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How Fat is Your Pipe? They say that everyone is created equal, and this may be true. However, you will quickly learn that on the Internet, every Gigabyte is NOT created equal. Maybe by reading this article you will become more educated on the bandwidth business, and be able to interview your new Web host in a more intelligent manner. But don't expect to get any straight answers. So what is a T1 line? It is 1.54 Mega BITS per second. Notice the BITS? It takes eight bits to make a byte. You can do the arithmetic on how many megaBITS it takes to make one GigaBYTE! (Mega is a Million, Giga is a Billion.) A T3 line has 45 MegaBITS per second of transfer capacity. When I started my first ISP I was very excited to bring a T1 line into our office. I started marketing to adult sites, and quickly found that the first customer I signed up saturated our entire line. I then realized there was a big need for adult bandwidth, and had better investigate getting a FATTER PIPE. So I started shopping around for bandwidth capable of accommodating these adult-oriented sites. At the time, the best deal I could find was a certain backbone provider out of San Francisco. These guys run a single T3 (45 Megabit) line down the coast through San Luis Obisbo, Santa Barbara, LA, Orange County, and San Diego. And off this one line, they sell fifteen T3 lines to local providers. These ISPs in turn resell "their" line over and over to business clients around town. This means that your little T1 office line has probably been oversold 300 times by the time it gets to you. These are standard business practices in the bandwidth industry. So, how can they get away with selling the same lines over and over and over? Well, part of this is the magic of ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) switches, which cram the maximum bandwidth through that line. Also bear in mind that most companies only use a small fraction of their available bandwidth at any given moment. The adult business is different because we use up every single ounce of every Gigabyte we pump. This is why you need to know for certain if your web host actually has the capacity to support your site. Because there are times of the day when less people are surfing, and there is extra capacity available so things move along quickly. But you will make your real money when the Web is Jam-packed with surfers. This is when you will suffer if you have selected a web host who is badly oversold. The ideal recipe is a provider who serves a nice mix of the standard low-density business and dialup traffic. These providers can have loads of extra space to sell (depending on their ethics). However, the only drawback to this is that most of them don't have the experience to run high-traffic web servers. A UNIX-based Operating System is the fastest and most secure platform available. But even so, it still takes a special kind of talent to run a high traffic Web server. Simply pulling Red Hat and Apache out of the box and slapping it onto a pile of parts only takes 10 minutes. But you will discover that after a few hours of light adult traffic that this box will choke to death. Furthermore, what happens if your site gets hacked? This happens all the time to adult sites. You have to implement advanced security measures as well as read the logs every day to stop problems before they develop. Most ISPs would never dream of actually paying a human being to read your logs every single day, and yet this is a necessity on adult servers. This is why it is important to consider your options carefully. Providers cannot afford to ignore the hundreds of thousands of Adult webmasters out there. Everyone wants their piece of that adult market and is able to put up a splashy web site. However, the majority do not actually have what it takes to reliably support adult class traffic loads. I also want take a moment to clear up some myths about hops to the backbone. People think they are smart because they can do a TRACERT and count the number of hops to the backbone. This entails opening up the DOS window inside Windows and typing the following at the C prompt: tracert domain.com You will then see your computer counting "hops" all the way to that domain. While this might seem like a good way to judge the distance to a server, it isn't exactly that simple. First off, the number of hops really depends on the location where the tracert was performed. Secondly: being close to the backbone guarantees nothing. Certain important hubs such as New Jersey have been known to be extremely congested. Back at that time when I was shopping around for lines, I spoke with the first network to begin offering a 155 Megabit backbone. When speaking with their engineer I asked him point blank if they were using ATM switches. His answer at that time was "no we are not." What is the consequence? Extreme congestion at peering points. It doesn't matter if you've got a giant pipe if you are only sucking through a straw - the point is that not everything is what it appears to be. A much better strategy is choosing an ISP who has multiple routes to different backbones. This way, a visitor can take the ideal route to connect with your site. If one backbone experiences problems another can pick up the slack. I'd also like to summarize the issue of overselling. During my bandwidth buying career I have continually shopped around. I visited a Network Operation Center in Irvine where people like Yahoo and Hyundai co-locate with their servers. Why? Because they are guaranteed to have twice as much bandwidth as they actually need. There are certain times of the day when you will get twice as much traffic as others. The excess capacity we are talking about here is called "head room." A 10 Megabit port in this facility would have cost around $10K per month at that time. Why do you think Web leaders are willing to pay top dollar for this capability? The do it so that people can get into their sites quickly at any time of day. Consumers spend a pile of money on their PC, and their cable or DSL modem, right? Well, they also want something entertaining to do with that investment. Bear in mind that a normally conservative US Supreme Court struck down Clinton's anti-porn measures on the Web. Ever stop to ask why? It's because the adult industry delivers the entertainment that sends people down to their friendly neighborhood electronics store to buy those PCs en masse! The adult content industry is funding the expanding Internet infrastructure. In a big way we are powering the current economic boom!
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