As mentioned in a previous article I am exceptionally good at coming up with ideas, then with tireless effort and dedication I find myself basking in the warm glow of my tv as opposed to following through.  As to why this happens I am not sure but somewhere along the lines I take a break and get sucked into some all day marathon of Stargate SG-1 instead of being productive.  However, thankfully this article is not solely to point out my glaring motivational inadequacies.

I come today with the first small step in my war against giving up.  It is the Google Hottrend Aggregator (echo and reverb effects added here). A few months ago the almighty Google created a site with the current hot trends from their searching.  It shows all of the things people are searching most for.  As far as I can tell often it is based on a sudden spike to an otherwise normally dormant search term.  For sheer interest I have completed an aggregator with every day’s terms all in one spot allowing searching to see where the term appears as well as links to the specific Google trend page for all of the nity grity details.  It is totally free and at least interesting to see what weird things people are currently searching for.

So continuing on in the thirty day challenge (30DC for all of those participating ganstas) we are now learning about the joy of internet research.  Now for many this may seem simple but for a programmer by trade it is a new scary world.  I come from a world of knowing answers.  That of logic and mathamatics.  Internet marketing is the opposite of that where there are basically no rules, no answers and no guarentees that anything you do will actually work.  This type of world is absolutely terrifying for someone such as I.

As scary as this realm is I have learned more in the past 10 days than I have learned in the first semester in college.  Such a influx of knowledge is either that the 30dc is great or I just went to a school that didn’t teach much.  Both are equally likely.

Another learned lesson is that people search for some pretty weird crap.  Did you know cory feldman has appeared on googles hottrends top 100 list 4 times in the past 4 months?  Seriously?  What was the last thing he did?  Personally, I thought he left to go back to mars.  Just in case he has left I want to say “Thanks for teaching us about vampires!”.

Something came across my email months ago. It was during a time when I was certain that amazon and its web services would be my meal ticket to being rich. After a few weeks of reading, studying and programming I gave up due to a serious case of A.D.D.. I know many have this issue and I share your pain in the struggle to see something through.

Alas, I digress. What came across my desk was the little known Amazon Web Service S3. I didn’t think much about it but basically it is an extensible storage service. The kicker is the new service Amazon is offering in beta called Amazon EC2.

To summarize the marketing babble it is basically where you can upload a server image to your profile. Then blow it out to new instances in times of need giving you the flexibility to grow instantly and only pay for what bandwidth and instance count you need. They even have api’s so that the system can monitor itself and turn on new instances with no human intervention whatsoever.

The uses for this service are limitless but a good example would be the recent over-popularity of the thirtydaychallenge. Most of the daily lessons are either podcasts or videos and to top it off the forum with thousands of active users is running on the same servers. So between those two things the servers are red lined with traffic and processing. In this instance participation was just a larger than expected response which is an extremely common problem, as seen by anyone who accidently ended up on the front page of slashdot.org with a page being served by your old pentium computer running linux.

If the video/blog portions of the system had been on a platform like EC2 then the moment the servers started complaining 2 more could be brought online. Once the initial 9am release time downloads had ebbed they can be shut down saving money. This process would eliminate the problems of traffic spikes as well as stop the need for costly extra servers and hosting fees.

Of course, this is still in beta but these solutions have been around in some more primitive forms for a few years. Such extensible architecture is great for redundancy and flexibility.

One would need to weigh the costs between the two options with a couple factors:

Bandwidth: Hosting a server with a bandwidth cap or the constantly linear cost of a per gigabit model of pricing. In a hosting model you would be alotted a set bandwidth cap which can be likened to a water pipe. You would only be able to push so much water through that pipe at any time, however you would not be charged for how much TOTAL water you push through the pipe over time. In the scalable service model the water pipe is as large as you want but you are charged for every drop that passes through. If the service is really spurt based with spikes of traffic and processing then the S3 model may be more cost effective as the client is only paying for the bandwidth they used instead of paying for a set pipe size 24 hours a day. Otherwise if the traffic is high constantly the per Gb charge could add up to a substantial amount of money.

Server Hosting: Servers vs Service. With hosting your own servers there are some upfront and lingering costs. 1 server is an average of about $3k (I know some like db servers are closer to $9k). This cost is just for the server itself there are also fees to store the server in a facility if you do not wish your hall closet to play host to your computer rack. The hosting fees include just keeping your server at the location as well as the additional fees of bandwidth described above. Finally, there is the cost of buying beer for your best geek-friend to come actually setup and maintain the servers you do purchase. These fees are almost in consequential as for the EC2 service is simply $0.10 an hour per server instance with no setup fee (at least none on the pricing page) plus the storage fee also applied.

Below are resources including the pricing structure. Google even provides a calculator to determine your monthly cost for service.

Resources:

Service Cost Calculator

EC2 bandwidth

Instances
$0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

S3 pricing: Storage

$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

We now sit on the cusp between day 2 and day 3 of the thirtydaychallenge.  The goal is to come up with ideas.  7 ideas to be exact that would be a good avenue to sell or something.  So over the past few days I have been contemplating these ideas.  Nurturing them the same way you would tend to a sick pet. Using the utmost care and compassion to nurture them to health and to grow into something great.  I have 6 because my mind apparently just likes to trip at the finish line.  I have discovered some great resources for trends and such.  In that I have also discovered many interesting things including that the hot topics on ebay are getting wives, getting girlfriends, getting an escort and making porn.  Who knew?  So huzah the the internet for answering the greatest question of ebay.  Can I snipe bid a happy ending?

As seen from my blog I am really good at starting things.  When the starting gun sounds I rocket off the line like a bat out of hell.  For about 50 feet I am in the lead until I have a coronary and collapse.  Some colleagues and myself are starting the 30 Day Challenge. This contest is basically an internet marketing training for the month of August.  The goal is $10.  Thats all.  If you succeed you can go to a mantinee movie if not you can rest easy knowing that you could not even earn what you pay your kids for allowance each week.  The biggest challenge is just keeping up with the videos and podcasts on a daily basis.  As I before mentioned I am quick out of the gate and such have signed up for every social network created by human beings.  I am trying twitter and facebook but still absolutely refuse to use myspace which I am certain is powered by ophrans and organized by the RIAA.  Now knowing myself I am in no way sure why people would want to watch me in twitter but everyone hopes they are more interesting than they are.  My hope is that I will learn something from this.  My dream is that in a couple months I can be blogging on a beach but I think that dream is almost as likely as my dream of a wonderful weekend with Jessica Alba.