I frequent WebHostingTalk.com, a really good forum for people in the web hosting industry. There are lots of really knowledgeable people on there, but there are also sorts of people without so much technical knowledge….

There was one guy a while back who announced that he was starting a video sharing site (a la Youtube) and that he’d need 450 petabytes of transfer a month. No one was quite sure how to respond, since this is orders of magnitude more than anyone measures anything in. I calculated that he’d be using about 1,400 Gbps. (And that’s an average… Real traffic patterns for big sites are more of a sine wave, so you’d probably want about 2,000 Gbps aggregate capacity, which you’d be filling at peak hours.) I’m fairly certain that even a site like Google doesn’t use anything like that. In fact, I’m fairly certain that even if a site like Google called up their providers and asked for 1,400 Gbps, they’d be laughed at. No one out there can provide that.

But some are just distressing. One guy posted, maybe a year ago, that he was getting a “private room” and didn’t know what he’d need for equipment. Did he need a router? Switches? A “private room” in a data center, by the way, is to host your many racks of servers, walled off from others for maximum security. You’ve got to be a very big place, with a very big budget, to be doing that. This is kind of like asking, “I’m buying a 500,000 square foot warehouse. What do I need? Do I need a forklift? Lights?” (A lot of answers were basically, “What do you need? You need an IT department, and someone who doesn’t have to ask this question.” Although my favorite answer was, “Padded walls.” Normally it annoys me when people give rude answers online, but I couldn’t help but burst out laughing.)

Today’s post is from a guy who seems to have about 30 servers with one company, running what I can only assume is a successful hosting company. He’ll fill one server and order another, but he’s having difficulty “managing” the traffic–he wanted to pool all of the bandwidth together. This is something that most big companies will do for you if you ask, since you’re a huge customer and they know that their competitors will do it if they don’t.

If you buy a dedicated server, you’re usually given a bandwidth allocation in GB/month. I’m allowed 1,000 GB a month, for example. (And I don’t use 5% of it.) This comes out to using about 3 Mbps 24/7, but it’s much more convenient for me since I don’t have to worry about momentary usage, just the net amount of transfer moved. There are also subtleties here: I have 1,000 GB over a 10 Mbps line. 1,000 GB means that my average use can be up to 3 Mbps. But, in real life, as I mentioned, traffic patterns ebb and flow. If I were using 3 Mbps average (I’m not), I might be using 5 Mbps during the day, and 1 Mbps at night. So just giving me a 3 Mbps line wouldn’t cut it, since it’d be really crappy during the day.

But this guy’s host quoted him a price in Mbps. He was very confused by this. He was used to his GB/month, and didn’t know what to make of these foreign “Mbps” measurements.

Someone else just posted about how some guy with the IP 0.0.0.0 keeps connecting to him, and wondering if he should ban that IP, which he thinks is awfully suspicious. (It’s not as bad as the guy who was getting people with “blank IPs” connecting to him, and wondering if he could ban a null IP in his firewall… It turned out that he was running some random command which was returning way more than just IPs, hence a number of blank lines…)

Who are these people? I wouldn’t post a blog making fun of people who didn’t know otherwise obscure things, except that these should be basic little tasks for people in these positions. It’d be like a certified (not certifiable, but certified) sysadmin for Windows systems posting and saying, “I need to change my desktop background? How can I do this?” Or a car mechanic, who’s gone on and opened his third garage, posting and saying, “The oil in my car is old and dirty. Is it possible to somehow drain the old oil and put new oil in?” Or, for the more absurd requests we see, someone posting on a financial forum about how they’re starting a lemonade stand and think they need $750 billion in startup capital, wondering what bank will give them a better interest rate. It just shocks me that these people are successful and yet so clueless.