Richard Siggs & Network Presence

This last week of December (between Christmas and New Years) has always been great for meeting in a more social context with other v.hard working self-employed / entrepreneurial or startup business owners, that I may not get to see much during the working year. Many of us are in the ‘Internet Industry’ and being in Australia means that we have a need to serve domestic customers from domestic servers, but also many customers internationally and on the wider Internet.

I’ve enjoyed a few such get togethers this week and a recurring theme has been “scaling” of Internet content, discussing when to scale and then how to scale Internet based content sites and hosting, and in particular how to do it from an Australian context of domestic end-users, or when preferring an Australian based hosting environment (for legal, commercial or latency based reasons, just to name a few) for use by an Australian or Asian base of end-users and customers.

Many site owners and startups have a “fear of going viral”, in that they know that they created their site and custom content on a tight budget and that ‘if word got out’, then their site would quickly go down due to the budget or initial hosting that they’ve got on that development budget.

Of course, I waited for some of these startup owners to say (in many different ways), “Yeah sure you can go to Amazon, but there’s still work to get the site to run there” and “they’re not local” and “even if they were, we’d need help getting the site over there and scaled onto their hosting”. All valid commentaries I believe and for many of them my response was “call me”, but in general I had ideas like this to put to them to give them food for thought;

– get a ‘templated’ hosting or online server “image” created that can be ‘instantiated’ and booted up when needed, perhaps anywhere that is compatible with EC2.

– consider a centralised or alternatively clustered Database server (or 2 or more) and I can create a MariaDB Cluster that’s mysql compatible within an hour on 2 separate server hosts. Some newer DB types may be applicable with any code refactoring that may be occurring anyway. eg: Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB, SimpleDB, VoltDB and others.

– use the server template image to run up your web and DB servers, each on their own static IP address and configure them to automatically or easily cluster, load balance, etc between themselves.

– we offer Sydney, Canberra and mid-west USA hosting platforms for running your servers (either fulltime or on a cloud-based online usage charging basis).

– we consider baseline System Administration (Linux/Unix/FOSS based) as part of our product line and Network Presence customers can contact us to utilise our “SysAdmin as a Service” offering. This allows you to use us to initially install and configure your ‘clusterable template’ VPS image in as cost efficient manner as possible.

In summary this is part of our “value proposition” for Cloud Computing and Scaling Online Demand, please contact us for more info and service.