Hostworks MD on My School, NBN, content

Managing director of hosting provider Hostworks, Paul Mullen, sat down to talk to ZDNet.com.au about what happened when My School went down, storage versus speed and Hostwork's development of a Content Delivery Network to provide hosting requirements for traditional media channels' online sites.

Paul Mullen, managing director, Hostworks
(Credit: Hostworks)

With offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, Hostworks provides video streaming capabilities, peak load management and transaction management for clients including Ticketek, Jetstar, ABC Corporation, and Channels Nine and Ten. The company also had the job of hosting the controversial My School website, which ranks schools according to test results.

The site, launched 28 January, was set up to manage 1.75 million hits per day, but with over 9 million hits on its first day, the site was unable to cope with the demand.

Mullen told ZDNet.com.au that the reason for the widely reported "crash" was simply a matter of demand seriously exceeding supply.

Hostworks provided hosting capabilities to its client, IT consultancy SEMA, which worked with the Federal Government's Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) on the site, according to Mullen.

"How do you estimate what the demand for users is likely to be? If you think of the government, working with our client SEMA, they would've put together what they believe demand was going to be and it just way exceeded that," said Mullen "The site was never down; it was just full with users using it. So it just meant whatever that capacity was, when that was reached, it just meant other users couldn't get in at that particular time. We increased the capacity as rapidly as we could in the time frame and it has now settled down and it's working quite well."

Storage versus speed

Mullen also had definite views on another brainchild of the current government, the National Broadband Network (NBN). He believed that increased storage may be more effective for content distribution than increasing network speeds as is proposed by the massive fibre project.

"You could argue that storage is a real substitute for bandwidth, so you don't necessarily need NBN to drive this," Mullen told ZDNet.com.au. "I think when the NBN gets built — and it's not happening tomorrow, it's happening sometime into the future — technology is moving ahead very, very quickly, set-top boxes are getting a lot smarter and a lot more capable of managing content and they are able to store that content based on the users' demand ... it can be sent overnight, stored on your device and you could be able to watch that whenever you choose to, or buy it."

Hostworks has developed a soon-to-be-launched content delivery network, to distribute its customers' content, including data-intensive video on demand viewing more efficiently, without the need for NBN speeds.

Hostworks provides hosting capabilities for studios online viewing channels, including Channel Ten's Masterchef, Channel Nine's "catch-up" viewer and ABC's iView. "We're very good at handling video in those online environments," Mullen said. "We're also very, very good at peak load management and by peak load. I mean if you take some of the video shows [of broadcasters] such as Nine, Channel Ten for that matter and the ABC, there's a huge demand for that content, and Masterchef being a case in point, we're one of the very few organisations that can actually manage that peak load."

Mullen believed storage-rich set-top boxes would increase in significance as distribution tools for traditional media forms.

"There's three ways in which you can deliver video content to the consumer," he said. "One is you can deliver it online via the browser, and all the networks are doing that. The second is delivery to a mobile device, and that is growing, and I think with the introduction of the iPhone, and other easy-user type devices, that will only grow and the third one is delivering content to the set-top box over the internet."