[Sussex] A funny thing happened on the way to the Net

[Steve Dobson]

Hi

On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 12:58:44PM +0000, Gareth Ablett wrote:
> On 15/12/05, Steve Dobson <steve at dobson.org> wrote:
<snip>
> > What surprised me the most was Gentoo's showing.  Now before you hit
> > the reply button and cause me to put on my asbestos suit (please
> > don't, it's just back from the cleaners after having the last set
> > of burn marks removed) I'm not getting at Gentoo.  Gentoo is
> > a distro that I think as targeted at developers, or people who
> > want access to (or close to) the cutting edge.
> 
> why the hell does this supprise you, if you just think clearing about
> this what to most people want, PERFORMANCE & CUTTING EDGE TECH, 1st so they
> can be faster then the others and 2nd so they can have better features then
> the others.  with a good team behind it, it shoudnt be a problem.

I disagree.  When it comes to SERVERS performance and cutting edge tech is
not a priority.  So what if it takes three seconds rather than two to 
server up that web page.  What matters is that the server is there when
the surfer wants to surf.

For an example lets take the SLUG website.  Here is a table of when
people signed up for a moot:

    +------+-------+
    | Hour | Count |
    +------+-------+
    | 00   |     1 |
    | 08   |     1 |
    | 09   |     1 |
    | 10   |     4 |
    | 11   |     1 |
    | 12   |     1 |
    | 13   |     2 |
    | 14   |     1 |
    | 15   |     4 |
    | 16   |     3 |
    | 17   |     3 |
    | 18   |     3 |
    | 19   |     6 |
    | 20   |     3 |
    | 21   |     4 |
    | 22   |     1 |
    | 23   |     3 |
    +------+-------+

"Hour" is the hour of the day when they signed up for a moot.  Is anyone
surprised that four people signed up within an hour of midnight?  I 
wouldn't have been surprised to see signed in the small hours - I'm more
surprised that there aren't any.

If you were creating a web hosting business and could offer only one 
software which would you go for?  The one that offered the best 
performance (or cutting edge tech) or the one that offered the most
stability?  Having read the bumf from Bytemark and Rackspace I have
to assume that reliability, stability and up-time are what most of their
customers are asking about.

Steve
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/attachments/20051215/bd8237fe/attachment.pgp