Skype, an essential communication tools for millions of individuals and businesses worldwide has been unable to authenticate users during the past 14 hours, rendering the service unusable.

14 hours – and counting. One can scarcely imagine the magnitude of the technical failure that causes such a lengthy outage.

Although Skype offers paid-for, business critical services including inbound geographic number routing and outbound PSTN dialling, they have long – and wisely – avoided any commitment to deliver emergency call services. And you can understand their reluctance to start now.

This event also highlights the challenge of keeping customers informed; a typical Skype user almost nevers dials www.skype.com into their browser, so how to get the word out about the outage and status updates?

Luckily (or not), many major media outlets are covering the issue more than adequately.

Fingers crossed for Skype’s engineers that they can effect a resolution soon.

Don’t be shy – your customers really want to know just how reliable your service is. So go ahead and brag about it with our Public Uptime Reports.

When enabled, you can place one of our funky uptime badges on your site showing uptime from the previous 24 hour, 7, or 30 day period. You can also link through to a detailed uptime report where visitors can examine your uptime history on a yearly, monthly, or daily basis.

Take a look at this example – and click to see the full report:

It’s a great way to show your customers that uptime is important to you – Could this transparency be your edge over the competition?

Rip-offs have never gone out of fashion – and it seems that web services are no exception. Possibly of interest to budding software engineers – examine this brief from one of our fans: Rent A Coder – Clone of Wormly

“I need a site to be programmed exactly similar or even better than wormly [dot] com. It is a website monitoring and uptime site. Please register for a free account and understand what it does exactly and then bid.

And I want it to be done in PHP and linux. And moreover it is going to be hosted on a shared hosting.“

We do of course wish them the best of luck – one can only be flattered by imitation, after all.

Most sysadmins share a slightly compulsive tendency to need proof that things are working properly. This is particularly evident if said sysadmin is setting up a corporate mail server – it has to work first time, no excuses.

One of the more painful parts of that process has been testing the newly configured SMTP server before delegating the domain’s MX to it. This involves speaking SMTP through your telnet client, or re-configuring your mail client to speak directly with the new server, then un-re-configuring it.

Neither is a difficult task, of course, but it’s a solid 30 seconds (minimum) that I’d rather not spend.

So I whipped up a handy little SMTP test tool, which does the SMTP-speak for you, and renders the whole conversation in your browser via an IFRAME.

Neat, handy, and of course free. Try it out.

Last week I had a chat with Mitch over at The Web Hosting Show, where we discussed – among other things – why I’m so obsessed with uptime. It was therapeutic, particularly knowing that his listeners number many in the hosting industry. Improved uptime and performance is what we’re pushing at Wormly, and I’m pleased to able to explore new avenues in doing so.

I don’t subscribe to many podcasts – I’m definitely in the casual listener category – but those that I follow are podcasts which focus on a very narrow, targeted niche. Mitch’s show definitely fits the bill, and his focus on the hosting industry offers listeners a lot of value. Nice work, Mitch!

Listening to our short interview, one thing that does strike me is just how varied the English language is. Despite my best efforts to slow down, my rapid-Australian-speak contrasted quite drastically with Mitch’s slow and measured twang. Keeps thing interesting!

This week my home network witnessed the passing of an era. For over 10 years now, I’ve been running a variety of Linux -based servers at home mainly as development boxes, with a bit of personal web and mail hosting on the side. It made a lot of sense to do this, as old hardware could easily be recycled into a useful second life running a light weight linux distro.

But this morning I finally switched the last one off, and a slightly eerie silence descended on my home office. My new laptop, with the help of VMWare, is more than capable of wearing all the software development hats, and I’ve jettisoned all local email hosting because Google can do it better.

VMWare is the facilitator – I’ve always preferred to use Windows on my desktop, and use GNU/Linux in the server environment. Virtualization makes it extremely easy to have all the operating systems you need on a single machine.

Quiet – and Greener

Compared to my desktop, my laptop is whisper quiet. That’s a nice bonus – No more buzzing and whirring 24×7, something I was so accustomed to that I didn’t even notice it until it ceased to exist.

One of the most obvious advantages is the electricity savings – something that in these intervening 10 years has moved from being a non-issue, to being at the forefront of server management and highly visible everywhere in the face of carbon emissions – and the reduction thereof.

So it feels good to have just one PC at home – a laptop – that gets switched off when not in use. It’s an improvement, although my green credentials still need work given the redundancy built into our uptime monitoring network.

The other obvious advantage is having full access to my development environment whilst I’m on the road. I have quite a number of travel comittments this year, so I expect to make good use of that capability.

The final benefit is the ease of producing backups. The full virtual machine sits in a tidy 8GB disk image, and a backup snapshot becomes as simple as shutting the VM down and copying the file that contains it.

Fewer Points of Failure

Considering backups raises an interesting point – the less hardware that is in use, the smaller your chance of hardware failure. Consider how much time it takes you to rebuild a server even if you had a great backup regime, and virtual servers become much more appealing. If my host laptop fails, getting my servers back up should be as simple of copying a handful of files and reinstalling VMWare.

What will the tomorrow’s data centers hold? One enormously powerful grid computing appliance, containing 1000s of virtual servers? The idea of combining hundreds of physical servers into a single computer, to then run hundreds of virtual servers on it does seem a little strange, I’ll admit.

Update: Further reading on this concept at SitePoint.

You might be surprised at just how variable the HTTP response times are in your web application. Take a look at this 24-hour example:

Crucially, the variance in this example is caused by the application response time, rather than the network. That�™s the blue Exec component, not TCP or Transfer components.

Variance-of-latency isn�™t a huge problem with traditional page-refresh-response websites and applications, but certainly does present an annoyance to your users. When your app starts to get cleverer and offers AJAX goodies, however, the problem becomes more serious.

Sometimes, your user clicks repeatedly in futility, wondering what�™s going on and why she is getting no response. Other times she�™s not sure if anything is working at all.

So our Happy User rapidly becomes a Sad User. Click… wait… wait. She�™s not feeling so empowered by your application at this point.

A more problematic scenario is that out of sequence AJAX responses will break your UI. Many developers using mainstream (read: simple to deploy) libraries fail to code precautions against this.

And it�™s easy to see why: By now, most AJAX-happy developers are aware of latency issues, and latency is quite simple to emulate in a test environment.

Variability-of-latency is not getting enough airtime – most likely because few people are actually measuring it as a part of their build process.

It�™s not the network.
Raise the issue with the developers and they will probably start a delightful discourse on the “best-effort” nature of internet pipelines, asymmetric routing, and similar vagaries of internet infrastructure. The implication being that the user is at fault because they chose to use your app from a free wifi hotspot in Turkmenistan.

Our graph above, however, shows that the fault lies squarely with the application being unable to offer consistent response times. HTTP network overhead is just a tiny fraction of the total – and runs at a consistent 89ms anyway.

The lesson is: Fully understand your application performance and work to improve its consistency, particularly during peak periods. The underlying network is rarely to blame.

I’m confronted with the purchase of a new laptop, and am wracked with indecision. A common problem, perhaps? It’s easy to see why: With such a bewildering array of options available I simply can’t be bothered – or don’t have sufficient information – to make the choice.

12, 14, 15, 17 inch screens. 2, 3 4kg weights, battery life options, processors, RAM, all the other specs that I’m not interested in studying. It’s all there. For me to decide.

Intel Core Duo T2250 vs Intel Core 2 Duo 5500? Even stating CPU clock speed has become passé. In the good old days we had MHz and GHz.

I don’t even particularly want to use a laptop, but upcoming travel engagements dictate it as a necessity.

We constrained Wormly users’ choices.

And it did a world of good. Until quite recently, Wormly customers were presented with pricing for every nuance of the services we offer, and they could use as much or as little as they liked.

It seemed a brilliant idea at the time, to offer no more and no less than what they needed (wanted?), and to make sure they don’t have to pay for stuff they can’t use.

Brilliant, except that it ignored a fundamental principle: That customers rarely know what they want.

All they know is that they have a problem – and it’s up to you to present the right solution. By splicing up our services into 4 distinct product offerings that appeal to 4 unique customer profiles, we’ve drastically simplified the buying process and – quite unsurprisingly – substantially improved our lead conversions.

Is it easy to buy your product?

I’ve been holding off on blogging for quite some time now – but as with most fundamental shifts there’s only so long that you can avoid becoming part of the change. There’s little doubt now that blogging has become the primary channel for communication between vendors and users in online business.

Since divesting Bikely to Future PLC, I’ve made some time available for both article and blog writing – and this is where I will start, hopefully giving back a little to the online community that has taught me a great deal.

Plus after reading this thoroughly polite mention of our monitoring service, I felt somewhat compelled to join the fray. Word of mouth recommendations are a cornerstone of growing small business, and I’ve got more than a few that I ought to share.

Expect to see plenty of technical analysis in this blog – I am, after all, a techie at heart. I also aim to share my discoveries in the variety of activities that go into creating, marketing and developing an online service.

That includes everything from search engine marketing, infrastructure design, and user interface architecture, right through to pricing models and customer support. Being a jack of all trades seems to be the most crucial aspect of running a small business.

One final note – I believe that the blog as a publishing medium demands a personal connection between author and reader – as such I will not be blogging from “behind a curtain” as it were. You know who I am, precisely where any conflicts of interest lie, and what I’m trying to achieve with this blog.

We’ve seen numerous blogs which are simply hopping on the “blogging is the new marketing” bandwagon by offering poorly disguised link bait to draw traffic and backlinks. This will not be one of them.

Oh and the name of this blog, Never Offline? Well you and I; it seems we’re always online – and Wormly is all about keeping websites online. Together we’re increasingly Never Offline, right? Hopefully it’s a good thing, but time will tell on that score.