Playing Nicely in the Shared Sandbox

• June 01st, 2010
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“Play nicely with others” is as important as “don’t run with scissors” in the grand scheme of integrating with other people.  Let’s face it; we’re all business people, and the largest part of business is playing nicely with others.  That’s just the greater part of it.

And it’s not even a fundamental rule because it’s good advice; in a lot of cases, it’s because everyone’s actions play a significant part in creating the “greater good” environment.

Let’s talk this on a shared server example.

Most business owners just starting out in the online world aren’t going to want to invest a whole lot of dough into a technology until they’ve seen some return on investment.  Understood.  So roughly about 65% of online shopkeepers are going to want to try a shared server environment initially.

While there’s plenty of good to a shared server .. low cost, easy maintenance .. there’s a few risks.  One of the greatest risks is that if a playmate in your shared server sandbox goes rogue and starts flinging sand, there’s no where else to go.  If that playmate invites his bully friends to come over and they’re too rough, you’re stuck.  You’re at the mercy of your playmates in that shared environment.

That’s where we come in.  Our 24/7 tech support is always monitoring a huge screen of blinking lights to let us know which servers are most active, and in a worst case scenario, which servers are being taken offline because someone isn’t playing nicely in the sandbox.  Our techs are certified at what they do, and they work closely with our bi-coastal data centers to isolate any problems so that (hopefully) there’s little to no downtime for everyone else.

And like all good caregivers, we try and give every player in the sandbox one or two warnings to play nicely.  Hopefully, the message hits home and day goes smoothly from then on out.  But occasionally, we’re forced to send someone to a timeout.

DDoS attacks (explained here by our System Admin, a master of words) are part of a shared server environment.  Put simply, it’s that bully inviting a thousand of his friends into an already occupied sandbox.  We do what we can to resolve the issue quickly, but there is no guarantee that we can keep these from happening.

If you are overly concerned with DDoS attacks affecting your business, consider upgrading to a semi-dedicated or dedicated VPS server, i.e. your very own sandbox.  We’ve seen far fewer DDoS attacks on these servers (dedicated servers have not suffered a DDoS attack in our history with SimpleHelix!), so it might be worth the cost.

As always, if you have ANY questions, you can find help online, by phone, or by Twitter.  We’re always here to help; it’s what we love to do.