4. Connectivity is another issue. Yes, I know many of the budget
colocation companies claim 99% or higher connectivity. But is
that really the case? If any of you do decide to put your own
server online, before going forward, use one of the monitoring
services (there are a number of free ones) to see what percentage
of time their own site and/or one of their client's sites are
online.
The trick is to look at the fine print. There are two issues: how big
is 99% and what is connected?
1. Have you ever done the math on 99% connected? Averaged over a year
that's almost 88 hours of downtime, which is either 3.5 days of one
very bad experience or just over 7 hours of downtime per month.
Pretty hard not to meet that goal.
2. Connected is often defined in subtle ways. It rarely guarantees that
you at your site will be able to connect to the server, only that the
server is available from at least one other place outside its own
network. Honestly, it's pretty much impossible to improve on this.
No service provider is going to explicitly warrant the reliability of
networks outside of his or her local domain.
I would contend that connectivity is only an issue insofar as you should
care who your upstream network provider is, which of course you should
for an email server. You have to figure you'll get subscribers from a
pretty broad geographic area, if not the world. You want to be pretty
close to the backbone to ensure the highest probability of being able to
connect to everything.
What I'm suggesting is that if connectivity is really important, you
want to make sure your host is on a network that is not more than "one
network hop" from a "national backbone".
There aren't that many national backbones and you should know them by
name. Get with a service provider that's connected to the backbone.
You're connectivity will be as good as it's going to be, assuming your
service provider is competent enough to keep his or her network online.
Jim
--
James M. Galvin, Ph.D. Principal
eList eXpress LLC +1 410.549.4619
607 Trixsam Road +1 561.619.2450 FAX
Sykesville, MD 21784 http://www.elistx.com
A premiere source for all your elist management services.
To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is
half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
