addition to these, there are other large providers, typically coming out of the telco space, such as Qwest, who also do a reasonable job. Then there's InterNAP who've built their network on a high-level private-peering setup that theoretically provides a superior service. I've used them in the past and, by and large their claim is true, you'll just have to decide whether the additional cost is worth it to you.

I've dealt with all of the above in recent years and can tell you that none of them are perfect.

Note, though, that some of them are not open to everyone. Exodus, for example, recently closed their doors to smaller, non multi-national customers so they could focus on the more lucrative (or, at least, cash-rich) companies.

Depending on your needs, there's a multitude of smaller companies around, too, which may be worth considering, depending on your needs.

If you want more feedback on the above, feel free to ask me. I have opinions about all of them

[simonmartin]

Originally posted by Camelot:
Akamai aren't so much a hosting company as a content delivery network - Apple pushes content out from their servers across Akamai's network, but Akamai don't host Apple's servers, per se.

If you want more feedback on the above, feel free to ask me. I have opinions about all of them

Camelot,

Thanks for that, really excellent info.

Educate me as to how Akamai work... Do they act as a kind of mirror for someone's servers, but with huge capacity?

Are all the companies you mention global players, likely to have offices in the Uk?

I guess there's some serious competition between the outfits you mention and times are tough?

Thanks again

Simon

[Camelot]

Originally posted by simonmartin:
Camelot,

Thanks for that, really excellent info.

Educate me as to how Akamai work... Do they act as a kind of mirror for someone's servers, but with huge capacity?

Akamai don't run hosting services. Their model is that they've deployed (literally) thousands of servers around the world. How you leverage them differs slightly depending on what service you use.

Their 'FreeFlow' service (which is what they started with) uses specially-crafted URLs and DNS to serve content.

As an Akamai customer, you recode your pages so that specific content (esp. images and other static/cacheable data) is referenced off Akamai's servers.

For example, instead of your page referencing an img:

img src="http://www.myserver.com/image.gif"

you'd write it as something like:

img src="http://a101.g.akamai.net/7/101/1278a63f9e0/www.myserver.com/image.gif"

This now points to a URL on a101.g.akamai.net, and Akamai pay lots of DNS tricks so that the user is routed to an Akamai server close by.

When the hit comes in to Akamai, their server checks if it has the image in its cache. If it does, it returns it to the user. If it doesn't it first requests the image from www.myserver.com and then relays it to the user, saving it in its cache for future hits.

The bulk of the speed increase comes from the fact that, thanks to their DNS tricks, a101.g.akamai.net is probably closer (geographically) to the user than www.myserver.com.

However, in this model, you still need to maintain the main www.myserver.com server to give out the original html files and where Akamai can pull the content from.

(incidentally, the numbers in the URL indicate flags as to how the data should be cached (e.g. if it has a time limit), data categorization (so the client can track usage) and a checksum (so that if the image changes, the URL changes and Akamai know to get a fresh copy).

The drawbacks of this system are that you need to recode your pages to include the Akamai URLs (or ARLs, as they call them), the ARLs increase your page size (you have to add the a101.g.akamai.net/blah/blah to every image URL), and they look somewhat ugly.

Akamai have an alternative solution they call EdgeSuite which overcomes part of this problem. Namely you CNAME your DNS data so that www.myserver.com points to an Akamai hostname (similar to the a101.g.akamai.net used by FreeFlow). In this model you don't need to recode your page, and Akamai take over all content serving to the user.

However, even under this model, you need to maintain your own set of servers to provide the base content for them to serve - they simply relay it.

EdgeSuite has some other features, such as dynamic content binding where personalized information is added to the page on Akamai's servers - you add special tags to your base page essentially building it in pieces, like 'ad goes here', 'static banner goes here", 'dynamic/personalized content goes here", and Akamai assemble it on the fly. In this case they only hit your server for the dnyamic content since they already have the static elements in cache.

(Man, I'm beginning to sound like an Akamai rep, huh?

-- post too long, continuing... --

[Camelot]

Originally posted by simonmartin:
Are all the companies you mention global players, likely to have offices in the Uk?

I guess there's some serious competition between the outfits you mention and times are tough?

As for location, I believe they all have UK offices/colocation facilities.

I know WorldCom, Exodus, MFN, Sprint and Level 3 have facilities in London. AT&T have a datacenter in Birmingham.

From a European perspective, though, 'carrier hotels' seem to be more common. These are carrier-neutral facilities that provide racks, power, A/C, etc. but not network. You buy your own transit from network providers and cross-connect it into your space.

This typically means you're paying two people for service (one bill to the hotel, one to the network provider), but that doesn't necesarily mean it's more expensive.
While more complex than a 100mpbs or gig-e connection to someone like Exodus or AT&T, it does mean you can provision multiple connections from multiple providers which may give you an element of redundancy against one provider's network going down.

London's docklands is a nexus of carrier hotels in the UK. I don't know if that's convenient to your or not.

Everyone is hurting right now. Overcapacity, thanks to the boom years, means everyone has more space and capacity than they need and there are some good deals to be had. Just be careful - a lot of providers have gone to the wall and having to move your network can be a PITA.

Just remember that prices in this industry go one way - downwards, so try not to lock yourself in for a multi-year, fixed-price contract. You'll probably find that you can renegotiate next year to get lower rates.

As a comparison, I'm now paying almost a quarter per mbps than I was 3 years ago, and space is 30% cheaper. I also know people who are locked into long-term contracts and are still paying almost $2000 for a 1mpbs connection!

[simonmartin]

Originally posted by Camelot:


From a European perspective, though, 'carrier hotels' seem to be more common. These are carrier-neutral facilities that provide racks, power, A/C, etc. but not network. You buy your own transit from network providers and cross-connect it into your space.

Camelot,

This is great stuff... but you lost me a bit...

You mean that it's more common over here to pay someone to host your servers and then select your own network/bandwidth suplier?

If so, I've never encountered that before...

Any ideas who does this in the UK? I'm in London so Docklands is convenient. As long as I don't actually have to go there... :-)

I like the idea of having several people suply bandwidth, the redundancy you mention. Does this mean paying two outfits the whole time, on the off-chance that one goes bad?

Lots of questions...

Thanks again

(I'll pick up again tomorrow, I just turned into a pumpkin :-)

Simon

[Camelot]

Originally posted by simonmartin:
Camelot,

This is great stuff... but you lost me a bit...

You mean that it's more common over here to pay someone to host your servers and then select your own network/bandwidth suplier?

If so, I've never encountered that before...

Any ideas who does this in the UK? I'm in London so Docklands is convenient. As long as I don't actually have to go there... :-)

I like the idea of having several people suply bandwidth, the redundancy you mention. Does this mean paying two outfits the whole time, on the off-chance that one goes bad?

I don't necessarily mean that carrier hotels are more common than 'normal' colocation facilities, just that they're more common in Europe than they are in the US

As for who runs them, TeleHouse is probably the best known ( http://www.telehouse.co.uk/ )

As for whether they're 'better' than carrier-specific colocation depends somewhat on your resources.

In a carrier hotel, you're responsible for provisioning your own networks, providing the routers and, typically, maintaining full BGP feeds to manage the multiple upstream links.
Due to the lead times in bringing up circuits, you'll typically need to maintain them at all times. However, you can usually specify certain circuits as being redundant, meaning you maintain a minimal bandwidth commitment over it, but have the ability to burst to use the whole line should your alternate (primary) feed goes down. These redundant feeds wouldn't cost as much on a monthly basis as your primary feeds.

Compare this to a carrier-specific, such as Exodus, where you'll typically get a single (or dual) Cat-5 or Gig-E link and can run static routes to get to the outside world - no complex routing setup needed.

It's also worth noting that most, if not all, colos will let you bring in your own feeds in addition to the feed you get from them. They realise that people want multiple feeds and will typically get whatever business they can get (space and basic network) even if they don't handle all your bandwidth needs.

[simonmartin]

Originally posted by Camelot:
Compare this to a carrier-specific, such as Exodus, where you'll typically get a single (or dual) Cat-5 or Gig-E link and can run static routes to get to the outside world - no complex routing setup needed.

It's also worth noting that most, if not all, colos will let you bring in your own feeds in addition to the feed you get from them. They realise that people want multiple feeds and will typically get whatever business they can get (space and basic network) even if they don't handle all your bandwidth needs.

Camelot,

This sounds like the most convenient option...

In your opinion, is it a good time to be driving a hard bargain? Do they have quite a bit of overcapacity these days?

Do you know if any of them have a particular connection with Open Source stuff? I think Exodus hosts Slashdot for instance but I'd like more of a connection than that if poss...

Thanks again for all this good stuff.

Simon

[Camelot]

Originally posted by simonmartin:
[B]In your opinion, is it a good time to be driving a hard bargain? Do they have quite a bit of overcapacity these days?

Do you know if any of them have a particular connection with Open Source stuff? I think Exodus hosts Slashdot for instance but I'd like more of a connection than that if poss...

On the 'hard bargain' issue, I think it's always worth bargaining until you get to the price point that works for you and your business. If they're prepared to provide you service at a price that you're prepared to pay, then everyone's happy.

That said, if too many people push too hard a bargain, the provider doesn't make enough money and goes broke.

Just remember that everything is negotiable, especially the first price they offer.

All providers who are still around have more capacity than they need, so it's a good time to buy.

Unfortunately, being in the US, I have no idea what the going rates are in the UK. I did some research a few years ago when I was looking at getting into the business, but that's all out of date now.

As for bandwidth needs, you should gauge the amount of bandwidth you think you'll need and plan accordingly. Any of the providers mentioned will have more than enough capacity to meet your needs, so don't worry about whether they can handle slashdot or not - their backbone isn't going to be the problem, it's the feed to your racks that will likely be your limiting factor.

In my particular case, I'm in the same Exodus datacenter as one of Google's farms. I'm sure I'm using a fraction of what Google uses, so everyone can get whatever size pipe they need.

Generally you'll get a drop of, say, 100mpbs or Gig-E with a commitment to use a certain percent of that line (e.g. 10mbps on a 100mbps feed). You pay a set rate for the commitment, and a premium rate for each mbps you run over that, meaning that you can burst all the way to the size of your feed if you need to. You just need to specify how high you want that cap to be.

The only exception I've found to this is WorldCom who want to apply QoS filtering to your link so that if you commit to 10mpbs on a 100mbps feed, they rate-limit anything over 10mpbs. Personally I don't understand why they do this because it's in their interests for you to use more bandwidth, especially if you're paying a premium rate for anything over your commit rate.

[simonmartin]

Originally posted by Camelot:
In my particular case, I'm in the same Exodus datacenter as one of Google's farms. I'm sure I'm using a fraction of what Google uses, so everyone can get whatever size pipe they need.

Camelot,

If Exodus can handle Google, they have to be pretty good I guess... :-)

Am I right in thinking they are under the C&W umbrella now?

Simon

[Camelot]

Originally posted by simonmartin:
Camelot,

If Exodus can handle Google, they have to be pretty good I guess... :-)

Am I right in thinking they are under the C&W umbrella now?

Simon

Yes, you're right, Exodus filed for bankruptcy protection last year and were bought by C&W.

Legacy issues mean it's hard to break from the name - both for me and, apparently, for them since my rep's email address only changed from @exodus.net to @cw.com in December.