There’s a common misconception that you can cut IT costs by scooping up some old servers on Ebay. True, for $75 you can pick up a server that once retailed for $3000. Sure, you may need to run a few extra boxes to get the computing power that you need, but even if you need 10 old servers to do the work of one new server, you’re still ahead $2250. So why not just buy old servers?
Well, the biggest reason is power consumption. One of your biggest IT costs is the recurring cost of the power it takes to operate your servers 24/7/365. So using 10 old servers to do the work of one new server also means using 10x the power – perhaps 20 amps instead of 2 amps.
Old servers have also lived out their useful lives a bit more. Electronic doesn’t mean it works forever, eventually all electronic components fail. The older hardware it’s closer to it’s failure date, and when that happens, you have the inherent risk of downtime, data loss, lost productivity, and the need to purchase new hardware. Your old hardware is more susceptible to dead harddrives or bad memory sectors, for example. When your server goes down (as all servers do eventually,) how much will it cost you? 10 hours of work? $75 for a new old server? $1000 in lost sales? It adds up.
What old servers do have going for them is the low setup cost. If you’re just building a new business, you usually don’t have a lot of money to dump into high end hardware or new hardware. In our next post, we’ll cover some ways to build a server farm on the cheap without making concessions in future costs.
CentOS is the most popular web hosting operating system these days. It’s short for “Community Enterprise Operating System” and it’s free, open source software built on Redhat Enterprise Linux. It’s essentially the same as Redhat Enterprise Linux with the RH logos stripped out a few things changed here and there.
Linux is selected over Windows for a lot of reasons, one being a more efficient IP stack. We’ve found ourselves what I’m sure many others have found as well – if you need to push a lot of data consistently, Linux beats Windows hands down.
Another reasons CentOS is selected makes it a bit of an ironic choice. It’s not cutting edge. Strange sounding, eh? Well, the problem with cutting edge is that it’s untested and not battle hardened. When new code is put in a production environment, it’s exposed to all kinds of things the programmers didn’t think about. By letting other people test the code and letting the operating system age a bit, you can avoid all the hiccups associated with bleeding edge technology. This is probably the most important ingredient in the recipe. (Want cutting edge? Go with Fedora, which is also based on RHEL, but with the most up to date, cutting edge code. It’s basically the public beta for RHEL.)
We’ll continue talking about CentOS in our next post.
I’ve been doing sales in the web hosting industry for a few years now, and one paradox that always seems to puzzle novice webmasters starting a new site is the question of how much hosting to buy (what size account?) vs how fast their site will grow and generate revenue. There’s no right or wrong answer, but after watching thousands of ideas and sites come and go (and a lot of times, stay!) I can give a few general rules of thumb to anyone looking to start a site.
Get your site running in the black (or green!) as fast as possible. Hosting a website isn’t free. Money (or the lack thereof) is the ultimate site killer. You probably don’t want your site cluttered with ads, but if you’re on anything more than shared hosting (spending in the ballpark of $5-$25 per month) you’ll probably want at least some revenue to defray the cost of your site. Donations work but you’ll need a solid sales pitch to your customers (think the annual Wikipedia fund drive) but most sites need to be able actually generate revenue. If you can largely defray or cover your costs, you won’t feel the drain on your own bank account, letting you keep the site running longer.
The most successful sites start with a spark and grow into a fire. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo….they all started as tiny little sites that spread by word of mouth, delivered a good product, and got large. Zuckerberg didn’t just create Facebook overnight (although I’ll bet he thinks it felt that way with how fast his life moved for a while.) He started with a tiny little site at Harvard and it grew organically into a worldwide Juggernaut. Likewise, start your site small with just a few solid features. As the site grows, add more features. There are actually two concepts working hand in hand here. A) It’s easy to spend a lot of time, money, and effort creating a site with all the bells and whistles, only to either find out that they’re not what your users want/need or to get so bogged down creating them that your site never launches. And B) If, when your site launches, you have all the features you’ll ever need, you won’t have any features to add as your site grows. Adding features is a great TOOL for getting your visitors to come back to check them out, so you’re cheating yourself out of a freebie when it comes to giving your users another reason to come back.
Good luck and if you use these tips, be sure to let us know how it works out for you!
Social networking is a big buzz term these days and for all the right reasons. When you can reach the people you want to reach through social networking, you can regularly contact them in a way that is convenient for both you and them. Last week we gave some tips for adding social networking elements to your site, this week we’ll cover two more tips but this time they’ll be regarding how to use social networking for your site from the social networks themselves.
3. Create a fan page or youtube channel Social networks can be a great place to post some of your site’s content to entice users to go to your site to see the rest of it. If you post all of your content on the social network, your users won’t have as much of a need to visit your site, so try to stick to teasers. Having a Youtube channel with videos about things on your site (i.e. if it’s a site about camping, perhaps a Youtube video on how to set up a tent would interest users on Youtube to visit your site for more great information.) Creating a fan page on Facebook can be a great way to drive traffic to your site, to use the same example, if your site is about camping, create a group about camping. Then, as users with an interest in camping join the group, you can update your page with links to your site.
4. Find niche social networks and….be social! Nothing beats good ol’ fashioned friendliness with the people with whom you’d like to communicate. There is no shortage of small social networks on the Internet, so don’t limit yourself to the big dogs. To revisit the camping website example, find a camping social network (there are plenty) and create an account. Don’t be too spammy, just share information with people who are like minded. A few links here and there and eventually you’ll be driving plenty of traffic to your site.
In closing, there are plenty of ways to drive traffic to your site using social networks. Just remember that the golden rule applies to social networking, don’t be any more spammy to others than you’d want done to you. Play it cool, post your links only when they’re relevant or valuable to the conversation and you’ll be pulling in the site visits in no time!
Social networking is a big buzz term these days and for all the right reasons. When you can reach the people you want to reach through social networking, you can regularly contact them in a way that is convenient for both you and them. Social networking is a great way to get your name and message in front of your users regularly, increasing the chances that they return to your site for future visits. Here are a few tips and ideas for integrating social networking into your site.
1. Integrate Twitter into your site for updates. Most sites get fresh content in some way, shape, or form. Using Twitter to tweet updates to your site can inform users that weren’t otherwise going to visit your site that there may be something interesting for them to see. Be careful though, if you tweet too much or too seldom or your tweets are regularly bland, users will unfollow you. A good rule of thumb is not to tweet more than 3-5 times per day and to tweet at least 2-3 times per week. Check Google for a wide range of scripts that can automate this for you. Add your Twitter link to your site in convenient, easy to see places to gain followers. Following your users who follow you makes it less likely that they’ll unfollow you.
2. Give your users link to post your site to their social network One of the most popular ways users use to share links with their friends is by posting it on a social network. By giving them an easy link to use “Tweet this” or “Facebook this” you can make the process very simple to do. Even if your users don’t want to use your link, it’ll at least trigger the question in their head “Do I want to Facebook this?” – a question which they may not have otherwise asked themselves, giving your a higher chance of having your content linked from their facebook page. There are plenty of freely available, easy to use scripts to help with this.
Check our next post for more social networking tips!
