Prius web stuff available offline

John PM me your mailing address and the bucks are in the mail.

 

Doing the mail thing now thanks John!

 

Hey, if we're talking about high-bandwidth low-priority web hosting, I can make two offers.

I'm pretty familiar with Linux, and have done something a little unusual with my home-DSL-line web server. (It's one of those MegaOffice accounts, so I get 640kbit down, 640kbit up, and 5 static IPs in a /29 network.) If either of you two use a Linux server (which you can control -- recompile the kernel and whatnot) for web services, I can offer some advice:

The Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control project, at lartc.org, describes some advanced techniques you can use to get better performance out of a simple Internet connection. There are two main improvements offered by using these tools:

First, if you're using "cheap" bandwidth, like a home DSL line, you are already at a disadvantage compared with "expensive" lines like a T1 with Cisco routers at either end. This LARTC stuff helps remove that disadvantage. The advantage is Fair Queuing: a T1 with a Cisco router at either end is doing something called Fair Queuing, where individual "flows" of traffic are identified and queued separately, so even if one large stream wants to take up all the bandwidth, other streams are still given shares of bandwidth. A stock DSL router doesn't have that advantage: it gives you a large, "dumb" FIFO queue, and so one stream intent on filling up your upstream bandwidth can do so very effectively, causing everything else to slow to a crawl. This LARTC stuff, with some creative routing of traffic, lets you configure a traffic control method in the kernel called Stochastic Fair Queuing, which achieves mostly the same effect.

I can offer a testimonial, too: mspencer.net does some free web hosting (for amateur web comic artists, because artists rock), and my personal DSL line had major lag problems when the server was under heavy load. Now that I use SFQ (Stochastic Fair Queuing) I can serve large-ish amounts of web traffic (8 to 15 MB of Apache log file per week) and still get 60 to 80 ms pings and can play multiplayer games online.

Second, LARTC offers some tools for categorizing traffic and dividing it into priority classes. You can have *perfect* control of your outbound traffic, giving different traffic categories hard or soft limits, so you can do things like I do at home: use a separate IP address for "low priority" traffic, put all your huge video files on that, and tell your traffic conditioner that everything from that IP address goes in a really restricted priority class. The hard-or-soft limit thing is really nice: a traffic class can be "bounded" or not, meaning it won't (or will) borrow traffic from other classes if those other classes have unused bandwidth to donate; a class can be "isolated" or not, meaning it won't (or will) donate unused bandwidth to other classes.

On that same home DSL line I described earlier, I publish some amateur music videos, multiple MB in size. I even have people hammering me with download accelerators, but normal web visitors still get fast pageloads, and these download accelerators get limited to 4 or 5 KB/sec when the site is busy, automatically scaling back up to the full 65 KB/sec when nobody else is using the site.

OK, so in elaborate geeky detail, I said that this LARTC project stuff is Good Medicine. It empowers mere mortal home Internet connections to serve traffic like the big boys. So if you guys are using Linux, and are using a less-than-professional-quality Internet connection, this stuff can help a LOT. (But even if you're using a CoLo server, this traffic shaping stuff could at least give you control over how much bandwidth you devote to large video files, etc.)

My home server has a low-priority section like I described above. I could also host some videos, if you guys want another mirror. (Keep in mind, when my Internet connection is busy, my site may end up sending files at like 0.5 KB/sec, even when the rest of the site is responding snappily and sending large jpeg's at 20 KB/sec or more. That's why it's low-priority )

Or, since this LARTC stuff is kinda hard to figure out, I could offer advice and help you guys set something like this up.

What do you think?

... wow, that post ended up REALLY long. Maybe I should move this to the usage forum or something...

--Spence