It use to just take someone that was willing to work long hard hours and maybe some start up capital to build a truly profitable business. Whatever business the entrepreneur was going to go into they did not have to have 20 years of experience working in the industry, however in many cases that helped. I have a close friend who went to college and graduated with a business degree. Other than odd college jobs this friend did not have much of a resume. He knew one thing; he did not want to work for “the man”, and he was willing to work his butt of to make it happen. After much research he raised a small amount of capital and went into the fast food business. Today he has grown the business rather successfully. All this friend had was a passion and a good head on his shoulders.

The New Skill Set Needed

The above example is getting harder and harder with the move to the web. To launch even a basic business you often have to surround yourself with domain experts in all sorts of different niches. If you want to compete on the web. You need to hire a designer, web programmer, mobile programmer, sysadmin, web marketer, experts on understanding your market, and more. You can not just sit on a busy street count the people going by to understand your market. You can not just lease a space and open your doors. You have to surround yourself with domain experts that often are not cheap. So a good head on your shoulders and some start up capital turns into a bunch of people with good heads on their shoulders and tons of capital.

How Do We Solve The Problem?

The problem I want to solve; Is how do we move the world to the web but keep the “all you need is a dollar and a dream” way of business alive? I know there is not a simple answer and as the Facebook generation morphs into business people they will already be hitting the streets with a leg up on my generation and older generations, but I would like to find better ways to bridge the gap.

As a side note, I realize this is a very general topic. I realize there are many case studies of the web making live easy for first time entrepreneurs. However, looking around most of the successful web companies are started by people with tech backgrounds. I want to find better ways for non-tech people to start great businesses without tons of money.

I now have an account with both companies. I use them both and over all am very happy with both. However, Linode tends to standout just a little bit more. After reading this blog posting Slicehost Vs. Linode I started to do some performance testing of my own. Bang for your buck Linode wins and performance wise Linode wins. My slice host account is 512 megs and my linode is 360 megs. In my testing I never used more ram that 250megs so this test is valid.

The first thing I wanted to look at was the 32bit vs. 64bit kernel memory issue. The 64bit kernel takes twice as much memory. So Slicehost does not offer a 32bit kernel so you are stuck wasting more memory. Here are my results with both accounts loaded nearly identical.

### Linode ###
root@stowe:/var/www# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 360 348 11 0 5 270
-/+ buffers/cache: 73 286
Swap: 255 0 255

### Slicehost ###
root@slicehost:~# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 512 461 50 0 16 303
-/+ buffers/cache: 141 370
Swap: 1023 0 1023

Both these have a web server with the same configs and about a gig of mysql data loaded into the database. They are running idle.

The next thing I wanted to look at was over all bandwidth and network speeds. So I did a very simple wget test. I was wget on a remote machine 6meg mp3.

### Slice Host
spicer@jam$ wget slicehost/satan.mp3
–08:32:46– http://slicehost/satan.mp3
=> `satan.mp3.3′
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 5,721,420 (5.5M) [audio/mpeg]

100%[=======================================================================================================================================>] 5,721,420 1.24M/s ETA 00:00

08:32:51 (1.16 MB/s) – `satan.mp3.3′ saved [5721420/5721420]

### Linode ##
spicer@jam$ wget linode/satan.mp3
–08:35:31– http://linode/satan.mp3
=> `satan.mp3.4′
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 5,721,420 (5.5M) [audio/mpeg]

100%[=======================================================================================================================================>] 5,721,420 2.69M/s

I ran the test many times and did conclude that Linode was about 1M/s faster. I am not sure where my slice host node is so this test might be thrown off by the location of the different data centers.

Next and lastly, I did http_load tests. http_load got a php script that loaded a much into memory and then printed it out.

## Linode ##
spicer@jam$ ./http_load -parallel 100 -seconds 10 url.txt
365 fetches, 100 max parallel, 5.57176e+07 bytes, in 10.0029 seconds
152651 mean bytes/connection
36.4896 fetches/sec, 5.57017e+06 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 270.134 mean, 448.058 max, 71.148 min
msecs/first-response: 353.144 mean, 745.521 max, 76.143 min
HTTP response codes:
code 200 — 365

## Slice Host
spicer@jam$ ./http_load -parallel 100 -seconds 10 url.txt
42 fetches, 100 max parallel, 6.72844e+06 bytes, in 10.001 seconds
160201 mean bytes/connection
4.19959 fetches/sec, 672779 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 59.8185 mean, 60.085 max, 59.535 min
msecs/first-response: 234.224 mean, 582.46 max, 68.179 min
HTTP response codes:
code 200 — 42

Once again Linode was just a little bit better.

Over all Linode is a better bang for your buck, seems to have as good or better stats than Slicehost. Linode also offers more options with a much better control panel. If you liked this blog posting please feel free to use my referral code to signup Sign Up For Linode

Lastly, one of the things that held me back from a dedicated service is I hate being the admin of email and other web services. So I keep a shared hosting account to manage my email. Allowing me only to run the services I really need full control over.

PiWik’s goal is to take Google Analytics and make it open source. The user runs it on their own server; which means they control how and where the data is stored. It also allows the user to write plugins to add extra features. It is written in Php and Mysql.

I have sat down many times and thought I need to write a replacement to Google Analytics but never have. Today I said I was going to do it but just before I got started I tried one more google search and found PiWik. I instead spend the rest of the day installing it on all my sites. My major problems with Google Analytics is I can not download the data for further processing and it is not real time. With PiWik I own the data it is already in my database and I can do anything I want with it and the data is processed in real time. Only thing that Google has that PiWik does not have, that really matters to me is the ability to pin point the city and state the visitor is coming from. PiWik has a plugin that is the next best thing GeoIP. I have a feeling this plugin will get better and better as time goes on.

Over all I am very happy now. I control my data. I get real time stats. Thank you PiWik and keep up the good work!!!