Pricing issues in web-hosting services

This paper considers a web–hosting application where a web server hosts a website for a client organisation. Users that access this web server are sensitive to the quality of service (QoS) they receive (such as response time and request loss). In the current state of practice, web–hosting services charge clients only based on the amount of information stored but do not negotiate any quality of service details. This is changing as users expect good QoS. From a cost standpoint, these web server farms consume a lot of electric power which needs to be incorporated in the price charged to clients. In addition, the internet domain in the web server farm vicinity experiences severe congestion. This paper considers two main parameters that the web servers tune, namely, caching strategy which is a one–time decision and the processing speed to run the web server which can be tuned from time to time. A detailed methodology is presented which web servers can incorporate to make the above decisions. Based on the dynamics between the three players (users, clients and web servers), it is shown that the price and web server settings could both either stabilise or oscillate between several points, indicating chaos.