Quick update: We now have the best bandwidth prices for Web Camera Hosting, Live Streaming, and Video on Demand (VOD) services in the world.
Yep.
Best in the world.
Stream more, pay less.
See here for details: http://hosting.brownrice.com/web-camera-software
So how does the new Brownrice data center measure up to the rest of the data center industry? First some background and then the numbers!
The Metric: PUE
The data center industry uses a fairly simple metric called Power Usage Effectiveness, or “PUE.” While there is legitimate debate about whether PUE is the best way to measure power efficiency it does seem to get right to the core of the matter: How much extra power do you consume to cool your servers and keep the lights on?
Continue reading The Brownrice data center energy efficiency
There are a lot of variables that go into how many hits and visits a virtual server can handle; from how efficient the site’s code is, to how beefy the host server is, to how over-sold the host server is (among other things.) Regardless, I still thought you might be interested in seeing some real numbers from a popular web site that we host on a virtual server:
| Month | Total Visitors | Visitors per Day | Unique Visitors | Unique Ratio | Pages | Hits | BW |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| April 2013 | 285,598 | 9,519.9 | 183,722 | 64% | 3,521,151 | 31,729,312 | 1,149.2G |
In April, on a 4GB RAM virtual server, this site served pages to 285,000 visitors and had 31.7 million hits.
Breaking this down further we might assume that a similarly coded web application could handle about 70,000 visitors on a 1GB RAM ($39.95 per month) virtual server and about 35,000 visitors on a 512MB RAM ($19.95 per month) Brownrice virtual server.
What tools does Brownrice use to alert us to a compromised hosted web site or server? Let me show you:
OSSEC: A great open source tool that constantly monitors server log files and file systems in real-time. OSSEC’s log monitoring helps with an important part of PCI Compliance, it can be configured to automatically block bad guys from doing bad things, and its a fantastic tool for post-mortem hack analysis. We have OSSEC installed on all of our hosting servers, virtual servers, and managed customer servers. It reports back to a mother-ship server so we can keep an eye on things from a central location.
Five years ago we were constantly fighting off hackers who would hack an insecure web site then try and install a rootkit so that they could own the server. Now? Nothing. They don’t even try and attack the server. We have all sorts of rootkit detection software on our servers (rkhunter, OSSEC, etc.) and I’m starting to wonder why we bother when a hacker has everything they need when they’ve compromise a web site.
When you host Ski Area web cameras like we do, bandwidth goes big along with the storms. Here’s what one of our web cam streaming server’s bandwidth looks like over the last week. And yes, its been snowing for exactly the last three days! I’d wager we could write an algorithm that would determine ski area snow fall amounts by the amount of bandwidth that their web camera’s are using…
We’re rolling out our new web cam video players (less flash, more iOS and HTML5 support!) to our clients. The first official release was for the Taos Ski Valley web site, which you can see and use here: http://skitaos.org/webcams
So what’s the geek back-story on these video players? Read on…
We’ve been experiencing issues with one of our live streaming and web cam streaming servers over the last 24 hours. We’ve got it close to permanently fixed but may have to reboot the server once more.
At 12,000+ feet above sea level these are the types of things that happen to a web cam. It works, but its too frozen to do anything but zoom in and zoom out!
See it in, um, action, here: http://www.skitaos.org/webcams
Our existing server space is close to capacity so we’re building a bigger and more awesome-r one!
The new Brownrice data center will be larger, greener, and more secure than our existing server space and will utilize a smart, fresh air cooling system with air conditioning and generator backup, multiple layers of physical security, and will improve on our already robust physical network redundancy.
It will also look *super* cool.
So if you’ve been looking for a place to co-locate your servers or server racks, look no further than Brownrice. And feel free to come by anytime and we’ll give you a tour.