Good morning Paul,
Sorry it took a little more time than I wanted, but I prefer to take the time necessary to do a good job in answer your very legitimate questions. First let me say we are making a lot changes in 2009 – we have expanded our management team by 50%, and continue to staff the company in all other positions to ensure we can continue to be a leader in Web Hosting, Domains and Website Related Services. Further we have just completed our move to our new global headquarters and have begun a major capital investment in a new 9000 sq foot data center which should go online around September. So in nutshell… Netfirms today and tomorrow is NOT the Netfirms of yesterday. What remains constant however, is our unique approach to Grid Computing which your questions point too.
I have gone to the owners, the lead architects, and the system admins to try and get you a fair and clear answer to your questions. I hope these answers will clarify what Netfirms provides our small and medium size businesses and organizations, and more importantly what they can look forward to in 2009 and 2010.
A good starting point is to look at the analogy of motor vehicles… there are different kinds … cars, vans, and buses. They run on the same roads, they travel at the same speeds, and they all get you to similar destinations. Where they differ, is in how many people they can haul at one time. This is very similar with Netfirms Hosting packages. They each tap into the same Netfirms computing grid, the websites on them have the same load times, and generally they all run the same applications. However, they differ in the level of concurrency (i.e., simultaneous visitors) they will support.
QUESTION: I would assume that all accounts (I see you have moved Plus to the grid) have equal access to the distributed computing?
ANSWER: Yes, all Web Hosting from Netfirms have access to the distributed computing platform. The Netfirms Grid platform which was invented in 1999, and has successfully operated over the last 10 years offers many ‘better than Fortune-500 grade’ hosting benefits for small to medium sized companies and a fraction of the cost. The benefits of our grid platform has become even more important these days as blogging and social networking websites can easily shine the spotlight on a large number of smaller websites. Finally we have seen that we live in a world where many a website can become “Internet Famous” in minutes and bring with it overwhelming visitors. With Web Hosting from Netfirms, our customers can actually enjoy the limelight as the Netfirms Grid expands to ensure the website is up and performing during these traffic spiking events. All Web Hosting accounts from the ‘Plus Plan’ on up to Enterprise product line benefit from the Netfirms Grid, but get different levels of concurrency.
QUESTION: Outside of bandwidth, you must have some way of tracking the resources individual accounts are using. Poorly written scripts and hacked scripts can create tremendous computing loads, for instance. How do you track this and can the customer track the resources they use and know when they are approaching their allotted usage for the month?
ANSWER: Yes we have a series of “health-check” monitors to control abuse of grid resources including bandwidth, CPU and DB & E-mail. Of course there are many customers who comply with our Terms of Service and need the grid to handle their spikes. Bandwidth and disk-space usage are two metrics that we display to customers. Not displayed currently, but nevertheless tracked, are important metrics such as, total number of CPU cycles used, average memory consumption, peak memory consumption, number of database rows accessed, number of database queries issued, etc. These are conveyed to customers as needed when the consumer has challenges that we are supporting. As for websites using poorly written scripts – they tend to exceed their allocated CPU cycles and are consequently stopped by the operating system. Scripts that repeatedly exceed their CPU limits are suspended and we contact the customer to notify them. The CPU Limits are throttled based on the plan selected by the customer at time of purchase, or upgraded quickly via the Netfirms control panel.
QUESTION: And does the amount of processing you are allotted increase as you move up in hosting plans or do you only get more bandwidth, storage, more databases, etc? And what happens when you’ve used your allotment of resources? Does your site get shut down or are you charged extra?
ANSWER: This is an area we are working on better communicating – we do not mention it publically on our website (yet), but each plan gets a higher allotment of processing resources. The Netfirms Enterprise plan for instance allows up to 20 concurrent CGI hits per node distributed between 5 nodes (i.e., a CGI concurrency limit of 100). The Netfirms Plus plan on the other hand allows up to 7 concurrent CGI hits distributed between 2 nodes (i.e., a CGI concurrency limit of 14). As an added benefit the higher end plans (The Business and Enterprise plans) also have our unique Multi-Platform capability, allowing developers to build LAMP and Windows ASP.NET Apps on the same website. Simply upload the code and it works. As for the question about “charging the customer”? – We NEVER automatically charge extra for exceeding resources. Our customer care team will get in touch with the consumer and advise them they are approaching their limits. If we see consistent need for extra resources we will offer to upgrade them to the next plan (all seamless to the consumer). Of course abusive or illegal spikes are shut down to ensure stability of our platform for our other paying consumers.
QUESTION: Obviously, it’s going to be very difficult to use 3TB of transfer on you Business Plan, but what happens when you do?
ANSWER: With Netfirms, hitting these lofting transfer rates is welcome! We have designed the Netfirms Grid to not only handle traffic spikes when they happen, but actually push out the bandwidth that we advertise and the consumers pay for. When the consumer does hit their limits, we will let them continue to run their website on our platform and like needing extra resources we will offer to upgrade them to the next plan (all seamless to the consumer). For consumers who continue to push the concurrency limit for the overused resources and want to avoid an upgrade we will place limits on their accounts to ‘cap them’. For instance, when a customer is constantly 10% over their bandwidth limit we reduce their download concurrency limit by 50%. Typically, we will place a phone call to the customer before we do this. Let me be clear – our experience over the last 10 years is we see most Web Hosting companies jamming their clients on a single server hardware and throttle bandwidth on top of that to manage the ‘box’. So when we see Unlimited hosting, we know this means “Unlimited Hosting until we run out of resources then you get what you are given” – the Netfirms Grid allows customers to continue to consume more and more without being trapped on a Limited Single Point of Failure Environment like our competition.
QUESTION: Also, I really don’t understand the need for your Enterprise level of hosting. Is that the same cluster with added benefits or a semi-private cluster?
ANSWER: The Netfirms Enterprise Web Hosting plan showcases the benefits of our Grid Hosting Platform to organizations that need additional horsepower. Already we run multiple clusters and grids at Netfirms for greater redundancy and concurrency – the Enterprise plans offer a greater Quality of Service. You get higher priority resources as much as 10x in some case. Some components of the Enterprise level hosting are on different dedicated clusters such as Databases and Application servers (CGI and PHP for example). From the car analogy this is very much like a HOV Lane on a highway! The Netfirms Enterprise Plan is a ‘fully managed cloud hosting service’ that fast growing startups and mid to large organizations appreciate. We haven’t jumped on the Cloud Hype wagon at this moment – but functionally that’s what Netfirms has to offer. For example http://www.pixlr.com is one of the Internet’s most popular online phone editing services – it’s running on the Enterprise Web Hosting Grid plan from Netfirms.
Thank you again for the opportunity to clear up some of the mysteries of Netfirms Grid Hosting platform. Bottom-line Netfirms invented a form of Cloud/Grid Computing back in 1999 and have been expanding on its capabilities for the average web hoster. You can expect a lot of new and exciting additions this year and I trust you’ll keep the discussion with us going.
Regards
Dan Kershaw
General Manager — Netfirms, Inc.
7030 Woodbine Ave. Suite 800, Markham, ON, Canada, L3R 6G2
