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Subject:  Google G-mail
Author:   Alex Chudnovsky:   view profile | all posts by this author | add to favourites
Date:   21:35:35 3 April 2004
 
On 09:10:15 3 April 2004 mikegb wrote:
>Surely the point of it it all is to start owning the
>audience it attracts?

Well Google managed to make a lot of money without "owning" anyone, thus showing that you do not _have_ to own to be profitable. Owning your customers could be very costly, as many .com's demonstrated in what is now quickly becoming forgotten tale. Here is my email (reproduced as is) to NetMarketing list (http://www.chinwag.com/) with some calculations:

> [names removed]
> Techie geeks, feel free to give an explanation.

ok, you asked for it ;-)

> How is it logistical / technically possible to
provide potentially over
> 2 million users, with 1GB of space each!!!

Ok, lets do some calculations based on real life
data (you can skip to the end for my estimate
of costs for 1st year running for GMail):

HotMail has got at least 50 mln email accounts, I
am pretty sure the figure is well above
100 mln, however lets take "mere" 30 mln accounts.
Lets count it in terms of 300 Gb IDE
disks that cost around £150 (ex VAT). You can't
really go higher in terms of capacity per hard
disk without getting into _very_ expensive
territory.

( 30,000,000 x 1Gb ) / 300 Gb = 100,000 hard
drives required

This will have to be distributed among at least
3-5 data centers, so we have to increase
the above by appropriate factor, lets say 5, so we
now need 500,000 hard drives @
£150 each (and you wont save much because high end
drives are expensive and margins are
low in that business) you have to spent £
75,000,000 ($150 mln USD) just to get started.

Is it all? No! You have to host these hard drives
on servers. Generally speaking its 4 drives
per small 1U server that Google is using, so we
will need that many servers:

500,000 / 4 = 125,000 servers needed.

Last time I checked Google had 10k+ servers used
for searching, so they will have to increase their
capacity by 12+ times, now lets look at costs of servers.
Again last time I checked Google was using pretty
cheap hardware, but you won't go much lower than
£500 per 1U server (without hard drives):

125,000 * £500 = £62,500,000 EXTRA

Still with me? Ok, then there is rackspace rent
(this is where you keep your servers).
1 rack will host 47 (might be wrong there) 1U
servers:

125,000 / 47 = 2,659 racks needed, have not got
exact figures (please feel free to correct me) at hand but
annual lease for 1 rack in a decent place can easily cost £10k pa, so total rent is:

2,659 * £1,0000 = £26,590,000 (thats every year!)

Sub-total for the first year of running:
£164,090,000 ($300+ mln)

And then there is bandwidth (and lots of it!), but
I can't be [WordLeftToYourImagination] to do any
calculations on Friday evening as I doubt anyone would still be with me at this point :-)

So, I can see that this idea will either cost a
LOT of money _OR_ they will severely cut 1Gb
quota. Would it be worth doing this service? I am not
convinced it will be, it will sure as hell require
a lot of computing resources that will cost pretty penny,
maybe thats why they want to float, ie need money
to "invest"? ;-)

Anyway seriously (for those who still here) - on
the basis of what was publicly available
I do not think its a good idea even though I
understand Google's desire to get to talk to
customers directly. I think 1Gb limit will be
abused a lot and will effectively be out of reach
for most people due to various traffic limitations
(like you can only email 10Mb a day).

Google should focus on improving its search
engine - no disrespect to legit white
hat SEOs but widespread "search engine
optimisation" is leading to poor
or even totally faked results being well
noticeable.

regards,

Alex

P.S. Just in case Sergey Brin will be reading this
email: Privet i udachi ;-)

P.P.S. Good thing they released information about
this GMail thing on 1st of April - they could
always call it a joke...
 
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  • Google G-mail, Dave Chaffey, 1 Apr 17:42
    Looks like there's another web-based mail service for e-mail marketers to test their creative / HTML coding against: I see from SearchDay: http://searchenginewatch.com/searc ...
    • Re: Google G-mail, Ashley , 1 Apr 18:40
      I also hear that Google are secretly developing a special 'adult' search engine? I've had difficulties finding it but apparently its called G-spot. Well, it is April 1st ...
    • Google G-mail, Alex Chudnovsky, 2 Apr 13:00
      On 17:42:15 1 April 2004 Dave Chaffey wrote: > I will certainly be signing up since it offers the facility to > search 1000Mb of e-mail for content using Google search > algo ...
      • Google G-mail, TallTroll, 2 Apr 17:10
        >and so will warez traders who will GMail being a very good >place to store big files that they trade online. Will it? If I were a "dodgy content" provider of whatever stripe, ...
      • Google G-mail, TallTroll, 2 Apr 17:11
        >and so will warez traders who will GMail being a very good >place to store big files that they trade online. Will it? If I were a "dodgy content" provider of whatever stripe, ...
        • Google G-mail, Alex Chudnovsky, 2 Apr 18:06
          I am highly sceptical that Google will be able to sustain this 1Gb offer unless they introduce some pretty draconian rules on daily traffic usage, thus limiting potential impact of ...
          • Google G-mail, mikegb , 3 Apr 09:10
            >Sorry but I am very sceptical about this feature being >anything but distraction from their core competency - >enabling highly relevant up-todate searching. Surely the point ...
            • Google G-mail, Dave Chaffey, 3 Apr 15:47
              I'm with you on this Mike. As within MSN and Yahoo!, Google will introduce a Gmail+ paid-for service and no doubt a raft of other fee-based services. It will also get more Adwor ...
            • Google G-mail, Alex Chudnovsky, 3 Apr 21:35
              On 09:10:15 3 April 2004 mikegb wrote: >Surely the point of it it all is to start owning the >audience it attracts? Well Google managed to make a lot of money without "ownin ...
              • Google G-mail, M. Johansson, 4 Apr 09:30
                Hmm. £26,590,000 per year distributed on 30m accounts. That's a cost of £0.88 per user. If we assume an average adwords worth of 0.1£ (it's probably higher) that means that each ...
              • Google G-mail, Dan Zambonini, 4 Apr 20:31
                > ( 30,000,000 x 1Gb ) / 300 Gb = 100,000 hard >drives required The calculation doesn't take into account that most email (plain text) can probably be compressed, for storage p ...
                • Google G-mail, Alex Chudnovsky, 5 Apr 07:14
                  On 20:31:33 4 April 2004 Dan Zambonini wrote: >The calculation doesn't take into account that most email >(plain text) can probably be compressed, for storage >purposes, to abo ...
                  • Google G-mail, Dan Zambonini, 5 Apr 10:03
                    >Indeed it does not take that into account. I however also >did not take into account other factors that there will be >300 mln accounts rather than 30 mln, which would negate ...
                    • Google G-mail, Alex Chudnovsky, 5 Apr 14:49
                      On 10:03:55 5 April 2004 Dan Zambonini wrote: >I guess there are far too many variables to accurately >estimate it! Yeah I agree - thats why I tried to keep it simple, eith ...
                      • Google G-mail, Dan Zambonini, 5 Apr 15:05
                        That's extremely interesting... Although there's been much 'April Fools/Not April Fools' speculation, and Google themselves denying an April Fools connection, I can't help not ...
                        • Google G-mail, Alex Chudnovsky, 5 Apr 16:10
                          Well, it looks legit to me - all what I'd expect from it is shown, very Google like too and it shows 1Gb box size :) Note AdWords panel no the right about tax software and how i ...
                        • Re: Google G-mail more screenshots, Alex Chudnovsky, 5 Apr 17:17
                          More screen shots here: http://fury.com/article/1990.php ...
                          • Re: Google G-mail more screenshots, Dan Zambonini, 5 Apr 17:21
                            >More screen shots here: > >http://fury.com/article/1990.php Looks like it's definitely real then! I wonder why the logo is so uninspiring; surely a million and one other pro ...
    • Google G-mail, Loz, 3 Apr 21:33
      I'm fairly happy with Yahoo! Mail for my personal account as it allows me to check my inbox via wap. But I'm always at 95% storage space used. For another email account I use www.f ...
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