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After reading Jonathan’s blog article about how bandwidth has changed over the last ten years it got me thinking about the hardware we use in web hosting. I’ve just placed an order for additional web servers of the following spec:

Dell 1950

• Two Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X5460, 2X6MB Cache, 3.16GHz,
• 8 GB 667MHZ FBD
• Primary HD: 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15.000 rpm Hard Drive
• Secondary HD: 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15.000 rpm Hard Drive
• Perc6i SAS RAID Controller
• dual Broadcom® NetXtreme II 5708 Gigabit Ethernet NIC

When we launched WebFusion in 1997 we built our own servers for the first year then started to use equipment from Penguin Computing. We selected Penguin as they were one of the first companies to supply rack mounted servers to the Linux community. They are based in San Francisco and we often had to wait up to four weeks for delivery – having said that they always put toy penguins in the packaging to ease the wait! The spec of the servers in 1998 was:

 
• Two 300 MHz Pentium II w/256K Cache
• 128 MB ECC 100 MHz SDRAM
• Integrated Adaptec 7890 Ultra2 SCSI Controller
• Primary HD: Quantum 9.1 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
• Intel 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Adapter

Of course in 1998 we only gave 10MB disk space with each account and bandwidth was limited by the fact that nearly everyone was on dial-up, so these servers coped fine. Today’s websites are much more demanding of servers, so even though the spec is significantly higher, we still only put the same number of accounts on each server as we did ten years ago.

We upgraded our bandwidth today, adding 50 Mb to our current infrastructure, it’s the second time we have upgraded this year. There’s nothing particularly special about this upgrade, except that it got us talking about how much our bandwidth requirements have changed over the last few years.

When we setup WebFusion in 1997 (which we sold some years ago) we started with a 64 KB line, that cost £20,000 per year! We had 600 websites on it before we needed to upgrade and we used it for our office Internet access as well. When we upgraded we went to 128 KB and it was sometime before we hit 1 MB. Back then most hosting companies had a spare room with all their servers in and “air conditioning” was provided by a couple of fans. I remember that the largest hosting company at the time had 2 X 2 MB lines and this seemed quite unbelievable.

Fast forward 11 years and it’s predicted that 2 out of 3 households in the UK will have broadband by the end of the year, so I think we will be adding to our network capacity again fairly soon.

We have updated our Joomla installer to 1.5.1 today. We had been planning on moving to this version in the next few months anyway, but recently some serious security vulnerabilities have been identified in previous versions of Joomla, so we felt we should upgrade our copy now.

To install the new version log-in to your eXtend control panel and go to the CGI/PHP Scripts section.

An overview of Joomla 1.5 is available on the Joomla Website. If you are looking to upgrade your existing Joomla site then there is a helpful article on the Joomla Team Blog on how to do this.
 

If you use your Heart Internet Customer Control Panel or eXtend to access WebMail then you won’t have noticed that we have a new version of WebMail available. The new version is just on http://www.outitgoes.com/ at the moment, but it will be available in the Heart Internet Control Panel and eXtend in the next few weeks.

The new default interface is much more powerful than the previous one, giving you a look and feel that is more like a Windows mail client. WebMail now also supports IMAP accounts as well.

To try out new WebMail now simply log-in at http://www.outitgoes.com/.

Welcome to the first post on the new Heart Internet Blog. We hope to give you an insight into Heart Internet, what we are thinking and what we are doing, as well as giving you some practical advice on building your website.

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