Computer Culture Shock

[ferd54]

I help run the website for a business in Thailand. With no warning the Thai manager and Thai technician decided to host our site using our own server. We were paying about 4,000 baht a year to a commercial web hosting company. The Thai tech has never configured a server for web hosting before. So we:

Paid 100,000 baht for the server

Paid 20,000 baht for UPS (after power outages knocked us out-- not in the orginal budget)

Pay about 2,000 a month for air con so the server can run 24/7.

Had to install a new air air con because the orginal one failed from running 24/7 and leaked water over the computers.

We do not have FTP, so updating is done by copy and paste to the root folder.

Just got hacked -- with an Islamist activist page replacing our original index.htm file -- due to poor or no security.

Where we are in Thailand suffers frequent power outages, so the site crashes out even with UPS, often on the weekend, and remains crashed until Monday morning.

Can anyone explain why this decision was reached? I'm at a loss.

Thanks

[Lannig]

I help run the website for a business in Thailand. With no warning the Thai manager and Thai technician decided to host our site using our own server. We were paying about 4,000 baht a year to a commercial web hosting company

Where was the site hosted? outside of Thailand?

. The Thai tech has never configured a server for web hosting before. So we:

Paid 100,000 baht for the server

Paid 20,000 baht for UPS (after power outages knocked us out-- not in the orginal budget)

Pay about 2,000 a month for air con so the server can run 24/7.

Had to install a new air air con because the orginal one failed from running 24/7 and leaked water over the computers.

We do not have FTP, so updating is done by copy and paste to the root folder.

Just got hacked -- with an Islamist activist page replacing our original index.htm file -- due to poor or no security.

Where we are in Thailand suffers frequent power outages, so the site crashes out even with UPS, often on the weekend, and remains crashed until Monday morning.

Can anyone explain why this decision was reached? I'm at a loss.

Thanks

Just plain stupidity? plus the incredibly dumb "pride" of having the server in-house, to show it to VIP customers and brag about it instead of away, hosted by farangs? (if that was the case). I've seen this kind of situation happening. T.I.T...

You have my sympathy.

--Lannig

[Firefoxx]

The people in charge of MIS stuff usually aren't tuned into the realities of life. One company I worked in had about 100 employees, and the MIS suddely wanted to get "connected" to the net. His choice? A 64k leased line costing the company around 70k baht/month (this was in the early days of internet, no broadband). We didn't have a server and didn't have any need for a leased line. It was still a ludicrous amount for a small company, and proposed using two 56k modems for 5k baht/month with the same performance, but I was a junior tech and nobody listened. The MIS guy continued to make stupid decisions, and I was fed up with him taking the credit for my work, so I quit after a few months.

[The Coder]

100GB of space and 1 terabyte of bandwidth is 200 baht a month from reliable providers. Just a few years ago those sorts of numbers required dedicated servers and cost prohibitive bandwidth charges. For reference, see godaddy dot com, the most popular host in the world.

[ferd54]

My immediate supervisor, a Westerner who is beholden to the Thai manager, fails to see why I find this situation mind-boggling. Could a disinterested Thid Party explain:

Whether FTP is an accepted and needed protocol for website maintenance.

What background and training is required to configure a server for webhosting?

How much UPS or electricity generation backup is needed?

Is it important for the website to by up 99 percent of the time? How does downtime affect Google rankings?

When would a company need its own hosting server and what staffing/training is required?

Thanks!

[Deksan]

My immediate supervisor, a Westerner who is beholden to the Thai manager, fails to see why I find this situation mind-boggling. Could a disinterested Thid Party explain:

Whether FTP is an accepted and needed protocol for website maintenance.

What background and training is required to configure a server for webhosting?

How much UPS or electricity generation backup is needed?

Is it important for the website to by up 99 percent of the time? How does downtime affect Google rankings?

When would a company need its own hosting server and what staffing/training is required?

Thanks!

If you own the server you should be able to decide which protocol are acceptable and which are not. You could also decide what operating system you want to run (linux/windows) and do the administration yourself by remote connection (or pay someone to do it) it s . For the price you paid that should be a minimum. Also you could change the hosting company and get your server hosted somewhere else.

[h90]

I help run the website for a business in Thailand. With no warning the Thai manager and Thai technician decided to host our site using our own server. We were paying about 4,000 baht a year to a commercial web hosting company. The Thai tech has never configured a server for web hosting before. So we:

Paid 100,000 baht for the server

Paid 20,000 baht for UPS (after power outages knocked us out-- not in the orginal budget)

Pay about 2,000 a month for air con so the server can run 24/7.

Had to install a new air air con because the orginal one failed from running 24/7 and leaked water over the computers.

We do not have FTP, so updating is done by copy and paste to the root folder.

Just got hacked -- with an Islamist activist page replacing our original index.htm file -- due to poor or no security.

Where we are in Thailand suffers frequent power outages, so the site crashes out even with UPS, often on the weekend, and remains crashed until Monday morning.

Can anyone explain why this decision was reached? I'm at a loss.

Thanks

Either they wanted some toy or the got 10 % commission on the purchase.

At that conditions I would consider to host the webpage somewhere different at 10 US$ you pay private and let everyone belive that it is hosted on the server

[A_Traveller]

My immediate supervisor, a Westerner who is beholden to the Thai manager, fails to see why I find this situation mind-boggling. Could a disinterested Thid Party explain:

Whether FTP is an accepted and needed protocol for website maintenance.

Yes, FTP {File Transfer Protocol} is the method used to send files and data to the server. If you like, its the equivalent of the process run by File Manager in Windows.

What background and training is required to configure a server for webhosting?

HM.... A web server requires an individual to be able to manage the diverse elements relating to OS, Windows, Li{u}nix, sever processes, Apache, IIS etc. Communications HTTP. FTP, shell etc. , data storage and if you are really busy spindle management or you buy one out of the box :-)

How much UPS or electricity generation backup is needed?

Depends on the infrastructure or lack of it at the location. The reality here is that if the office has problematic power {variation, brown-outs etc.} then the sever will have problems. Equally if it is hot, by server standards, say +25C that will lead to possible problems too.

Is it important for the website to by up 99 percent of the time? How does downtime affect Google rankings?

Only 99%, that means you are dark for three and a half days a year! Ranking will suffer, but that would depend on a range of variables.

When would a company need its own hosting server and what staffing/training is required?

If a project is difficult to estimate, as an example say you are running an on-line poll where each user can submit a video then you data storage requirement would need considerable flexibility.,This might be difficult to get from a 'standard' web hoster and could be cheaper to manage yourself. However, you would need a reasonable MIS team to so do. Without knowing what the site is, or a market/traffic review it's difficult to be more detailed.

Thanks!

[Firefoxx]

If you wanted control like this, a better alternative would have been co-location. Put your server at some ISP, and let them worry about the electricity, cooling, and bandwidth. The more hops needed for a customer to get to your server, the more things that could fail. Even big companies don't usually have their hosts at their offices. They're at network hubs, where bandwidth and power are adequate.

An expensive server is only as good as the software running on it and the person operating it. Hence, if you lack the personnel to configure/maintain it, then you might as well not buy it.

[Crushdepth]

I help run the website for a business in Thailand. With no warning the Thai manager and Thai technician decided to host our site using our own server. We were paying about 4,000 baht a year to a commercial web hosting company. The Thai tech has never configured a server for web hosting before. So we:

Paid 100,000 baht for the server

Paid 20,000 baht for UPS (after power outages knocked us out-- not in the orginal budget)

Pay about 2,000 a month for air con so the server can run 24/7.

Had to install a new air air con because the orginal one failed from running 24/7 and leaked water over the computers.

We do not have FTP, so updating is done by copy and paste to the root folder.

Just got hacked -- with an Islamist activist page replacing our original index.htm file -- due to poor or no security.

Where we are in Thailand suffers frequent power outages, so the site crashes out even with UPS, often on the weekend, and remains crashed until Monday morning.

Can anyone explain why this decision was reached? I'm at a loss.

This kind of mistake is very common among IT-ignorant managers. Many poorly informed people believe that i) you have to have your own server to run a website and ii) that it must be placed in your own office. They don't know (and find it difficult to believe) that you can get professionally managed disk space from a commercial webhosting company for as little as $1 per month.

Could a disinterested Thid Party explain:

Whether FTP is an accepted and needed protocol for website maintenance.

What background and training is required to configure a server for webhosting?

How much UPS or electricity generation backup is needed?

Is it important for the website to by up 99 percent of the time? How does downtime affect Google rankings?

When would a company need its own hosting server and what staffing/training is required?

FTP is accepted, yes, but it does come with risks and needs to be managed carefully in terms of access rights, strong passwords etc.

Training or at least a good bit of experience is required to configure a webserver to a reasonable level of security. It does require some skill and ongoing attention to detail so don't expect that your 'computer guy' will be proficient at this. Good security also requires discipline - if the staff have a poor attitude to security, or tend to be lazy, sloppy or careless then don't let them near it.

UPS...and uptime...its up to you. How long do you want your server to stand up during a power failure and how will site downtime affect your business? Most 'garden variety' UPS will only last around 15 minutes. If you can't afford much downtime, this is another reason to put your site with a reputable web hosting company that has their servers in a data center with backup power generators.

Frankly, I would not recommend running your own server unless you have some dire need to do so. If you're just running an ordinary website then buy some disk space from a commercial webhost for a few bucks a month and let them worry about server maintenance and security. Looking after your own website security is headache enough for most small businesses.

At that conditions I would consider to host the webpage somewhere different at 10 US$ you pay private and let everyone belive that it is hosted on the server

This is exactly what I did at work. Our moron ex-boss wanted everything in our office (pretty must the same situation as the original poster). After many, many problems I just paid for some disk space in the US and moved the site out on the quiet. Been running without a headache ever since. One of the best $30 I ever spent.

Edited September 7, 2006 by Crushdepth

[Crushdepth]

One other thing - you might want to check if your IT people actually have a backup of your website. Getting hacked is excusable, but failing to have a full and regular backup of your website isn't. If they don't have one then this is is a very good indicator that these people are not competent to manage a server.

[cclub75]

Can anyone explain why this decision was reached? I'm at a loss.

First, did you ask them WHY they took this decision ?

Does this company have very specific needs regarding its website (very demanding databases, issue of confidentiality for datas, bandwith?)

That's the key question.

If there is no other answer then : "it's better" or "it's more sanook". Then you can be sure that kick back money is involved.

Stupidity has limits. Even in Thailand.

Of course, if the boss just want to play and has no money concern, then why not...

[fxm88]

Can anyone explain why this decision was reached? I'm at a loss.

It's called learning new skills so that they can go get better jobs. Very common in the tech industry.

[sajal]

> Whether FTP is an accepted and needed protocol for website maintenance.

FTP protocol is accepted and is the norm, however if you need to mantain the website from outside your office i.e. going thru external networks you would want to use SFTP

> What background and training is required to configure a server for webhosting?

Some Linux experience. and also to google your way around.

> How much UPS or electricity generation backup is needed?

I think you should have atleast an hour. The colocation centers normally have 12 to 24 hours backup on UPS and a diesel generator for longer downtimes (but I doubt if they ever have to power it up)

> Is it important for the website to by up 99 percent of the time? How does downtime affect Google rankings?

Google doesnt like downtime. It really pisses off googlebot if he cant reach your site.

> When would a company need its own hosting server and what staffing/training is required?

Few scenarios some may be posted already:-

1) Kickback for employes

2) Noisy Toy with lights to decorate your office.

3) Need full control of your server - Need to run specialised applications which shared hosts wont allow.

4) The website is a high traffic website

5) Paranoid about security - depends on how you configure it.

6) Most users to the site are within the office network - Intranet

[exchange1973]

what about the environment of serverhosting:

redundant power supply with inline UPS.

redundant network links

firewalling (i mean real firewalling on a dedicated machine)

halon flooder (in case of fire)

access control

well, in general all these effort doesn't worth for only one or two machines.

but the best way to communicate it to a manager is a study of well known researcher like gartner group.

the magic words are "TCO - total cost of ownership". this is a language every "manager" will understand.

best regards

exchange1973

[Prakanong]

I help run the website for a business in Thailand. With no warning the Thai manager and Thai technician decided to host our site using our own server. We were paying about 4,000 baht a year to a commercial web hosting company

Where was the site hosted? outside of Thailand?

. The Thai tech has never configured a server for web hosting before. So we:

Paid 100,000 baht for the server

Paid 20,000 baht for UPS (after power outages knocked us out-- not in the orginal budget)

Pay about 2,000 a month for air con so the server can run 24/7.

Had to install a new air air con because the orginal one failed from running 24/7 and leaked water over the computers.

We do not have FTP, so updating is done by copy and paste to the root folder.

Just got hacked -- with an Islamist activist page replacing our original index.htm file -- due to poor or no security.

Where we are in Thailand suffers frequent power outages, so the site crashes out even with UPS, often on the weekend, and remains crashed until Monday morning.

Can anyone explain why this decision was reached? I'm at a loss.

Thanks

Just plain stupidity? plus the incredibly dumb "pride" of having the server in-house, to show it to VIP customers and brag about it instead of away, hosted by farangs? (if that was the case). I've seen this kind of situation happening. T.I.T...

You have my sympathy.

--Lannig

Agree - probably done to

Get it on their CV

Techies sometimes think they know it all and have an inflated sense of their own skils

[MarkBKK]

but the best way to communicate it to a manager is a study of well known researcher like gartner group.

the magic words are "TCO - total cost of ownership". this is a language every "manager" will understand.

Just hope he doesn't have a brain and realise that most TCO figures are made-up rubbish!