Re: ISP capacity maturity model
This is all just my opinion.
At 03:05 PM 3/12/2006 -0500, Dan MacNeil wrote:
>Right now, we're pretty small. We host 35 sites and provide email to 300
>people. We'd like to add infrastructure as we need it, not before and
>not after.
I think it's best to build in scalability sooner rather than later. With
the current state of technology I think there are only 3 levels of size that
warrant different approaches. There are tiny, huge, and everything else.
Right now I guess ur tiny. U can get away with doing things by hand. The
top rung, huge, is like Geocities, Hotmail, things like that. They need
massively parallel and massively redundant systems. U don't have to worry
about anything like that for quite a while. I think ur going into the
"everything else" category. With the software available today I don't think
it's worth it to NOT go ahead with radius, control panels, redundancy/load
balancing, etc. Once u create that modularity, adding capacity is trivial.
U don't have to do all this at once. It can be a 5 year goal to implement
everything. Divide things up into core functionality, "it would be nice
if", and bells and whistles. Then do them in that order. The first of that
group is everything that either brings in money or costs u money. The next
two are just modifiers on the first.
>Is the next step up, 100 sites and 400 users ?
>
>To get to the next level (whatever that is), where do we need to be with
>these bits of infrastructure?
>
> Customer Control Panel
> Billing
> Accounting
These three go together. They're important when u can no longer remember ur
entire client base simultaneously.
> SPAM filtering
> DNS
> IMAP/POP3/Webmail
> apache
> chrooting ?
> load balancing ?
Core. Mail and Web are the most important and should have transparent
scalability first. Spam filtering is a cost modifier on email. It lowers
the cost of email provision and is a free value add to the customer.
Because keeping email out of ur email server means it's doing less work
which means it can do more work. ;) If u do webmail make sure it's
comparable to something like Eudora or Outlook. U don't need a Yahoo
knockoff. And Yahoo mail is free.
> help ticketing
Don't need it until u have thousands of users (or more complaints than u can
clear in 24 hours).
> log monitoring
> remote server monitoring
Should be obviated by modularity.
> routing (BGP ?)
Only if its a core service. Are u going to sell T-1's, etc.
> quality assurance?
> canned cgi scripts?
> domain registration automation
Bells and whistles. And to an extent these will be subsumed by other areas.
>Is the list above complete?
>
>Are there other bits of infrastructure a good hosting organization
>should have at the next level?
The added benefit to doing these things when ur still rather small is that u
have more free time to mess with things than when ur larger. More sales
calls, more customer hand holding, less tinkering and planning time. It's
also easier to change something that's small than something large. Think in
terms of black boxes.
In terms of additional services I think CGI and database access are
critical. "Serious" web clients are data intensive applications. I would
call that #3 after beefing up email and web hosting. I would support a wide
variety of scripting languages and multiple databases. I would also support
prefab web applications. Have a prefab ecommerce package. Prefab message
board, blog, user community, whatever u can think of. I think those areas
are the most lucrative. ThE most lucrative I think would be the custom web
application. Going to a customer and telling them "we can make a web
application to do absolutely anything u want, anyway u want" is very
attractive. (Confession: that's what I do ;) People will pay to turn a
dreary mundane tedious task into a triviality. But u have to be a little
creative here. That's because most people will have no conception of what
the capabilities are. Imagine ur Michael Faraday trying to explain to
someone what the benefits of electricity are.
</IMHO>
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