The Chillidog Software Blog

The ramblings of a developer

Lessons from the trenches - Network Speed

This is the second post in a series of blog posts that I will detail various lessons I have learned fromJavabean Hosting.

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Network speed is all about serving content as fast as possible. The faster your network, the quicker your website will load. Faster networks are also able to handle more simultaneous requests and complete any extra jobs faster. For instance, lets take a standard task such as backups. In the event of extreme failure, there should always be at least 1 offsite backup. Javabean maintains these backups on ice using Amazon. The questions remains, however, how do you get these backups to Amazon. This is where your network speed is important. If your network speed is too slow, performing an offsite backup may take too long. If this happens, youll end up with backups that overlap one another and never finish! Another possibility is that you choke the network and use all of the bandwidth. This leaves no bandwidth left for serving websites and your websites go down. This is very bad!

In conclusion, a fast network is very important. It is just as important to maintain enough "headroom" to complete other, network intestine tasks such as backups.

As always, stay snappy and make sure youre connected with a fast internet connection. :)

Your barista, Greg