Web hosting with statistical capacity guarantee

We propose a new web hosting service with statistical capacity guarantee. By using this service, each customer subscribes to a certain capacity; that is, the speed that the web hosting system processes and transfers the web content, for his/her web site. The system provides the requested capacity to each web site with a probability of p where p is a given quality-of-service (QoS) requirement. To fulfill this QoS requirement, the system measures the traffic statistics of each web site and manages statistical resource sharing among the web sites. As a result, the system can better utilize its resources for hosting more web sites. The proposed web hosting service involves two new decision problems: (1) an admission control problem in which the system decides whether it can accommodate a new web site and (2) an assignment problem in which the system assigns web sites to server clusters to fulfill the QoS requirement. We have formulated these decision problems and designed efficient algorithms as solutions. The simulation results demonstrate that web hosting systems that use the proposed service can host significantly more web sites via statistical resource sharing among web sites.