Resources

Because the web-hosting and managed service industries are still very volatile, I'm maintaining an updated copy of Chapter 22, Resources, here. The list is loosely organized according to the Table of Contents.

If you know of additional resources that should be added to this list, please send them to resources.

Strategies

The Web Host Industry Review. The best site for news and editorial content about the web-hosting industry, suitable for both vendors and customers. You can also subscribe to a variety of The WHIR's newsletters.

Web Hosting Monthly. A free magazine-format monthly, published in PDF format by the folks at The Web Host Industry Review. The best of their editorial content including columns by RDS Strategies' own Doug Kaye.

Host Help. Hosted by FutureQuest, contains some good articles, particularly regarding shared- and dedicated-hosting services. Topics include the value of on-line host directories, resellers, and uptime guarantees. It's a bit out of date, but still valuable.

HostCompare.com. An advertising-sponsored site that compares web-hosting vendors. It also contains links to other comparisons and on-line articles.

Gartner Group. Aa consulting and research firm, is very active in the analysis of web hosting and other areas of Internet infrastructure. In Chapter 9, Risk Management, we quoted data and conclusions from Making Smart Investments to Reduce Unplanned Downtime (D. Scott, Gartner Group, 1999). Another Gartner publication, Best Practices for Internet-based Business: Storage and Hosting Strategies (Gartner Group, February 29, 2000), provided background material for our discussion of NAS and SAN technologies in Chapter 15, Storage.

ActivMedia Research. Another consulting and research company. In Chapter 1, The Options, we used data from its report, Real Numbers behind Web Hosting & Development 2000 (August 2000)

Tier 1 Research. Another consulting and research company, emphasizes hosting, storage, and CDNs. Its publications range from daily reports to geographically-focused Web Hosting Bibles.

Robertson Stephens. An investment banking firm, published an excellent analysis of many aspects of Internet infrastructure in Virtual Bricks II: Virtual Econ 101 Update, A Comprehensive Guide for Understanding ecommerce Infrastructure Evolution and Convergence-CSPs, ASPs, IUPs and IPPs (Richard A. Juarez et al., Robertson Stephens, May 2000). We used some of its data in Chapter 9, Risk Management. Hopefully, it will follow this up with similar reports in the future.

Merrill Lynch. A financial services company, analyzes Internet infrastructure for its investment clients. We referred to Internet Infrastructure 2000-IIS Launch: Survival of the Fittest (Thomas W. Watts et al., Merrill Lynch Global Securities Research & Economics, July 25, 2000) for background material on CDNs in Chapter 13, Caching and Content Delivery Networks.

ASP Research Center. Hosted by CIO Magazine, is obviously focused on application service providers, but it includes valuable information on outsourcing in general.

FreeEdgar. A valuable resource for researching published financial data from publicly-traded companies. Portals, such as Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com), and financial institutions, such as eTrade (http://www.etrade.com), provide additional data such as analysts reports.

Architecture

RAID, discussed in Chapter 12, Web Site Architectures, was first described in A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), available on line at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Dienst/UI/2.0/Describe/ncstrl.ucb/CSD-87-391. Not only is RAID itself important to the web-hosting industry, but this 26-page paper, written in 1987, is a good example of pragmatic thinking about redundancy and cost.

Web Server Survey. Hosted by Netcraft, shows market share for Apache, IIS (Microsoft), iPlanet (Netscape), NCSA, and other web server software.

Two books, although specific to the Solaris (UNIX-derivative) operating system, will help anyone who wants to understand the quantitative aspects of server performance:

Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet, second edition, by Adrian Cockroft and Richard Petit (Sun Microsystems Press, 1998, ISBN 0130952494). Buy or read reviews at Amazon.com.

Configuration and Capacity Planning for Solaris Servers, by Brian L. Wong (Prentice Hall PTR/Sun Microsystems Press, 1997, ISBN 0133499529). Buy or read reviews at Amazon.com.

Caching and CDNs

Web Caching. Managed by Brian Davison, is a good centralized resource for information regarding caching and CDNs.

Caching.com. Operated by Jupiter Media Metrix, contains CDN and caching news, white papers, and case studies.

Squid. Free caching software distributed under the GNU public license. The Squid FAQ provides a good technical background on Internet caching.

Intel. Offers a number of free on-line courses including one on caching. The course emphasize Intel's own caching products, but it's still good for background information.

CacheFlow. A hardware cache vendor, hosts an on-line cacheability tester. If you enter a URL, this utility will analyze how the page is likely to be treated by the various Internet caches.

Content Alliance. One of two industry groups supporting initiatives for content peering as discussed in Chapter 13, Caching and Content Delivery Networks. This group was created by Cisco in August 2000.

Content Bridge. The other content peering industry group.

Edge Side Includes. Another industry-sponsored group promoting delivery of dynamic content from CDN edge servers. You can find the specifications for ESI on their web site.

Cisco. Publishes a number of excellent white papers. In some cases the most informative documents appear in support of particular products. One good tutorial on CDN technologies is Cisco DistributedDirector (White Paper) by Kevin Delgadillo, 1999. Vendor-specific, of course.

AOL. Has posted important information for webmasters developing a web site aimed at consumers, and hence AOL customers. Particularly interesting is an article at all about AOL's access-side caching.

Connectivity

Internet Ratings. Published by Matrix.Net compares the accessibility of rated ISPs and web-hosting services in terms of median latency, packet loss, and reachability for 24-hour, 7-day, and 28-day periods. We referred to this analysis in Chapter 18, Connectivity Performance.

Internet Average. Another report published by Matrix.Net. This one is shows graphs of rolling 24-hour, 7-day, and 28-day averages of overall Internet reachability, latency, and packet loss.

Internet Weather Report. A third report published by Matrix.Net, includes geographical maps that show latency within the Internet. It's analogous to daily newspaper or television weather radar reports, except that it's about conditions within the Internet itself.

Internet Traffic Report. Published by Opnix, monitors the flow of data worldwide every 15 minutes, and displays the results broken down by continent.

Internet Health Report. Hhosted by Keynote, shows the network performance (latency) between major United States Internet backbones.

UUNET/WorldCom. Has posted a document that describes their peering policies. It's a fascinating insight into the politics of peering between the major backbone ISPs.

Two excellent (but expensive) books on networking are:

Computer Networks and Internets, With Internet Applications, third edition, by Douglas E. Comer and Ralph E. Droms. (Prentice Hall, 2001, ISBN 0130914495). Read reviews or buy from Amazon.com.

Computer Networks, second edition, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum (Prentice Hall, 1996, 0133499456). Read reviews or buy from Amazon.com.

Security

BugTraq. Operated by SecurityFocus.com. BugTraq is a full-disclosure moderated mailing list for the detailed discussion and announcement of computer security vulnerabilities. Someone responsible for your web site's security should subscribe to this list.

CERT. Located at the Software Engineering Institute, a federally funded research and development center operated by Carnegie Mellon University. The web site is an excellent source of security-related information.

Sudo (superuser do). A free Unix-only software maintained by Todd Miller that allows a system administrator to give certain users (or groups of users) the ability to run some or all commands as root or another user while logging the commands and arguments.

AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment). Developed by Rami Lehti and Pablo Virolainen in Finland, monitors all file changes, verifies the integrity of data on network servers, and notifies you of any violations. It also identifies changes to other system attributes including file size and access permissions. It's a Unix-only utility that's a free replacement for Tripwire, available for Windows as a commercial product.

Some of the better books on Internet security include the following:

Hack Proofing Your Ecommerce Site, by Brent L. Huston (Editor), Ryan Russell, Teri Bidwell, Oliver Steudler, and Robin Walshaw (Syngress Media, 2001, ISBN 192899427X). Read reviews or buy from Amazon.com.

Web Security & Commerce, by Simson Garfinkel and Gene Spafford (O'Reilly & Associates, 1997 ISBN 1565922697). Read reviews or buy from Amazon.com.

Practical Unix and Internet Security, by Simson Garfinkel and Gene Spafford (O'Reilly & Associates, 1996, ISBN: 1565921488). Read reviews or buy from Amazon.com.

Hacking Exposed, by Joel Scambray, Stuart McClure, and George Kurtz (McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing, 2000, ISBN 0072127481). Read reviews or buy from Amazon.com.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, by Bruce Schneier (John Wiley & Sons, 2000, ISBN: 0471253111). Read reviews or buy from Amazon.com.

Monitoring

MRTG. Tthe Multi Router Traffic Grapher, was developed by Tobias Oetiker in Switzerland, and Dave Rand of AboveNet, in the U.S. MRTG is free software that graphs any numeric values it can obtain using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) or other methods. Versions are available for Windows and Unix-derivatives. Some of the graphs shown in Chapter 18, Connectivity Performance, were generated using MRTG.

Big Brother. A free internal monitoring package that supports Windows NT/2000 and most of the Unix derivatives. We used Big Brother as our examples of internal monitoring and trend reporting in Chapter 19, Monitoring.

Keynote Systems. A commercial external monitoring service that we used for many of the examples in Chapter 18, Connectivity Performance, Chapter 19, Monitoring, and Chapter 20, The Net Detective Toolkit. Keynote's web site includes some good white papers on web-site performance and measurement.

Alertsite. Also offers an external site-monitoring service-one of many lower-cost alternatives to Keynote.

NetMechanic. Hosts a number of tools targeted at shared- and dedicated-server customers, including Server Check Pro, another low-cost site-monitoring service.

Appliant. Offers a combination of internal and external monitoring services. We used their external monitoring as an example in Chapter 19, Monitoring.

Probester. Aan external monitoring service we looked at in Chapter 19, Monitoring. Probester is one of a new breed of monitoring services that uses P2P (peer-to-peer) technology in order to measure performance from the desktops of a large number of web-site visitors.

Backup and Recovery

CVS. The Concurrent Versions System, an open-source version control system for most flavors of Windows and Unix.

Veritas. A commercial vendor that supplies software for server cluster management and backup and recovery. Their whitepapers are helpful for understanding some of the issues associated with backup and recovery, particularly of databases.

DNS and Domain Names

Ask Mr. DNS. An archive of great information about DNS and BIND. Although its creators (Cricket Liu, Matt Larson, and Michael Milligan) are no longer enhancing the site (their company was bought by Network Solutions in June 2000, the archives continue to be valuable.

ICANN. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The non-profit corporation that was formed to assume responsibility for the IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain name system management, and root server system management functions previously performed under U.S. Government contract by IANA and other entities. As recommended in Chapter 21, Domain Names and DNS, never use a domain name registrar that isn't among those on the ICANN-accredited list.

ARIN. The American Registry for Internet Numbers. ARIN is a non-profit organization established for the purpose of administration and registration of Internet Protocol (IP) numbers for the following geographical areas: North America, South America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa.

RIPE NCC. The equivalent of ARIN for Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa.

APNIC. Another equivalent of ARIN for Asia and the Pacific.

The standard text on DNS is:

DNS and BIND, 4th edition, by Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu. (O'Reilly & Associates, 2001, ISBN 0596001584). Read reviews of buy from Amazon.com.

Tools

SamSpade.org. Developed by Steve Atkins, is a portal to many of the other tools described in Chapter 20, The Net Detective Toolkit, and listed below, as well as some unique ones. From the web site you can also download a copy of Steve's free Sam Spade utility that performs similar functions on Windows-based systems.

Netcraft. Used throughout Chapter 20, The Net Detective Toolkit, as an excellent way to research an existing web site or web-hosting service.

Dr. Watson. Hhosted by Add & Associates. It's a free service to analyze web pages, including features that verify links, generate word counts, spell-check non-HTML text, compute estimated download speeds, check search engine compatibility, and analyze HTML syntax.

traceroute.org. Maintained by Thomas Kernen, is an list of international reverse traceroute and Looking Glass servers that can be used to track down various routing and performance problems.

Geektools. Hosted by CenterGate Research Group, provides gateways to traceroute and whois, and a searchable index to the RFCs. We used this site in some of our examples in Chapter 20, The Net Detective Toolkit.

IP-Plus Internet Services. Also show in Chapter 20, provides gateways to dig, traceroute, and whois.

Stokeley Consulting. Runs an excellent site with Unix System Administrator's Resources. With topics ranging from firewalls to "Coffee and Caffeine," there's something here for everyone, even those running Windows 2000/NT.

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