Performance is your website’s first impression to visitors. Almost 50% of users expect a web page to load within two seconds. The move from a shared server to a dedicated server can alleviate many of a website’s performance issues and improve overall revenue and user experience.
Shared hosting, by contrast, has hundreds of other websites on the same server. All bandwidth, server memory, hard drive space and CPU cycles are shared with other website owners. Database servers are also shared with these hundreds of other site owners. The result can be a bottleneck at the server-level.
Dedicated servers are leased or fully purchased machines completely controlled by the webmaster. All server resources and databases are dedicated to the one business. Bandwidth, which plays a major role in how quickly a page loads, is also dedicated to the server, so no other website traffic interferes with the business’ traffic.

read more

This week’s news about cloud storage provider (CSP) Nirvanix has lots of organizations thinking about and, in some cases scrambling to deal with, the repercussions of a cloud provider shutting down. While pundits may speculate about what happened to this particular CSP and ponder the various “what-if” scenarios of how the outcome might have been different, such analyses offer little consolation to the customers who are affected by this sudden change and loss of their trusted cloud vendor.

Adding to the hysterics, cloud opponents on the sideline may find time to revel in the momentary superiority of traditional IT infrastructure which is unaffected by such disruptions. However, those who understand the intrinsic value of cloud storage solutions and have been perceptive of prior happenings in the cloud industry may recall this week’s incident is not unique, as a major vendor shut down their CSP services over three years ago. Instead, they may ask whether the events of three years ago have improved the ability of customers to react to an event of this nature.

read more

Call for Papers for the WebRTC Fundamentals Summit will be open through October 11, 2013. If you are an WevRTC speaker and would like to join WebRTC Fundamentals Summit faculty, please contact us via “contact organizer” by email “events (at) sys-con.com” with your session proposal and bio.

read more

Call for Papers for the WebRTC Fundamentals Summit will be open through October 11, 2013. If you are an WevRTC speaker and would like to join WebRTC Fundamentals Summit faculty, please contact us via “contact organizer” by email “events (at) sys-con.com” with your session proposal and bio.

read more

At the Tau Institute, we develop relative, “pound-for-pound” rankings that can uncover diamonds in the rough and more important, show well a nation is doing with respect to its available resources. We integrate several technology and social factors into our algorithms — on the one hand including average bandwidth, access to broadband, number of dataservers, on the other hand including income disparity, perception of corruption, human development, and the local cost of living.

We’ve ranked 102 nations, and include an overall ranking as well as regional rankings and rankings by income tier. We’ve also developed “raw” rankings, which emphasize technology parameters more than the socio-economic ones, and therefore can be used to show a country’s raw potential.

I’ll list our current leaders in several categories in an upcoming article. For now, I’d like to focus on an interesting relationship between Internet access, broadband access, and income.

I noted previously that Uganda is emerging on our charts because a relatively high number of its people have Internet access, given its low per capita income. Developing this stat goes to the heart of what we’re doing, as we seek to identify those countries that are doing the best with what they have.

A cursory review of data from the International Telecommunications Union shows the usual suspects as the world’s leaders in Internet access: Northern and Western Europe, South Korea, Canada and the US. However, we would like to know who leads the world on a relative basis, ie, who is doing the most with the resources they have? So, if we integrate the percentage of Internet access directly into the per capita income among the 102 countries that we survey, we find a Top 15 as follows:

1. Kenya
2. Uganda
3. Vietnam
4. Tanzania
5. Nigeria
6. Morocco
7. Senegal
8. Sudan
9. Egypt
10. Bolivia
11. Philippines
12. Yemen
13, Tunisia
14. Ghana
15. Malawi

This view may serve of some value to us in developing our “raw” algorithms. African nations dominate, and it shows how there are flickers of potential within the lower-income nations of the world.

To refine it a bit, we can then integrate the percentage of Internet access into fractional exponents (square roots and beyond) to dampen the influence of lower income on Internet access. We also measure our iterative results against a nirvanic “Perfect Land,” a statistical nation we’ve created that has optimal performance in every category we examine. In doing so, and in feathering in a 10% logarithmic adjustment, we come up with a Top 25 of:

1. Morocco
2. South Korea
3. Latvia
4. Estonia
5. Slovakia
6. Croatia
7. New Zealand
8. Malaysia
9. Netherlands
10. Czech Republic
11. Lithuania
12. Poland
13. Finland
14. Taiwan
15. Vietnam
16. Sweden
17. UK
18. Slovenia
19. Germany
20. Denmark
21. Bulgaria
22. Canada
23. Hungary
24. Hong Kong
25. Kenya

Again, this applies only to a ratio of percentage of population with Internet access versus per capita income. It is not in itself one of our official rankings. Rather, it is just one little glimpse of how we conduct our overall methodology. And it provides a nice relative look that doesn’t simply parrot a correlation between wealth and connectivity.

It also provides a flavor of how we balance various factors to create looks that don’t follow traditional methods, which trend heavily toward simply having wealthy nations on top, developing nations on the bottom. We are continuously fine-tuning each of our formulas and algorithms, and will be fine-tuning this view as well.

In any case, notably missing from this list are the United States (which we believe to be a consistent underperformer in its deployment of IT infrastructure, given its resources), as well as all of the BRICs nations (which we also find to be underperformers in all of our rankings).

Later, I’ll address broadband connectivity (not just overall Internet access), as well as mobile access…after I let my floating-point core recover for awhile.

read more

At the Tau Institute, we develop relative, “pound-for-pound” rankings that can uncover diamonds in the rough and more important, show well a nation is doing with respect to its available resources. We integrate several technology and social factors into our algorithms — on the one hand including average bandwidth, access to broadband, number of dataservers, on the other hand including income disparity, perception of corruption, human development, and the local cost of living.

We’ve ranked 102 nations, and include an overall ranking as well as regional rankings and rankings by income tier. We’ve also developed “raw” rankings, which emphasize technology parameters more than the socio-economic ones, and therefore can be used to show a country’s raw potential.

I’ll list our current leaders in several categories in an upcoming article. For now, I’d like to focus on an interesting relationship between Internet access, broadband access, and income.

I noted previously that Uganda is emerging on our charts because a relatively high number of its people have Internet access, given its low per capita income. Developing this stat goes to the heart of what we’re doing, as we seek to identify those countries that are doing the best with what they have.

A cursory review of data from the International Telecommunications Union shows the usual suspects as the world’s leaders in Internet access: Northern and Western Europe, South Korea, Canada and the US. However, we would like to know who leads the world on a relative basis, ie, who is doing the most with the resources they have? So, if we integrate the percentage of Internet access directly into the per capita income among the 102 countries that we survey, we find a Top 15 as follows:

1. Kenya
2. Uganda
3. Vietnam
4. Tanzania
5. Nigeria
6. Morocco
7. Senegal
8. Sudan
9. Egypt
10. Bolivia
11. Philippines
12. Yemen
13, Tunisia
14. Ghana
15. Malawi

This view may serve of some value to us in developing our “raw” algorithms. African nations dominate, and it shows how there are flickers of potential within the lower-income nations of the world.

To refine it a bit, we can then integrate the percentage of Internet access into fractional exponents (square roots and beyond) to dampen the influence of lower income on Internet access. We also measure our iterative results against a nirvanic “Perfect Land,” a statistical nation we’ve created that has optimal performance in every category we examine. In doing so, and in feathering in a 10% logarithmic adjustment, we come up with a Top 25 of:

1. Morocco
2. South Korea
3. Latvia
4. Estonia
5. Slovakia
6. Croatia
7. New Zealand
8. Malaysia
9. Netherlands
10. Czech Republic
11. Lithuania
12. Poland
13. Finland
14. Taiwan
15. Vietnam
16. Sweden
17. UK
18. Slovenia
19. Germany
20. Denmark
21. Bulgaria
22. Canada
23. Hungary
24. Hong Kong
25. Kenya

Again, this applies only to a ratio of percentage of population with Internet access versus per capita income. It is not in itself one of our official rankings. Rather, it is just one little glimpse of how we conduct our overall methodology. And it provides a nice relative look that doesn’t simply parrot a correlation between wealth and connectivity.

It also provides a flavor of how we balance various factors to create looks that don’t follow traditional methods, which trend heavily toward simply having wealthy nations on top, developing nations on the bottom. We are continuously fine-tuning each of our formulas and algorithms, and will be fine-tuning this view as well.

In any case, notably missing from this list are the United States (which we believe to be a consistent underperformer in its deployment of IT infrastructure, given its resources), as well as all of the BRICs nations (which we also find to be underperformers in all of our rankings).

Later, I’ll address broadband connectivity (not just overall Internet access), as well as mobile access…after I let my floating-point core recover for awhile.

read more

By Eoin Jennings, general manager hosting services, Easynet Global Services

A little learning is a dangerous thing, scribed poet Alexander Pope in 1711, possibly to distract his wife from improving her bible studies knowledge or honing her counterpoint skills.

Three hundred years later and whilst most of us no longer frown upon a lady flashing her ankles nor rush to join a harpsichord recital, never could the statement be truer.

Smartphones and tablets have brought about the collision of the worlds of IT and telecoms, and are responsible for us all knowing a little bit about IT. 

If we can find ‘Settings’ on our iPhones, we can find ‘Control Panel’ in windows or ‘Internet Options’ in Explorer, delve in and make the changes we want, removing the need for the IT helpdesk – blissfully unaware that we’re putting our organisation at risk. In businesses across the globe, CIOs are breaking …

Consumers need to be made more aware of what they’re purchasing in a cloud solution, according to the latest research paper.

The team of researchers, including IBM and Google, published their findings in a paper entitled ‘Verifying Cloud Services: Present and Future’, and aimed for this to be an education for cloud customers – punters need to examine “in breadth, rather in depth”, how a CSP performs.

The researchers put this down to a series of issues which need answering: is the service running the right software? Is the service doing what it is supposed to? How efficient is the service? Does it comply with security policies, if any?

Of course, this comes down to the niggling matter of SLAs. A CSP puts down an SLA, intending to give the client an idea of availability and performance. Yet the researchers say this isn’t always the case.

The paper argues …