Wanna burst up to 300mbps? Try 1and1

I've said this before, 1and1's network is superb! I'm not sure what's the pool of bandwidth that they got, but what I got is more than enough. They have peerings with providers like Lycos, Yahoo!, Trustnet and many more. Their network exceeds my expectation.

For the past 4-5 days, one Linux box that I'm handling has been very busy. I'm also keeping an eye on it, I'm afraid that it may break anytime or maybe some services will just stop as it has been very busy lately. The Linux server works as HTTP server, the DB server is also on a Linux platform but it's not fully unitilized. Let's call this HTTP server as 'redmate' - that's actually the hostname assigned (redmate.internal) to the server. =)

redmate has been fully utilized for the past few days.

• Memory usage is hitting up to 90%
• Load average is around 20. It's a dual quad-core box.
• Some spikes on Disk I/O have been noticed too.

But what surprises me is the bandwidth usage. It's hitting up to 300 megabit, I thought it can only burst up to 100 mbps? Well not really.

Kansas vs Kentucky - resulting to 200mbps burst of bandwidth

Today is NCAA Men's Basketball finals, it's Kansas Jayhawks vs Kentucky Wildcats.
One of the server that I'm handling is hosting a webzine for NCAA Men's Basketball. Though it has no video streaming feature of the current match, the site is bursting up to 200mpbs of bandwidth for the past hour.

Wow! I thought 1and1 is shaping the bandwidth for dedicated servers to burst only up to 100mbps?
Does this mean that we can burst up to 1gbps? We'll never know unless we'll experience it, so I might do some stress testing within this month.

Okay, let me go back to the game. It's 2nd quarter now.

1and1's Managed Server sucks!

Why I said so? Because you're not given with a root access on the server.
There are many providers out there that focus on managed service, yet they give the customer with a root access. I mean, you are leasing the server from them. You're the one who's paying it monthly or so, then why can't you access fully? Why are you given with a limited user account?

Uhm, or maybe the customer is not given with root access because they are not using a physical server for it? Perhaps they're using a VM like Xen for that? Whatever!

A true managed service must offer the following:

• root access for the customer
• monitoring of the server (I know this is common, they have this)
• monitoring of the services on the server
• monitoring of the server's hardware resources
• bandwidth monitoring and graphing
• disk IO monitoring and graphing
• mysql monitoring and graphing
• httpd monitoring and graphing
• regular security audit
• vulnerability assessment
• DDOS protection
• highly designed firewall
• and of course, great technical support!

The only thing that's there with the Managed Server of 1and1 is the monitoring of the server.
If you're looking for a Managed Server, there's Rackspace (expensive? sure they are), Liquid Web, Softlayer,Layered Tech and some smaller players like WebNX, Quadra Net and many others.

I would say avoid 1and1's Managed Server.