5400rpm vs 7200rpm Hard Disk Drive

I got my first touch with a computer during the 386 era in my school computer class. I was being exposed to the basic programming (BASIC) and gaming from a 5.5" Floppy Disk drive. My dad bought me my first computer back in 1995 which run on Intel Pentium MMX and Windows95 with a 1.7GB Hard Disk (pathetic! my SD card can store more data than this HDD).

Many years down the road and after few PCs change, I finally own my first notebook in 2002. With a notebook, I feel that the data redundancy is getting more important as I put almost all my work data inside 1 single Hard Drive. Then I started to realize the importance of doing a more regular backup on the notebook comparing with my desktop that run on 2 x HDD. Even a regular backup would cause a havoc on critical day if the Hard Drive decide to die.

What is the next step?

I change Hard Drive every 2 years, it's for better reliability, performance and space upgrade. My current notebook came with a Fujitsu 160GB 5400rpm Hard Drive. The performance was adequate when I just got it that time as I do not store a lot of data especially emails in my notebook. Now, I have more than 100,000 emails in my hard disk itself and it's a pain whenever my email client (Thunderbird) trying to load that particular folder and compact it. This also affect other applications that try to load huge data from the disk.

2 years are up and I've decided to change the Hard Drive. After looking around, I have narrowed down my option to Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7200rpm. My options were Intel X25M 80GB SSD and Seagate Momentus Hybrid XT. SSD were too expensive per GB and Momentus Hybrid was not in the market yet.

Here is the screenshot of the benchmark test on HDtune on both of the Hard Drives, do the judging.

What is web hosting?

In a simple definition, web hosting is taking your web pages (for example html,php,asp and java files) and placing them on a web server which will be stored inside of a data
center. Web servers are simply computers or servers designed for web hosting. Data
centers are constantly connected to the internet with high-speed connections with multiple backbones and backup lines so that the world can access your web files through the internet. "Virtual hosting" or "Virtual Host" allows more than one web site to be run on the same server on the same IP address. This makes web hosting very easy and affordable compared to running your own dedicated web server whereby you would need to pay few hundreds of dollars per month to maintain it. With virtual web hosting your site shares server resources with many other sites on the server. This is why it is important to choose a host that utilizes powerful equipment and high standards of security. Almost all of the web hosting server now combine database server and email server under the same physical server for easy administration by both the users and administrators.

At last: Am on holiday now

I had stuffed myself with work for the past few weeks and this explain why the blog is so outdated. Well, the project that I was undertaking between my last blog entry and now is implementing a new Customer Management System (CRM) which my company has gotten it off the shelves.


The product came with 15 days trial but it was not enough to test all the features. Our first customer was dated back about 8 years ago and the total number of customer has increased few folds.


Migrating the information and customization from the old system which was built in house is really NOT as easy task. The project started around November '09 and it is still not yet completed as of now. As we are changing over to an off the shelves software, there are limitations on the software and we need to change some of our work procedure to adapt to the new system. The new software incorporate the billing system and this add the stress on the data migration as it involved money. Any error during the data migration might cause the company to lose money, annoy the client by sending repeated invalid payment reminder, client miss the invoice hence causes the product to expire. In short, a minor mistake on the billing system migration might lead to a FUBAR situation.


Anyway, the implementation task is about 90% complete and there are still a bit of customization need to be carried out before I could sign off the job.


Ohh yea, I'm on holiday now and typing this blog entry on board Airbus A330 (2nd biggest plane in AirAsia fleet after A340 which they fly to London). It is a 5 hours journey and I have nothing to do except sitting duck over here. The destination that I am heading to now is Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan. The journey was rocky due to bad weather and one of my mate threw up just before the plane landed (the turbulence was really bad). We could not even see the ground from the aisle of the plane until it reaches a very low altitude (<500m).>


We have not planned anything much except the airport shuttle service to our hotel. It would be a free and easy cum backpacking trip (I just got a new backpack). It is winter over in Taiwan now and the temperature ranges from 13-20 degree celcius. Honestly, I am not prepared for the weather as I only brought a thin cotton jacket along only. Hopefully the jacket which is my best buddy during my Data Center operation could warm me up later. The average temperature in the Data Center is around 18 degree celcius and the jacket could warm me up nicely. Hopefully it can do the same job at 13 degree celcius.


This holiday might not be the best as my mind is still at work now. We have just gotten few medium size business deals and I am on holiday now :( I should be in the office coordinating the job and deliver the results to the client. I should not be worried that much as I have a team of capable colleagues to handle the job. It would be nice if the client could confirm on the deal earlier or later but not when I'm on holiday.

Part 2: How to choose the right web host?

The hosting industries has grown up from few hosting companies to few thousands as of now. Picking the right web host for your website would be important to keep your website up and running for your users. The website is the most critical component for your business if you are on the e-business whereby the website is your online store to generate income for you. In this case, no website = no $$$

Your income will be affected if your users does not have a good experience in accessing your website. Your visitor will go to your competitors if your website is down, slow or does not return a good browsing experience (eg. bad shopping mall).

Lets go back to the main topic, how to choose the right web host for yourself? I will start from the most important to the least important point.

1.Location
Determine the location of your visitors and choose the web host from that place. Why? A closer server to your visitors would usually provide faster website access time due to faster network latency and lesser hops that the data need to travel before it reaches the destination. Try to get an account from your local web host if you know most of the visitors are from your country.

Request a live IP address from the webhost so that you could perform a network test on the connectivity performance from your location. The simplest way would be by doing a "ping" from your command prompt on Windows or Terminal if you are on Linux/Mac. An ideal response time from the server should be <100ms> I am getting 30-40ms response time from my place to the servers.

2. What if some of my users are scatter around the world?
Try to please the bigger and more important group of users

3. Uptime and Reliability
Ask for their uptime guarantee but I believe most of the reply that you will be getting is 99.9%. So forget it, the better chance is to search for a review of the web host in Google. Spend a bit of your time going through the review by independent website. Another good resource would be searching through http://webhostingtalk.com

4. Support response time
Try to send an email to their support address or via a ticket. Check how long do they take to response to you. The faster the reply is, the more points you could give to this host.

If they have live chat support, try to see whether somebody is actually responding from the other side. Some of the web host would put a live chat support option but it would actually return you to a "contact us" form once you click on the live chat option as they do not have a real person behind the chat support.

If the host offer telephone support, try to call and experience it yourself. Try to ask few simple questions and see if they could response to you well.

5. Quality of support response
If you are an IT geek, I believe you would have some questions is mind to test out the support quality. But if this is your first time looking for webhost, you could ask a simple question like, "I need to host my website, how should I proceed?". Check on their response and gauge the quality yourself. Some hosting providers do have very friendly and quality support team while some would have a very "robotic" team.

6. Disk Space
Check how much disk space that you need and choose your plan from there. Again, do not fall prey to unlimited disk space offer easily. Try to walk in to your neighborhood computer store and ask for a "unlimited space hard disk" and you will understand the point. You do not need unlimited disk space to host a 100MB web site. Most unlimited disk space offer comes with the terms and conditions in their fine print. Please read it if you would like to subscribe to one. Most of the hosting plans offer in the market nowadays are more than enough to host a commercial website unless you intend to run a local "youtube" website which I doubt the host will allow it to run.

7. Bandwidth
Same like disk space, choose the amount of bandwidth that you need. As usual, unlimited bandwidth do come with a lot of hidden clauses. Most commercial website would be less likely to hit the bandwidth quota of the lowest plan. Ask the host if you could upgrade to higher plan later on by just topping up the differences.

8. Server Resources
If you know that your website will be getting a lot of traffic, ask them if you could host with them. They might need you to provide them with an estimated number of visitors or the traffic history if you have any. Ask them what is the clause if your website is using more server resources that is allowed. Good hosting provider would usually send you a reminder and give you a grace period to upgrade your account instead of shutting the site down immediately. Usually you would need to pay more if you use more computer resources.

9. Windows or Linux platform?
Go for Windows Hosting if your website contain the following components:-

• ASP
• ASP.NET
• MSSQL
• MS ACCESS
• Cold Fusion
• VB
• VB.NET
• Any components that must run on Windows platform
  

Go for Linux hosting if your website does not have any of the Windows components as listed above. Why? Linux/Unix server does perform better and has better reliability (eg. does not need a reboot after an update).

10. Control Panel and applications vault
Most of the modern hosting control panel comes with a application vault whereby you could install an applications (eg. forum, shopping cart) directly from the control panel. Ask for a demo account from the webhost if you want to try it out.

I will list down some of the popular control panel:

• Cpanel (Linux)
• Direct Admin (Linux)
• Plesk (Linux)
• Plesk (Windows)
• DotNetPanel (Windows)
• HELM (Windows)

From personal experience, my best preference would be Cpanel if I need to host my site on a Linux platform.

11. Price
Work the price out from your allocated budget for a web hosting account. Price is always an important factor but you should realize that you often get what you are paying for. Most of the better host would charge higher but that would not be necessary true. Consider everything from point No. 1 to No. 10 and judge if the price is reasonable.

Part 1: What's the big hoo haa on these unlimited hosting offer?

Let me brief you through a bit on the history of the web hosting industry, web hosting company run a business by leasing you a space to host your email and website with your own domain name (eg. ahbengahlian.com) and the minimum tenure would usually be one year. Web Hosting business was a lucrative and fair business game during the ".com boom" almost a decade back. During that time, most of the provider were playing the game fair and steady. What do I mean by that, they only sell on what they have to offer and the package was pretty straight forward (no hidden clause). The owner of these hosting companies would need to understand and know the system in/out to run the business. Most of the providers at the time were selling the package with the fair and reasonable amount of computer resources (50MB of disk space + 5GB monthly of bandwidth) at an average price of USD50/year.

Over the years, more and more people has ventured into the same business as it is a hidden gem in the IT industry. As these new players does not have a solid company profile to secure the business, what they usually did was lower down the price and offering more specs. This is the usual case for other businesses whereby the new player would usually sell at a lower price. This trend in web hosting businesses has been continuing until now and a lot of the providers are offering ridiculous amount of disk space or unlimited disk space and bandwidth. This is a desperate measures by business owners to secure the business and worry later on the problem that will arise. The name for this practice is "overselling", it means that the business owner is selling more than what they have to sell. Most of the Telco in my country is also practicing overselling. How do I know about this? Because I can't even send a short SMS during festive season!! It took me >3 hours to send an sms and longer to make a phone call. I believe most of you has experienced the same problem as I do. I have subscribed to a 512kb broadband line 4 years back and it is slower than a dial up connection now as they have overloaded the same segment with more users now!

By overselling, hosting providers would put more accounts that the server are able to handle. These providers are hoping there will be only small amount of users in the server will utilize their account. Therefore, the server would work fine if the prediction is right.

What if for example at a festive season, more websites on the same server receive a sudden surge of traffic due to greeting cards sending, online business getting more orders, a bloggers posted new interesting article (eg. The scandal of Tiger Woods) and etc. The server will usually be brought down to its knee together with few hundred websites on the same server at the same time. It will be unfortunate if you are being hosting on the same server. I have personally logged in to the servers of these providers and you won't be surprise that their server resources utilization is >96%.

I have a friend that fell prey for these kind of unscrupulous provider and his blog were suspended without any notice for overloading the server. We went in to check the traffic statistics and it was only receiving about 200 visits day. A switch to a more reputable at triple the price solved his problem even though his blog is receiving triple the amount of traffics.

Part 2: coming soon