1. Does speed matter? The fact is, most of your favorite web services are being hosted outside of Malaysia. This includes pictures you’ve uploaded to your Facebook account, your daily ‘tweets,’ your favourite Youtube videos and more; and these are just some of our day-to-day online activities. Another fact is that no one has ever asked me where those services are hosted. They bear with long loading times because they want those services badly. Do you want mukabuku.com for the sake of it is hosted inside Malaysia and it just loads faster?

2. Let’s look at the differences in loading speed for a services hosted inside and outside Malaysia. First, let’s forget the fact that it takes you 12 hours by plane to reach the UK. Data transfer doesn’t work in that way, it’s much, much faster. The difference shown is in milliseconds. In most cases, the differences are less than 2 seconds, or 200 milliseconds. Does this really make a big difference?

3. Whatever the case, the speed of things is increasing. I started using the Internet via dial-ups, and at the time, that was fast enough for me. Then, in comes Streamyx and broadband, which got me all excited. Then, last week, I got Unify installed and, basically, it keeps getting faster and faster. With every upgrade, the gaps are minimized, and soon, there’ll be no gaps or close to no gaps at all!

The comparison between services hosted inside and outside Malaysia

Facebook servers in the US

Streamyx website hosted in Malaysia

Download of your email and speed to access the website is slower in US server, if the users are from Malaysia

This is quite a common statement I have been hearing, all this while. It is kinda ‘logical’ to think that way knowing that US is geographically located in the far far land from Malaysia. But

1. Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and many sites you are using daily are hosted in US

2. The difference could be in miliseconds…. Yes, ‘mili’. Today, the earth turn faster, who cares?

Uninstall BitDefender

There is a proven theory in the investing world about how one should not put all their eggs in one basket. In a word, diversification. The logic of diversification has been applied to many circles of life, but it is now proving to be good advice in communications, especially email.

Several of the consumer email providers have been trying to service business customers in recent years. Microsoft began with MSN mail, added Hotmail, and now has Live Mail, which accepts subscriptions from individuals as well as micro businesses. Google is another example, where Gmail is offered to both consumers as well as universities and businesses under Google Apps. Having both one’s personal and work email in one account with the same provider might sound like a move that simplifies life, but it exposes additional risks when outages happen.

This is coming to light for users of Gmail today, which is having another unfortunate service outage. (Full Disclosure: We admit we are not perfect either) A tweet message from @eskobarnow hits on this exact point. When your personal email account is unavailable, you can use your work account for important personal emails. Vice versa when your work email is down. However, as @eskobarnow points out, one can be “screwed” when a single outage makes both your work and personal account inaccessible.

These days, the ability to easily import contacts and files from one system to another is rather easy in many cases. Accordingly, the benefits of using the same provider for work and personal email are lessened. Some providers allow two accounts to be viewed in a single inbox view, which is surely more elegant then using forwarding rules to accomplish the same. HOWEVER, what good is it to have all messages from two or more different accounts on the same inbox, when the inbox is not accessible?

Yes, diversification works in the email world just as it does in investments.

So what happened exactly? Isn’t Gmail supposed to have multiple points of failure? Well yes, Gmail has thousands and thousands of overlapping mail servers which can pic up the slack if any one fails because the data is replicated and spread all around. But there are also request servers which do nothing but route the requests for email to whichever server (with the right emails on it) happens to be available.

It tuns out that Google took down some regular email servers for routine maintenance, and because of some recent changes, that overloaded the request servers. Google engineering VP Ben Treynor explains on the Gmail Blog:

At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.

So much for redundancy.

Gmail, which recently passed AOL to become the third largest Web mail service in the U.S., is obviously having some growing pains. A few hours of downtime is not the end of the world, although it might seem like it at the time. It just better not make this a new habit.

Article extracted from http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/01/why-gmail-failed-today/

Good thing Gmail is out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates. (Gmail is the orange line in the chart below). That puts Gmail within sight of the No. 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors. After that there is a wide gulf separating Yahoo Mail and its 106 million monthly unique visitors.

Google launched Gmail only four years ago, and it is now the fourth most popular e-mail service on the Web after Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and Windows Live Hotmail. In 2008, it saw some serious growth in the U.S. Google doesn’t break out the number of Gmail users, but comScore estimates unique monthly visitors. According to the latest stats, the number of people visiting Gmail grew 43 percent last year to 29.6 million. In contrast, the much more massive Yahoo Mail grew 11 percent to 91.9 million uniques. AOL Mail finished in second place for the year with 46.6 million uniques (plus another 7.2 million visitors to AIM Mail), while Hotmail actually declined 5 percent to 43.5 million.

How can Gmail keep growing at such a fast rate, when the other email services seem to be stagnating? Maybe it’s because Gmail is evolving at a faster rate.

If you look at any of the major Web portals by subdomain, the email service always comes out near the top in terms of driving traffic (for instance, see Yahoo’s breakdown). Google never defined itself as a portal, but as it added more and more services beyond basic search, creating deeper connection swith consumers by offering them indispensable apps for free was always part of its strategy. And as much as we like to complain about it, email remains on of the most indispensable communication tools out there.

If you look at the chart below, you can get a sense of how Gmail gained against AOl Mail and Hotmail during 2008 (I left out Yahoo Mail because it is so much larger than the others that it skews the chart). At this rate, Gmail could overtake AOL and Hotmail within the next two years. Yahoo Mail won’t be as easy to catch. Although Yahoo Mail grew only 11 percent last year, it still added more visitors (9.4 million) than Gmail (8.8 million).

Extracted from http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/14/gmail-grew-43-percent-last-year-aol-mail-and-hotmail-need-to-start-worrying/

Special thanks to CNKuan for the compilation!

DNSreport started as a free tools to run your mail server against 100 over tests. The result is a full page report to tell you where goes wrong and why! Anyway, the full report is now stripped-down in the free service. Without subscribing to their paid service, users are able to view a summary of your test result. The result is layman-proof, check it out!

2) Is your mail server running on a small scale setup?

Check the IP address of your Webmail, POP, SMTP and Website. If all of them are identical, your mail server must have installed all these services in one server. Putting all eggs in one basket, bad ideas! You can use the web-based Dig tools from Geektools!

3. Is your mail server hosted in just one or multiple data centre?

Again, based on the Dig tools, you can tell if most of the IP address are in the same class (only the last set of numbers are different). If they are, chances they are in the same data centre. Geographically-dispersed data center provides higher availability support.

4. Do you have a Reverse DNS?

It is not end of the world if you don’t’ Anyway, having one means you email are less likely to be marked as Spam! Use AOL Postmaster’s Reverse DNS Check.

5. The recipient’s email address has some problems, how to verify?

Use Free Email Address Verifier. This email verification tool actually connects to the mail server and checks whether the mailbox exists or not.

Are you a Lazy bugs? Email Pin (pin@1.com.my). He can run the test for you, free of charge!