It’s all about power.

January 3, 2006 on 7:04 pm | In Hardware, Insider View, Musings by Josh Jones | 25 Comments

Come to me son of Jor-El, kneel before Zod!

We crave power.

All of us do, at least a little. It’s just as a web host, we crave power a lot.

Not just the kind of power that allows us to crush our enemies, to see them driven before us, and to hear the lamentation of their women, either. We’re also talking about that other kind of power.

The power that runs servers!!

Now that’s the kind of power that really gets our juices flowing. You see, when you run a web hosting operation as SUPREMELY AWESOME as ours, you need a lot of computers. And, as any of you who’ve ever worked on a help desk will know, for computers to be really awesome, try plugging them in.

Which is why we try to keep all our servers plugged in all the time.

Unfortunately, this uses a lot of power. In fact, each rack of servers we have uses about the same amount of power per month as an average American home. Which means our data center draws about the same amount of power as a small suburban subdivision. It costs a lot to power a whole suburb subdivision for a month.

And it costs us even more!

Our power costs even more than yours because it’s “good” power. That is, it’s backed up by huge diesel generators and UPS batteries in the supremely unlike event of say, a Los Angeles power outage. People estimate that Google must pay about $50,000,000 a year for power for their 100,000 servers. That sounds about right to us!

Data centers generally charge you $X per square foot and $Y per amp of power you need. In the last few years, the whole industry has realized that servers are packing a lot more power per square inch. They are not however packing a lot more power per amp.

So, as clever web hosts such as us packed more and more processing power in a rack, clever data center owners dropped the price they charged per square foot and raised the price they charged per amp! When it comes to data center space, what you’re really paying for above all else is the power.

At this point, our servers are about twice as dense as they can be, physically. It doesn’t matter though, because the physical space they use up is becoming a less and less significant part of the cost equation.

It's not a tumor!

What we really need is a better CPU to power ratio.

Fortunately, help is on the way!

We finally tested some new dual-core AMD opterons which draw about HALF the power of the Intel Xeons we were using. The most surprising thing was, the AMDs not only used 1/2 the power, they were 30% faster too! And for only about $100 more per server!

We might have bought our last Xeon for a while..

Don’t count Intel out though, it looks like they’re going to be pushing into the low-power CPU market pretty heavily in the near future as well. And although they say the chips are for laptops and home media devices, I doubt they’ll be turning away any server orders.

Postscript

Which is worse, running out of space or running out of power?

Last year (sigh, it seems like only yesterday or the day before that or the day before that), for around six months, our data center effectively ran out of power. They ran out of the “good stuff” at least. We had fortunately bought a fair amount in advance that we weren’t using yet, but until relatively recently we had to extremely curtail our deployment of new servers because there just wasn’t anything to plug them in to!

Now, if we’d run out of space somehow, it wouldn’t have been so bad. We still have a bunch of older servers that are about twice the size of our new servers, and although it would have been somewhat of a waste of money, we could have retired them a bit early.

But that wouldn’t have done us a lick of good in regards to saving power, because (until these new AMD chips), the new servers still had about the same amps/cpu ratio as the old server. Size/cpu was way down, but amps/cpu, same-o same-o.

First you get the money, then you get the power. Then you get the women.

I’d like to close by saying that we are the Tony Montana of web hosting.

Except we just stop at the power.

25 Responses to “It’s all about power.”

  1. X-Tra Rant » Why I Love Dreamhost Says:
    January 3rd, 2006 at 8:03 pm

    [...] It’s posts on their blog like this that reminds me why I love Dreamhost. [...]

  2. El Ocio » Una mas para AMD Says:
    January 3rd, 2006 at 9:04 pm

    [...] Hace poco que cambie mi blog a DreamHost y de su Blog es de donde veo esta noticia (esta en ingles). [...]

  3. Vlad Says:
    January 3rd, 2006 at 9:09 pm

    Oh, definitely. You guys are the Tony Montana of web hosting.

  4. Frank Bisono Says:
    January 3rd, 2006 at 9:44 pm

    Somebody is smoking some serious shit man! :-) I guess that xmas fruitcake had some twisted side effects huh? I love the post, gotta love a company with a sense of humor. I am happy to say that after many years of running a web hosting company, I have retired that side of the house and transitioned my hosting customers and my own sites to Dreamhost.

    Now if you REALLY want to be the almighty uber hosting company, impress me with some Apple Xserve Servers in your rack and you have a customer and partner for life!

  5. Jennifer Says:
    January 4th, 2006 at 4:19 pm

    It wasn’t the fruit cake Frank. It was the Belgium chocolate.

  6. rob poitras Says:
    January 4th, 2006 at 5:19 pm

    I can’t believe I have over a tb of bw per month.

  7. santos Says:
    January 5th, 2006 at 1:15 am

    One of the reasons why I don’t leave Dreamhost, even through they are missing some cool features is because of the pimping they do. You guys want people to spend the money each year to keep your customers don’t you? Well, you are doing a good job. I’m still holding out for those features I would love, but I’ve waited this long, so another year or so wouldn’t hurt.

    Holy crap, 65 GB of storage, what the hell am I going to do with 65 GB of storage? I could like be a mirror for a popular site, like Linux ISOs bittorrent and crap and still have space and bandwidth to host my other sites. Damn, I could host all of the Linux Dist ISOs and still have space.

  8. Simon Says:
    January 5th, 2006 at 6:20 am

    I just got your announcement about the bandwidth and disk quotas.

    You’re all insane :)

  9. shiz.biz » Blog Archive » Let’s talk about my webhost Says:
    January 5th, 2006 at 8:04 am

    [...] To give you an idea of what Dreamhost are like it would be a good idea to read their blog, and posts like this, this and this. I think those three posts sum up their sense of humour and their tecnological knowledge. [...]

  10. Amanda Says:
    January 5th, 2006 at 8:09 am

    Holy crap. I just sign up this week and get bonused. That’s so cool. :)

  11. Sara Says:
    January 5th, 2006 at 10:27 am

    I have never heard of a ‘TB’ before but it sounds humongous.

  12. Clint Says:
    January 5th, 2006 at 1:15 pm

    I don’t know how you do it but I want to say thanks for being the best web host in the world. You just quadrupled my disk space and octupled my bandwidth! And not to long ago before that I think you doubled my original specs! And to boot, you actually have a sense of humor. Thanks DreamHost!

  13. I’m sick but I’m pretty… » Woo! Says:
    January 5th, 2006 at 3:17 pm

    [...] Plus, bonus!  Now, other than porn, how can I fill up that much space?! [...]

  14. Matt Says:
    January 6th, 2006 at 3:55 pm

    AMD > Intel, old news! Glad you realised it though, and thanks for the extra space/bandwidth. Just a shame my site’s hits seem to have gone down since I spent all summer rewriting the entire thing :(

  15. Ahmer Says:
    January 6th, 2006 at 6:15 pm

    I would definitely make you my webhost if you guys switched to AMD!

  16. TjL Says:
    January 7th, 2006 at 12:55 am

    Ha! I just finished watching Superman II with my son Ethan (of the very famous Dreamhosted Daily Dose of Ethan) who received a Superman cape from his aunt for Christmas and has worn it pretty much every day since.

    Hey, do you suppose if you switched to G5s you could light California on fire?

  17. Yabo Says:
    January 7th, 2006 at 11:31 pm

    Dreamhost, I love you ! I just renewed my hosting plan and BANG, two days later you come up with that ! You just earned a lifetime client !!! A small one but an happy one !

  18. Minh Nguyen Says:
    January 8th, 2006 at 1:15 pm

    I love the additional bandwidth and storage… but isn’t there any worry of server saturation?

  19. Nate MC Says:
    January 9th, 2006 at 6:28 am

    As an AMD fanboy if you start using them, I’d love to move my site over to one of those so I could put the powered by AMD logo back on my site.

    I loves mah AMD.

  20. taekwondave Says:
    January 9th, 2006 at 1:56 pm

    HEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLL YEAAAAAAAAAH BOYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  21. David Says:
    January 9th, 2006 at 10:17 pm

    “I love the additional bandwidth and storage… but isn’t there any worry of server saturation?”

    That’s the main thing I’m worried about. A crap load of people will be signing up now due to the 1tb 20gig stats. I like dreamhost for its stability and great downstream speed.

  22. ofshadows.com Says:
    January 10th, 2006 at 7:31 am

    Thanks for the perspective on power economy.

    Can I leave a suggestion here? Can you add the Date/Time stamp to the RSS feed headlines? I was looking at it as “Livebookmark” thing in firefox, and it seems like it would be useful to have those in the heading.

    Then again, I think the “offsite status page” is a service maybe you should resell. Lord knows a few of the other services I use could benefit from that kind of solution.

  23. Scott Nolan Says:
    January 13th, 2006 at 1:19 pm

    Ever look into VIA Eden line Mini-ITX motherboards in server rackmount chassis? When I was shopping around for a solution (before I found out how excellent DreamHost is) I was considering leasing rack space and putting together my own ultra-low power servers.

    http://www.via.com.tw/en/initiatives/spearhead/clusterserver/ (only 14watts, fully loaded!)
    Oh, and thats TWO servers in 1U of rack space, running fanless and low-power.

    AMD/Intel is certainly faster, but are your servers really CPU bound or are they I/O bound like the rest of us?

    Just a suggestion.

  24. Bradley Says:
    February 8th, 2006 at 8:10 am

    AMD SERVERS are AWESOME!

  25. jeffrey Says:
    February 8th, 2006 at 11:02 am

    ‘Now if you REALLY want to be the almighty uber hosting company, impress me with some Apple Xserve Servers in your rack and you have a customer and partner for life!’

    Unfortunantly, frank. Xserves suck, but the main problem is the OS.

Powered by WordPress. Pool theme by Borja Fernandez, modified by DreamHost.
Like WordPress? Consider attending WordCamp LA.
Entries and comments feeds. ^Top^