ON COMPUTING: Widening the Internet pipeline for you
JIM HILLIBISH

Most Web users know nothing about bandwidth, but their biggest surfing roadblock is directly related to it.

There’s nothing worse than a slow Web site. When loading times begin to crawl, users hit the Webmaster e-mail, and it ain’t pretty.

“What have you jerks done to my site?” is fairly representative.

Bandwidth is the problem. You need a lot of it. It’s all about capacity, of computers, transmission lines and networks. More is faster, less is slower.

Bandwidth becomes a problem when too many users try to access the same data at the same time. The Web acts just like the network in your house or office. The more users onboard, the slower it runs for everybody.

Bandwidth for Webmasters remains a moving target, an expensive one requiring constant monitoring. It is as basic as paper and ink are to publishing.

DESERTIONS

Eight months ago, our readership at cantonrep.com reached the point of bandwidth crisis. If a site takes more than 10 seconds to load, users will desert it. Our mainpage took 23 seconds on a home cable modem, even longer at our peak time of 8 to 10 a.m.

All it took was a word of panic to Bruce Himebaugh, leader of our Internet hosting service at CanNet. Bruce knows bandwidth better than anybody in town and immediately ordered a server upgrade with much more power — more bandwidth. It worked. Our users were happy, but not for long.

We kept adding users by the thousands. On some days, we had more users than the paper’s circulation. Our page views (one page viewed by one reader), kept exploding. Our new advertising, an easy sell at this rate, multiplied the bandwidth problem.

MORE UPGRADES

Six months into our new server, Bruce was planning yet another upgrade: new box, faster dual processors, new operating system, new database system, 4 gigabytes of RAM and an array of 73-gigabyte hard drives.

Frankly, I was a little worried. Such a major upgrade rarely happens without problems. On the day we ramped it up, I anticipated a major outage and hundreds of nasty e-mails from users.

Bruce and his workers planned well. It took all day, but we were only down for 15 minutes.

I immediately saw the result. My monitoring computer is my home system on Road Runner, a setup not unlike many of our readers’. Our mainpage is loading in four seconds or less.

We’re not sitting still. The pursuit of bandwidth never ends on growing sites. Bruce soon will roll out a separate server for our advertising, taking this bandwidth hog off our main server.

Lucky for us, Web technology is keeping pace. Lucky for all, we have a talented group of people at CanNet who understand it and know how to keep the data flowing to tens of thousands of users, all at once.

http://www.cantonrep.com