1000 Lbs Web Hosting Gorilla: Amazon?
October 27, 2006
If you are in the hosting business I would look over your shoulder, because your favorite bookseller is making big wins in the web hosting business. What? Yes, Amazon is really making an impact in the space and big hosting companies are starting to feel it. We are incorporating their services in EVERYTHING we are doing. The Amazon web services products (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - EC2 and Amazon S3) are built for the little guy AND the big guy.
For the Small Guy: I like to call Amazon’s web services “zero point capital” for startups. For no money (i.e. the zero point) you can build as many servers as your web application needs ~ your startup only pays when it uses Amazon’s computing resources (i.e. when you have users/customers). I know of more than ten startups in Dallas that are using Amazon’s services as a way to start without spending any money on servers, bandwidth and colocation. This is big.
For the Big Guy: If your web service is successful, but need a quick way to scale Amazon is the perfect solution. Architel was working with Linden Labs (Second Life) this summer to help them with a data center solution here in Dallas. Working with PAIX/Switch & Data who would provide ping, power and pipe (i.e. the data center) the Architel team would provide the support. Linden Labs planned to install one rack of servers each week for the foreseeable future. Since we would be responsible for unpacking and installing each server we suggested they consider Amazon’s EC2 and S3 instead since we could support it just as easily. Today Linden Labs uses Amazon for their client downloads (this is especially important when they update their client for all 1MM users). Jeff explains how it is working:
In case you’re curious, we switched over halfway during release day; but even for the tail 8 hours of the download rush, we averaged roughly 70 gigabytes of viewer download per hour. Then it settled down to a relatively steady stream of about 20-30 gigabytes per hour. In the last 23 hours we’ve transferred a total of ~900 gigabytes so far- which I’d estimate to be around 30,000-38,000 downloads. This does not include the first several hours of the download rush, which are typically the highest. In case you’re wondering how the client auto-updater works: it actually contacts the website for a special script, which finds the latest version, and then makes a request to download the file through HTTP, just like a regular web download. This is why the Amazon S3 switch is transparent, even to the auto-updater; when the auto-updater makes a request to get the file through HTTP, our website receives that says, “Aha! You really want to go to this Amazon S3 URL, here ya go.”
