Tom Foremski of SiliconValleyWatcher had an amusing item about how awful it is to be successful enough to “run out of bandwidth”. “SiliconValleyWatcher was off line for about 6 hours as traffic surged above our monthly quota. And I couldn’t open up the pipes because there was no way to buy more bandwidth online. I found that I would have to wait until the next morning and email the sales department!!!”
This little problem is why you negotiate with a managed service provider for overage bandwidth. A good ISP should be calling Tom about his burst, not waiting for Tom to call call them after his blog has been knocked offline as punishment for the sin of being successful. But negotiating bandwidth overages when you are a small business isn’t usually done – everything is so “on the cheap” that even simple contract items (which could be automated) don’t exist. Is it any wonder I run my own datacenter?
I wrote about this in one of my essays on datacenter management and monitoring. I’ve been told that no one needs to know this stuff anymore, because everything works perfectly. Think that’s the case?