April 2007 - Posts

• Blog Spammers

  I can't believe the extent that spammers go through to get their "junk mail" in front of people. I can only assume that there is some percentage of the population that actually responds to the spam - otherwise the senders would give up on Read More... Posted Friday, April 27, 2007 9:55 PM by Brad | 0 Comments

• Server traffic: Requests Per Second

  Let's break some estimates down to requests per second and ponder the results... The assumptions we'll work from in this example: Peak traffic on the site is from 9am - 7pm; this gives a 10 hour peak window. Let's say that 80% of the total Read More... Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007 6:50 AM by Brad | 0 Comments

• Data Transfers: How much?

  How do you estimate bandwidth usage, in GB/month, for a project that doesn’t have historical data to base numbers on? Here are some homepage sizes of a few common sites: Orcsweb.com : 307,487 bytes Cnn.com : 465,447 bytes Microsoft.com : 282,788 Read More... Posted Thursday, April 19, 2007 5:34 AM by Brad | 0 Comments

• Speeding up a Slow Outlook 2007

  If you use Outlook 2007 check out Scott Hanselman's post about this new patch that improves the performance. All the initial feedback is extremely positive about it: http://www.hanselman.com:80/blog/SpeedingUpASlowOutlook2007.aspx ~bk Read More... Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2007 6:31 AM by Brad | 0 Comments

• Webfarms: Scalability and High-Availability

  Networks can be configured to be so incredibly redundant now - for reasonable prices - that there is no excuse for a data center not to achieve five nines (99.999%) of network availability. What about the servers and applications though? For a site or Read More... Posted Friday, April 13, 2007 12:35 PM by Brad | 0 Comments

• Vonage

  I've been trying to cancel my Vonage account. Not because of any specific problems - in fact, I haven't had any problems with them - but because we have switched phone services to a company with more advanced features. Wow, what a painful process. Read More... Posted Thursday, April 12, 2007 11:48 AM by Brad | 3 Comments

• Yes Man?

  At ORCS Web we provide Managed Complex Hosting services with a specialization in areas like web farms for both redundancy and maximized scalability, in clustering options for maximized high-availability, and in other complex architecture support. We have Read More... Posted Tuesday, April 10, 2007 6:24 AM by Brad | 0 Comments

• Estimating System Requirements

  How do you understand system requirements for applications that don’t have comparable historical data? This is a tricky topic, and one we deal with almost daily. Clients who are migrating existing systems with historical traffic and performance Read More... Posted Saturday, April 07, 2007 9:33 AM by Brad | 0 Comments

• Data Transfers: Why GB/month?

  Why do most hosts sell bandwidth in GB/month of data transfers rather than Mbps of peak usage? We also package bandwidth this way at ORCS Web . I can’t speak for everyone, I can only speculate. Some speculative potential reasons: Many people would Read More... Posted Thursday, April 05, 2007 11:19 AM by Brad | 4 Comments