Written in response to a question on Web Tools Review , a guy who asked if it was reasonable for his $8.99/month web hosting services to have 16 outages a month, 4 times what his free tripod account had. Here's my response:
You don't always get what you pay for, but you won't get what you don't pay for. $8.99 a month doesn't cover much, it's probably some guy with a few overtaxed old Pentiums in a basement covering a fractional T-1 or a couple of ISDN lines to his house. Heck, if you look at the economics of the business you soon realize that it costs about that much for just the electricity to run a single machine for a month.
Bandwidth, clean power, a full-time staff of troubleshooters and sysadmins, people willing to track down and call MCI (uhmm... for example) vice presidents at home when the links upstream fail, all of these start to add up.
While it's no guarantee that paying $100/month is going to get you all of these things, chances are really good that $8.99/month isn't. (Barring some trust-fund baby with some really strange kinks regarding caffeine and personal hygiene and a bizarre sense of economics.)
Which, of course, is why although Tripod went down 1/4th as often as your commercial provider, it also saddled your site with more pop-up ads than a really disreputable porn dealer.
It's been a while since I've been in the ISP business (left it to friends in '95), so all of my numbers are outdated, but if you've got too much time on your hands, try figuring out the economics yourself:
Look at your power bill and see how much electricity costs you, figure out how much power your desktop draws (for back of the envelope order of magnitude numbers you could just use the power supply size, although that's likely way high), do some load testing on your home PC and see how many users you'd run off that computer, divide the cost of running your PC per month by half that number ('cause you're an optimist, that's why). That'll give you a number for electricity per web site.
Then realize that you're willing to put up with a lot of flaws in that home computer that are unacceptable in a server machine that needs real long-term reliability, so at least triple the capital costs of depreciating that computer over 3 years.
Add to the capital costs uninterruptible power supplies, backup devices, racks to put these things on, air conditioning to keep them reasonable (and budget the additional electricity useage too!).
Call up some vendors and price bandwidth. Before you pick two of them (for when one of them fails, you want an alternate route), take a month and "traceroute" each of them from a couple of different hosts occasionally, see how often their links are slow, or fail. Figure out how much you're willing to subdivide that bandwidth.
Then call up your local telephone company and ask them what the local loop from these other connections will cost. Do it several times. Pick the highest answer, that'll be the one that they'll charge. Then call them back and ask them how much to guarantee that there'll be actual separate connections to these separate vendors, through separate tunnels or overhead lines, so that an errant backhoe won't shut you down for three days.
Then ask them how much to have it installed with less than a 9 month lead time.
Budget all the lunches you're going to buy for the local telephone linemen, you're going to get to know them fairly well, you need to be on good terms with them. Also realize that the local telephone company knows nothing about data transfer, and that you're going to have to get some information from these linemen that's held pretty close to the chest, things like the serial numbers of the switches that they're using which your bandwidth companies will need when you're helping them to configure the routers.
(Okay, you don't need serial numbers. But you will need hardware and software revision info, and quite often that stuff is much better tracked by "social engineering" (as the crackers call it) the vendor of the switch and giving them the serial numbers than by asking the telco directly.)
Call up your local geeks and see how much they cost to work the night shift. Call up some technical non-geeks and ask them what they cost to do tech support to all the clueless gits (no, not you, the really clueless gits) who are going to call for AOL support even though this ISP has nothing to do with AOL.
Then realize that with the status of working for your Internet company they'll probably leave you within 3 months for a salary that's several times what you were paying them, so budget for training new ones regularly.
Toss in incidentals, like taxes, an accountant, advertising, the pittance you're going to pay yourself while you try to convince your wife that you're "building equity" [giggle]...
And I think you'll find that the folks trying to do this for $8.99/month have got to be transmitting your data over wet kite string between frozen orange juice cans, routing customer support to their personal answering machine and regularly forgetting to change the tape, and hiring illegal immigrants to do sysadmin duties.
At least that's the conclusion I've come to.
Sunday, October 17th, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com