We know long loading times have subtle effects on user behavior as corroborated by many other studies. If you are a start-up competing with big guys hosted locally you know you need to equal or better their snappiness advantages and if your competition is hosted in US then *move to India before your competition does to create an edge*

For technical understanding on why latency matters please refer the blog and make a well informed decision while choosing hosting for your servers in India instead of high latency locations like US if your web visitors are from India.

As a special Independence month offer we’ll waive off 50% of the onetime setup fee on all dedicated server hosting in India if you sign up on or before EOD 31st of Aug 2010. Also avail 5% discount on usage of coupon code [ India-Aug-2010 ] on monthly fees on all our dedicated server hosting in India and Virtual Private Server hosting in India, over and above the other automatic discounts mentioned on our website

For startups who would like to start small please check out our India based VPS server hosting plans starting from Rs. 1799/mo . We offer sane support for even un-managed India based server hosting plans with a lot of free security and scaling advice on application architecture side.

For serious bloggers using E2E Networks VPS servers we provide generous on-demand capacity bursting capabilities for free if you give us a heads up on a breaking news story that could get dugg/slashdotted an hour or two in advance.

Your feedback on how we can bring hosting back to India is important to us and we welcome it at all times just as we welcome traceroutes from everywhere in India to us, regardless of whether or not you are an existing customer of E2E Networks.

This was an un-planned network downtime out of direct control of E2E Networks.
While we strive to inform and update our customers but for un-planned network related downtimes our first focus is to follow up with the ISP(s) to get the issue resolved first.

The presentation by Kunal whose upshot is this slide had the maximum impact on what ails the Indian broadband penetration numbers, the idea that different companies can fix the different parts of this equation was clearer, before this I always thought a wireless ISP at my hometown would be a nice upgrade to its infrastructure :-

So here we are at E2E Networks Private Limited reiterating our promise ‘It will happen, it will happen in our lifetimes’
Pervasive and world’s fastest broadband Internet in every Indian home that can afford a Rs. 750 or more a month connection and this would happen only if everyone who has to serve Indian audience hosts in India. We are doing our part of the bargain which is to bringing Internet traffic ( dependent on content and applications ) back to India so your last mile ISPs can stop complaining about the high cost of International Bandwidth, the cost of National long distance backhaul is a no-brainer there is million kilometers of practically un-used dark fiber capacity in the country today, the last mile is already available to the extent of 8Mbps ( no wonder you have those IPTV and other anti-net neutrality products riding the last mile ). So whether your Internet business uses a mere 100GB bandwidth a month or several 100 terabytes we are are ready to serve your hosting needs. Its not just about performance, bringing hosting back to India also means your contribution to growth of broadband in the country and consequently to the growth of your own marketplace.

So in the enlightened self interest of helping grow the broadband marketplace we are launching the phase 3 of bandwidth price war in a few more weeks from now the E2E Networks’s Cloud Computing Products cheaper than anyone else in the Asia Pacific region.

And oh by the way we’ll waive off 50% setup fee till the end of August starting today for next 15 days. The signup must be completed before 31st August 2010 to avail this special offer. So bring your servers back to India.

Update 11:05 AM: Our ISP has re-routed some paths to not traverse Bharti-Airtel backbone within and outside the country and things are back to normal for E2E Networks Mumbai Zone network for now.
The ISP’s operations would be back to normal by 3:30 PM or so.

Update 1:55 PM: The ISP has updated all operations are back to normal, their upstream Bharti had a media issue which was causing packet losses but not enough for BGP to do an automatic route re-announcement for our prefixes. The upstream has fixed the issue and the ISP operations are running at optimal capacity and performance as of 1 hour back.

Please email us at support@e2enetworks.com if you have any questions regarding the same.

Update:-
The above Maintenance was scheduled by our Delhi Zone ISP and not by us, we decided to clarify that as our customers hold us to higher standards, and we were informed a mere 9 hours in advance via an SMS, we strive to provide as much information as is available with us to all our customers.

Our network uptime over last 3 months remains over 99.9% despite this outage. We’ll update the blog about the latest we get from the ISP.

Other E2E Zones were not affected by the outage.

Loading…Frustrated on seeing this? The large visible delays in loading a website are really irritating. In this fast paced world, your web visitors don’t want to wait for long for your website to load. A few major causes of latency are discussed here.

One of the main reason for latency is the physical distance of the datacenter where the site is hosted from your visitors. If you are hosting your website on servers in one geographic location but you are receiving visitors from another geographic location, the latency would be high. The sites hosted in countries like US/UK add up a latency of about 300ms to 400 ms which increases page rendering times by a few seconds. With larger number of page elements higher latency makes for higher page load times regardless of optimizations in the size of images and compression of javascript/css elements.

As an example of the effects of latency lets look at a few data points :-

Ping a website hosted in India ( say pluggd.in ) and another hosted in US (mobikwik.com)

Pinging www.mobikwik.com [67.18.92.243] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 67.18.92.243: bytes=32 time=344ms TTL=50

Pinging pluggd.in [180.151.0.203] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 180.151.0.203: bytes=32 time=53ms TTL=49

The huge difference in latency times of both the websites is clearly visible.

Firebug is an extension for Mozilla FireFox, and can also be used to analyze your site’s network activity.

The firebugs output for both the websites could be seen at

http://e2enetworks.com/wp-content/uploads/mobi.png

http://e2enetworks.com/wp-content/uploads/pluggdin.png

See the net effect in being able to throw in 470KBytes of data in 12.72 seconds mostly from India compared to being able to throw 171 KB of data at the browser in 13.74 seconds. Hosted in US no matter how much processing power you throw at something you hit a lower bound for each content element being pulled in 600 ms or more.

The firebug output for a nearly pure everything in India kind of site can be seen here

http://e2enetworks.com/wp-content/uploads/tarundua.png

There are several hosting companies in India which have their servers in USA and thus sites hosted by these get impacted by high latencies.  How to determine if your site is in USA or India.

Low latency means faster browsing experience and that’s what every end user wants but also higher page views and greater engagement as shown by Google’s study.

As an online business owner, what is most important for you is the security of your website and here I will discuss the various security issues in shared hosting environment. Let us face the bitter truth that in shared hosting environment, it is not possible to completely cover all the loop holes. A server is never completely secure and everything that interacts with your server is a threat to you.

Let me share an analogy with you. A shared server is like an apartment building and a dedicated server is like having your own house. You are sharing all the resources like water supply, power supply, parking lot etc. with other people in the apartment building. In an apartment building if someone puts on his A.C. then it will put extra load on the power grid of the entire building. If there is short circuit in one apartment, the entire building is prone to face the impact of power cut. Similarly, an anti social element staying next door who tries to peep into your apartment poses a security threat to you. While in your own house, you have all the resources just for yourself which are not shared with anyone. It’s like a dedicated server where the clients have full control over the server regarding the choice of operating systems, root access, hardware, software etc.

In shared web hosting, the HTTP server like Apache requires a control over the files to be served to the client which immediately poses a security concern. If the domains have the ability to run scripts or if the domains have the access to the shell, then in shared hosting environment, one client can modify the files of another client. Though in a multiuser operating system like Linux read/write/execute privileges can be provided to different user groups (user/group/other) yet through a simple PHP script, files outside own home directory can be accessed. Even when using pre-packaged software solutions, you need to allow the hosting server to have read, write and execute access to your files and thus exposing vulnerabilities to other clients. Moreover though the functions like exec( ), shell_exec( ) provide flexibility to the developers, yet they pose adverse security problems. Let us see a very simple example:

Most of the websites require some image uploads from the web and if the client on shared hosting does not have server permission then these uploads will not move to the destination directory. The common solution is to give all the users 777 (read/write/execute) access to the destination directory. This is a common solution but what it has provided is an easy way to hack the files of other users sharing the same server.

Now just think about the situation when your website is on a server that hosts a number of websites out of which few are vulnerable to attacks. Now if even a single one is attacked, the downtime for your website also increases as it is hosted on the same server. And if this happens during working hours when you need to send/receive important emails your business will surely get a negative impact. There are several hosting companies that claim guaranteed 100% uptime which is a complete lie as a server will be down during maintenance. A Denial of Service (DoS) attack on one website impacts the rest of the websites in the shared hosting environment. So a poorly managed server can cause downtime for all sites hosted on the server. Extending the analogy of apartment building, suppose some problem in an apartment on ground floor causes blockage to water, then the water will not climb up to any of the apartments on other floors if there is just a single pipeline. It’s like a DoS in case of shared servers where all the websites suffer.

So concluding, I could say that there is a trade off for low costs in terms of security in shared hosting. Security in shared web hosting cannot be as strong as the dedicated server. So a good solution is to keep your sensitive data in a database. Be careful while uploading files on the server and keep all server utilities up to date. A lot of log tracking, access tracking and website usage tracking have to be done. You even have the option of Virtual Private Servers. VPS or Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS) hosting provides a middle path between shared and dedicated web hosting services. Every user has a full control over his Virtual Server up to his own OS image. This blocks other users from seeing or modifying information even when the information is present on the same server. But if you are playing with highly sensitive data, then the best solution is “Go for a Dedicated or Virtual Private Server(VPS)”