In the good old days before the Internet, when was talked of a network we meant the corporate network at the office. And traffic came no greater distance than employees down the hall connecting to the file server. Before installing a new server, it was obligatory to estimate how much server traffic you were likely to receive. Accordingly, namely, choosing CPUs, disk drives and network connections that could handle the anticipated traffic. That was before the global internet arrived.

Server Traffic

Now, you cannot have the slightest idea of what your server traffic requirements are going to be because you can no longer canvas your colleagues to find out their plans. You are going to be serving data to complete strangers on the other side of the planet, who you will never meet, who you will never know, who celebrate holidays that you never knew about, people who work on Sundays at 2.00 am in the morning, working on data coming from your server.

Your objectives are no longer the same. It used to be controlled; to keep everything stable. Now it goes viral, goes for downloads, goes for page hits, serves images, serves movies. The best thing that could happen is your boss tells you we had so much traffic that people just have to buy us up immediately. Think UTube.

Distribution Network

Stranger yet, there will be people out there who are waiting for you to go live so that they can copy your data and distribute it further. This used to be considered a jolly bad thing and not quite cricket, but now, distributing off Google Play is just not enough. You have to be able to support the secondary distribution network. It goes places that IBM does not. But you need them, like they need you, to get your product out there.

Let’s face it, Facebook is not going to buy you for a cool couple of billion if you only have a million downloads. So, you need the secondary distribution network, even though you cannot approve of them and as they are unwilling to meet with you and tell you of their intentions, you have to be prepared for the huge terabyte spikes that will surely come when they sneak up on your server early one Sunday morning when you are not looking. The Internet makes for strange bedfellows.

Blocking vs. Pay Strategies

So, you cannot estimate. You have two alternatives: block or pay. The blocking strategy is easy. You find the cheapest internet connection that you can and tell them how many terabytes per month you are willing to buy. And then it up to them to either serve the data or not. The agreement has to be that you will not pay beyond the agreed amount. So why would they server more than your allowance? Two reasons. One: they want your business and keeping your business means keeping you happy.

And they can keep you happy because they have other customers in the same position as you. Who are also desirous of distributing virally. They have to have big pipes to accommodate all their customers, and it’s quite hard to keep them filled, especially if you keep losing your customers by annoying them by blocking their customers. Blocking is good for you in that there is a ceiling on your monthly spend, if you get traffic, you will probably get most of it served, there is just no guarantee. But 90% viral is still a lot better than 0% viral, and it keeps your burn rate down while waiting for the secondary distribution network to discover you.

Gigabytes

If 90% is not good enough, you have the payment option. If you want a 10-Gigabyte connection from here to Australia, it is all yours for cents per gigabyte out. Incoming traffic is fortunately free. If you want it delivered now, it really will be delivered in the next few microseconds. The downside: you will have to pay for every byte out. Sure, you can be selective and use IAM to get some control of your traffic, but if somebody discovers you and hits you up for a terabyte of data and you had it marked as “public,” you will need to pay for it.

So, these days there is no more estimation, merely a choice between serving 90% of the world or serving 100%, and that is the decision that has to be made when you decide to serve.

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Photo cred: Flickr / yakobusan