West Africa struggles after cable cut

Yesterday, an undersea SAT-3 cable was cut between the Iberian peninsula and West Africa. It is apparently the only line connecting West Africa to the digital world, and the cut caused connectivity problems in Benin, Togo, Niger, and Nigeria. Nigeria’s banking sector, government and mobile phone networks all suffered from bandwidth outage.

“SAT-3 is currently the only fibre optic cable serving West Africa,” explained Ladi Okuneye, chief marketing officer of Suburban Telecom, which provides the majority of Nigeria’s bandwidth.
“So all West African countries have to use it.”

The fibre optic cable is 15,000km (9,3000miles) long, connecting eight West African countries along is route to South Africa. 70% of Nigeria’s bandwidth is routed through Benin, causing it to suffer greatly from the cut. The company responsible for the network, Suburban Telecom, is sending a ship from South Africa to investigate. According to Okuneye, it could be two weeks before the ship arrives.

Source: BBC News
Photo: Flickr

Providers delay network expansion, risk catastrophe

If you’re Monday is off to a good start, here’s some bad news to put a damper on any sort of nice day you might have been having. According to a report issued earlier this month, your provider’s failure to upgrade infrastructure at a time when usage is increasing could spell disaster down the road.

It seems as though network providers are seeing increases in traffic, but are doing nothing to upgrade infrastructure such as routers and switches. This includes both web hosts and ISPs. Providers are letting their equipment run “hotter.” Whereas in the past networks might have run at 40%-50% utilization and leave room for future growth, they are now operating at more than 80%. With IP traffic expected to increase fivefold by 2013, the picture down the road doesn’t look very cheerful.

John Mazur of Network Infrastructure at Ovum summed the problem up:

Router spending is down, IP traffic is up. Internet service providers (ISPs) are putting off buying new network equipment to save money, just when the amount of traffic they are handling is exploding.

If networks do not expand, web services –hosting included– could become more limited and more expensive as time goes on. During traffic speaks, people would experience time outs, packet loss, and slow speeds. In other words, that Thriller video might take a longer than normal to load.

Source | eWeekly
Photo | Flickr

BT Broadband Throttles Online Video

Avid Youtube fans and BBC addicts will be upset to learn that Britain’s largest ISP, BT Broadband, has started throttling online video.

The cuts are pretty substantial. One customer with a 8mbps connection says he can only stream BBC’s HD iPlayer at 500kbps, a service that requires at least 3mbps:

From about 1730 onwards something like BBC iPlayer becomes impossible. It’s fine during the day but come the evening, it’s a no go. We get nowhere near that. We’ve tried to contact [BT] numerous times to complain but without success.

The speed cuts occur during peak times- 5 PM to midnight. During this time, most users see their speeds drop below 1mbps.

BT is not the first ISP nor will it be the last to put forth this sort of limitation. As more and more computers connect to the web and file sizes get larger and larger, Internet providers either have to upgrade their infrastructure or force their customers to cut back.

Broadband companies are choosing the latter to save money. In a statement, BT defended its actions, saying that they were done “to optimise the experience for all customers, as part of its Total Broadband Fair Usage policy.”

Source: TG Daily

The Horror of Hotlinking

Find yourself using too much bandwidth? While the pictures and video content many of us host on our sites use a fair bit of data transfer, a hidden threat may be hogging more resources than you realize.

Also known as inline linking, hotlinking occurs when someone else uses a picture or video on your site somewhere else on the web, but doesn’t bother to host the content themselves. An example might be some taking an image located at http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/yourimage.jpg and placing it on their website, but instead of uploading the file to their own server, leaves the URL as-is.

A victim of hotlinking can lose gigabytes of bandwidth this way. Often times, those responsible for the problem are unaware of the damage they are causing. A good deal of hotlinking occurs on forums and personal blogs, for example, where many users aren’t tech-savvy enough to realize what they’re doing.

The good thing is this danger is very easy to prevent. Many hosts, including all those using cPanel, offer some form of built-in hotlink protection that can be enabled in the control panel. You can also configure your .htaccess file to block hotlinkers.

Photo: Flickr

A lighter, faster web server

For some web sites with heavy, often spiking traffic, sometimes the standard web servers like Apache or Microsoft’s IIS simply do not suffice. When you need a web server that will be fast and secure and still produce a light CPU load, you might consider Lighttpd.

Lighttpd is a free and open source web server that runs on Linux, other Unix-like operating systems, and on Windows (under Cygwin). It supports most of the standard web server features such as modules, SSL and TLS, server side includes, virtual hosting, and conditional rewrites. Nevertheless, the entire package is less than 1 MB and has a single process design (whereas many http servers start new processes with each connection).

It is designed to sustain large numbers of parallel connections, something important for high performance AJAX applications, according to the company’s web site.Many large high-traffic web sites run Lightthpd, such as meebo, Wikipedia, and YouTube. High traffic bittorrent sites, such as Mininova, also run the small web server, recording more than 1,000 hits per second. Lighttpd is available for free download at the project’s website.

Security: Hidden Botnet Costs Can Hurt Small Businesses

Hidden bots running in the background of web servers, do more damage than just comprising security and privacy. They drain system resources. A business that might depend on keep low bandwidth usage and low power consumption can be crippled by these hidden bots that increase CPU, memory, and bandwidth usage.

Many companies, even with dedicated servers, have metered bandwidth restrictions that can quickly be exhaust by a nasty spambot. As the Internet underground of digital crime continues to grow, it is more important than ever for companies to protect their assets (which includes their information technology) with proper security.

A properly secured server can save time, money, and energy, which not only helps an individual company but also the global economy and environment, two issues weighing heavy on the minds of nearly everyone. It might be worth the investment to hire a security contractor to evaluate your security needs and prescribe the best remedy for any issues you might face.

Photo source: SXC

Bandwidth Usage Increases as Infrastructure Grows

After the telecom bubble burst in the early 2000s, networks took a huge hit. Without the capital to lay new cable, Internet infrastructure did not get better and bandwidth usage stayed about the same.

According to analyst TeleGeography, things have gotten better. The research service, which tracks 224 network operators and 221 underwater cables, says that greater investment in Internet architecture, most notably the building of more coast-to-coast submarine cables, resulted in a 64% increase in international bandwidth usage last year. That means we downloaded more movies, music, and visited more websites than ever before.

As bandwidth demand increases, network providers are beefing up their systems. This year, more than 60% of American providers plan on laying fiber optic cable. Telecoms will build 16 new undersea cables.

Such growth hasn’t been seen since 2001, right before the economy went bust. Despite worse economic conditions now, web architecture investment is surprisingly higher than ever.

Photo: Flickr

How Much Bandwidth Do You Need?

Web hosting companies typically highlight two significant features in all of their packages: disk space and bandwidth (also called data transfer). Most people are quite aware of how much disk space they will need to run their web site, but often times the word “bandwidth” is confusing.

How much bandwidth do you actually need? The answer to that question largely depends on the type of site you will have. Hosting companies may offer anything from a few gigabytes (GB) of bandwidth to “unlimited” amounts.

Bandwidth is the amount of information sent from the web server to a user’s computer. For example, if your web site has one 12 kilobyte(KB) page and one 500KB picture, each visitor will use 512KB of bandwidth. If you have 20,000 unique visits to your site in a month, that is about 10GB of bandwidth used in that month.

Therefore, if you have more content, you will need more bandwidth. If you have a site with numerous images or photo galleries, streaming audio or video, or just hundreds of pages, your bandwidth requirements will be greater.

The average personal website does not reach the 10GB threshold mentioned above, and most web hosts offer more than that. Businesses might need more, and media sites will probably need the most. The key is knowing what you intend to offer visitors and how much information you will send.

Apache Turns Ten

Last month the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) celebrated its 10th anniversary. Apache is the underlying web server technology that powers most of the world’s web sites. According to Netcraft, 49.95% of web sites run on servers powered by Apache. The second closest web server technology belongs to Microsoft at 29.27%.

What is most surprising about those statistics is that Apache is free and open source software and ASF is a non-profit organization. ASF consists of 300 individual members and over 2,000 collaborators from all over the world.

Apache web server is a cross-platform software application that is customisable due to the nature of its license. It runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and many other operating systems.

The Truth About "Unlimited" Web Hosting

From time to time, I’ll come across a web host offering unlimited space, no bandwidth caps, or both. These hosts claim that for a low monthly price, often under £10, you can use all the storage and data transfer you want. Other hosts might not be so audacious as to offer no limits, but instead give their customers space and bandwidth limits far above what any average website owner would ever need. So, how do these companies stay in business?
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