“The words ‘too busy’ shouldn’t be in a waitresses vocabulary.”

This isn’t a post about that, but I thought of it when I was told today on two separate occasions that the files I was sending were too big. We’re talking 7 MB files, not gigs and gigs of video. 7 MB.

The words ‘the file is too big’ should not be in anyone’s vocabulary.

Are you running into problems because of your archaic email system can’t handle files over 1mb? Stuck in a world of 100mb email quotas? Fondly remember the days of Sneakernet?

Here are a few tools to help you.

Amazon S3

I know you’re stunned that I’d bring up S3, but seriously, it has unlimited storage, public availability and is super low cost. Need to use S3? There are a ton of tools, such as S3Fox, Transmit, and CloudBerry.

I’ve put up presentation materials on S3 to allow people to download them. It’s great because I don’t have to worry about storage or bandwidth or email bounces, and it costs me literally pennies to serve. No brainer.

Drop.Io

Drop.io lets you, for free, host any type of file up to 100 MB. You can create a drop and let people download, upload, share and more. You can send files right to your drop via a custom email address, or call a number and save voice messages. It’s a neat system – and if you need more collaboration, there are paid plans that offer more storage space and features.

DropBox

If you’re like me, and find yourself either emailing yourself files or putting them on a flash drive to take home at the end of the day, then Dropbox is for you. It allows you to sync a folder between any number of computers (and your mobile devices) as well as a web interface. Users get 2GB of storage for free, with paid plans adding more space. I’m a huge fan.

What’s neat about DropBox is that there’s also a public folder, where you can make some of your files accessible via URL. Here’s an example picture of some nachos I took. Don’t those look good? DropBox totally served that yummy pic to you.

In the end, there are many ways, including the ones above and others like YouSentIt that make problems of sending out large files largely a problem of the past.

Now, do you also have this virtual host set up: http://yourschool.edu. I see some hands, but not all.

Those of you don’t have your no-www virtual host set up, please do it now. Nothing’s more annoying then quickly typing in an institution’s address and getting nothing, or worse an error message from the browser. This configuration change should take you or your systems about 30 seconds to complete.

Your users will thank you. I will thank you as well.

In this edition, we’ll look at reasons to leave your hosting on campus.

1. Security
Your campus network may have more safeguards in place then a hosting company when it comes to firewalls, network monitoring, filtering, etc. Most hosting companies I’m sure keep a very close on eye on these types of things, but if you are nervous about access to your data, keep it on-campus. However, if you machine is compromised, hosting on-campus may give intruders access to other devices on your network. If someone 0wnz your hosting account, the attack should not affect other campus systems.

2. Location, Location, Location
As they say in real estate, sometimes the best feature about a house is the location. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to walk down the hall or across campus to get at your server. You may need to change a backup tape or run a quick software update. Depending on your IT setup, you may not have access to your server directly.

3. Baby got back(up)
At least at my school, every night a backup is made of my server to tape, and several tapes are kept on a rotation. Hosting companies backup data (make sure they do!), but restoring that backup may be time-intensive and cost money. It may behoove you to have a hot spare, either a server or data set somewhere you can get at easily. I’ve started keeping a gzipped tarball at S3. You can never be too sure.

4. Bandwidth
Bandwidth is at a premium on many campuses. By moving your site off-campus, you reduce the amount of traffic coming in and going out, but you’ve got to be aware that you may see an increase in bandwidth usage as your campus community must now leave the borders of your network to get to your site. One answer may be keeping your intranet internal and your public-facing site off-campus.

5. ..and the law won
At the end of the day, your administration may just say no. Sadly, that’s the way things go sometimes. If you’re really adamant about moving your site, gather up some additional data and take it back for approval.

Photo by Digital:Slurp

This week, I started a list of stuff to do this summer. It’s a great time to tackle some larger projects, and of the largest I’m looking at is deciding where to host my school’s website. The service agreements run out on my on-campus hosted hardware this month, so I’ve got to decide if I shell out big bucks for new servers or move the website off-site.

I’ve been thinking of a few reasons to move the site off-campus. In a future post, I’ll also detail five reasons to leave your web server on-campus.

So, why move your hosting off-campus?

1. 24/7/365 Support
We’re a small school with a limited team to manage our server farm. Sometimes I need to call someone at 3 in the morning and have them at the machine ready to fix the issue. I’m not diminishing the knowledge or dedication of our IT staff, they do amazing stuff, but off-hours support is a challenge.

2. Emergency Response and Availability
Having your site prepared for an emergency is a big topic right now. If an emergency happens on your campus, having your site off-site may be beneficial for a few reasons. First, you are taking the crush of traffic off your campus and onto your web host. Second, if your network is affected by a weather emergency, the website can still be used as an information resource, especially if you have a setup like one that uses a third-party tool, like Jott.

3. Reduction in bandwidth usage on campus
Our site serves a lot of traffic. I’ve been slowing migrating content to S3, but there’s still a lot of traffic going out over our pipes. Moving the site would reduce the load a bit, though I’ll talk about a potential downside to this in the next post.

4. Dolla Dolla Bill Y’all
Hosting off-site can also make economic sense. If you are buying, say, two servers and associated maintenance plans, this can easily cost over $10,000, and that’s before you start adding in software costs, backup costs and more. By hosting off-site, you are letting your hosting company worry about the infrastructure and you are spreading the cost of hosting over several years.

5. The kids grow so up so fast
For some institutions, adding server power is as easy as turning on a new server, tweaking the load balancer and you’re good to go. For a small institution like mine, this is much harder to do. Hosting off site allows you to grow and add capacity at lower cost. Doing so on-campus would incur additional cost and time. There are several hosts now, like Mosso, that will scale your site on the fly to handle the load during emergencies, Diggs, etc.