Web site performance is critical because visitors are more likely to leave sites the longer they have to wait for pages to load. For mom-and-pop businesses without any real internal knowledge on how to design fast web pages, this could mean losing business to larger competitors whose sites perform better. And while a CDN won’t cure bad web design, getting a page’s images to load faster can definitely make a difference.

Jason Rosenthal

GoDaddy’s new service, called Website Accelerator, launched on Tuesday for users of the company’s “ultimate” hosting plan and, President of Products and Technology Jason Rosenthal told me, is designed for relatively unsophisticated sites and users. It’s optimized for sites that are fairly straight HTML and maybe a bit image-heavy, rather than dynamic, personalized sites that rely heavily on database interaction. The GoDaddy CDN also starts intelligently caching parts of customers’ web pages with just one push of a button rather than requiring them to go through and tag which content they want housed on a CDN providers servers.

Because GoDaddy handles many domain and web-hosting for many customers, Director of Product Marketing Eric Moyer said, the company is able to optimally route traffic without involving third parties. Early users have seen improvement anywhere between 25 percent and 100 percent, in part because the routing process remains entirely within GoDaddy’s network. Rosenthal said the CDN spans several major population and traffic centers throughout the United States, but that the company will expand it internationally at some point.

GoDaddy is also providing its CDN users with metrics to see how their sites are performing and will offer suggestions on how they might improve performance even more. Moyer said the company partnered with webpagetest.org as the backend for gauging performance improvements.

Really, though, the CDN is just part of a bigger push by GoDaddy to transition from a simple domain and web host into a full-service cloud provider that’s focused on users without software-development or systems-administration knowledge. Yes, it already tried and failed at offering its users something akin to Amazon Web Services and other popular infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, but Rosenthal chalks that up to poor judgment about what GoDaddy’s users really wanted in terms of server-level control.

When it killed its Cloud Servers offering, GoDaddy said it would use those technologies and the lessons learned to build cloud offerings better suited to its users. Rosenthal said Website Accelerator, which has been in development about for about six months, is the product of this plan. “This is really fruit that came out of our Cloud Servers product,” he said. ” … What we heard loud and clear from our customers is ‘I don’t want to know what makes my web site go fast, I just want it to work.’”

Presumably, that means they’re also not interested in looking at other services, such as Yottaa, that claim to be less-expensive CDN options than what giant CDN providers such as Akamai provide. It’s possible they’d work even better, but they would require a greater effort and cost than just sticking with GoDaddy.

GoDaddy actually brought in Rosenthal from Ning.com to help with its transition, and in December it hired former Yahoo and Microsoft executive Blake Irving as CEO. In November, GoDaddy launched a new service to convert customers’ web sites into mobile sites and discussed plans to start offering higher-value cloud applications, as well.

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Karl Freund, the VP of marketing for Calxeda, says the company has shipped about 3,000 nodes and 130 systems although none are deployed in production environments yet. He expects the first production deployments to occur at the end of the second quarter of 2013. But most of the conversation was about how ARM-based systems could be used today in the storage market. Not just for cold storage such as Amazon’s Glacier or Facebook’s photo storage effort, but even for the big storage systems for scale out storage and enterprise class storage appliances. Named customers who are evaluating the systems include Scale.io, Gluster and Inktank, the storage startup backed by Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame that is commercializing Ceph.

There are more, notes Freund, (pictured) who says that when Calxeda servers make it into production environments, they will likely be deployed first in a storage capacity, as storage customers don’t care if the chips are 64-bit compatible. For now, ARM-based systems are stuck only able to address less memory because ARM only has a 32-bit capable core design. Next year ARM will have a 64-bit capable design and systems will be built around them in 2014 (maybe even late 2013). Calxeda plans its 64-bit capable SoC for 2014.

But Calxeda isn’t waiting and in storage, it’s also not focusing on power consumption — the initial draw for ARM-based servers in the scale out data center. For the storage world, where spinning hard drives tends to suck huge quantities of electricity, adding a low-power has a negligable affect on the consumption of an overall system. However, Calxeda boasts that popping in more of its systems on a chip (SoC) are both cheaper and make for faster information transfer and retrieval.

Its tests show roughly a 4X improvement in IOPs for a rack of Calxeda SoCs versus x86-based systems. Adding Calexeda’s SoCs also cuts complexity because the entire system of processing and networking components are integrated on the SoC, and the terabit-plus fabric between cores also offers more network capacity between cores in a system –the so-called east-west networking traffic.

As the market for scale out computing, storage and networking changes the demands made on IT equipment, Calxeda and others are seeing an opportunity that may have begun in servers and the cloud computing environment, but certainly isn’t stopping there. No wonder Intel is trying to catch up with chips of its own. So far, it’s recently announced new Atom-based chips haven’t made the cut for most customers I’ve spoken with (the lack of integration of the entworking and processing hardware is a problem), but in 2014 it will have a new, integrated SoC as well. Then, the competition will really get interesting.

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Jason Rosenthal

New head of products and technology Jason Rosenthal told me GoDaddy is trying to evolve from being just a marketing and support company. It wants to grow a third leg focused on products and technology, and it thinks mobile is the perfect delivery vehicle for those aspirations. Rosenthal has spearheaded major strategic efforts before, including at his previous gig as Ning.com CEO, where he got rid of the social-network-creation company’s freemium business just a month into his tenure.

It’s mobile-first for GoDaddy

Whatever the rationale behind that decision, though, it’s difficult to argue with his focus on mobile at GoDaddy. Mobile device shipments have surpassed PC shipments, and even small businesses can no longer afford to ignore that reality. Consumers increasingly want to surf the web and do business on tablets and smartphones, and if it takes too long for a big clunky site to load, or if it’s too difficult to navigate a poorly designed site best viewed on a 27-inch screen, they’ll go elsewhere.

So, on Thursday, GoDaddy announced its new program for letting customers easily create their own mobile websites or convert their existing sites into mobile one (in fact, the conversion is free for the company’s approximately 700,000 premium Website Builder customers). Customers can customize their new mobile sites if they wish, but thanks to a partnership with mobile-conversion specialist DudaMobile, the idea is that GoDaddy’s customer base of landscapers, shop owners and others can make the transition with a click of the mouse.

However, Rosenthal said, “It’s really the first step down the road of what you’re going to see from GoDaddy in the future … This is going to be a year of mobile for GoDaddy.”

Up next: applications

In fact, the real first step in GoDaddy’s planned evolution might have occurred in July when the company bought Outright, creator of a Software-as-a-Service application for financial management. That helped the company establish a presence in Silicon Valley and also gave it the first in what sounds like a series of SaaS applications designed to make life easier all around for GoDaddy small-business customers, not just when it comes to hosting websites.

The accounting app will be first, Rosenthal said, and we should expect to see a big product announcement every couple of months through 2013. And they’ll have a largely mobile-first bent. He thinks a comparison to Intuit’s suite of cloud-based applications is fair, only he noted that GoDaddy’s offerings will be built from the ground up for mobile devices (running to the desktop to change a website or do simple accounting will soon start to feel “clunky,” he said) and will be less focused on the back office and more focused on helping manage users’ web presences.

About that Cloud Servers issue …

Lest anyone get suspicious of GoDaddy’s ability to follow through on its SaaS transition after the company delivered a swift death to its cloud computing infrastructure business in October, Rosenthal said they can rest easy. The company realized after launching the cloud computing offering that most customers really didn’t get it, which is a problem for a company that is, as Rosenthal described it, trying to take the complexity out of technology. Applications and services, not infrastructure, are the way to achieve that goal.

But, he added, the whole of GoDaddy is built upon the same cloud architecture that had been externalized as the Cloud Servers offering. And the company has completely separated the web experience from the mobile one, open access to its various services via API and is constantly testing backend configurations to find out what will work best for its mobile customers. If GoDaddy is going to deliver on its mission of giving customers websites and tools that work so their businesses don’t suffer (save for the occasional outage, presumably, which can happen to anyone), Rosenthal said, it all starts with the platform.

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The email highlights GoDaddy’s focus on winning small business customers and the apparent ill fit of Cloud Servers for that goal. “After reviewing all of our hosting products, we decided to double-down on our shared hosting and site builder products and invest to win in these spaces,” it reads. “As part of this focus, we will discontinue Cloud Servers as a stand-alone product.”

GoDaddy has confirmed the decision in an email to me via a statement from CIO Auguste Goldman:

 ”We are focused on SMBs and SMBs don’t use this product the way we are offering it now. So, in the weeks ahead, it won’t be a stand-alone product in and of itself. However, we plan to continue developing cloud technology into our other hosted products.

“We will continue to support existing Cloud Server customers in a variety of ways.”

This type of decision is one of the classic risks of cloud computing, where a service might be here today and gone tomorrow. Services rarely shut down immediately, thus leaving users without a chance to reclaim their data or code and move it elsewhere (well, except in the case of MegaUpload), but an eventual transition to a new service is still necessary nonetheless. Recent examples of cloud services shutting down include Motorola’s ZumoDrive cloud-storage service, the Slicehost on-demand servers service (by Rackspace) and, nearly, TextDrive (by Joyent), which was saved at the last minute.

The GoDaddy email mirrors Goldman’s statement on this issues, saying the company is “identifying the best ways to support customers who need to transition from Cloud Servers. Once we identify these support paths, we’ll notify them of the product update.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Lucie Lang.

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But as Microsoft tries to sell startups on its services, is this deal enough to turn the tide of startups away from Amazon and Rackspace? Azure has been live since Feb 2010, and despite some big customers touted by Redmond, in general Azure isn’t a name I hear often from startups. Patrick Riley, director of business development at TechStars, notes that as of 2010 (about 18 months ago) 35 percent of the incubator’s startups used Amazon’s services, 30 percent used Rackspace, 20 percent used Media Temple and 5 percent used SoftLayer. The rest fell under the “other category, which may or may not include Azure, which had launched earlier that year.

Getting startups on board is important for the future of a cloud business. While enterprise may be where the big bucks are, enterprise cloud deployments tend to be a small chunk of their IT operations and they may never commit fully to the cloud. Meanwhile, startups are risky, but where the growth is. In many cases, a startup using an outside infrastructure or platform as a service still has to design its architecture for that service, so convincing a startup to launch on your platform is a step toward gaining a customer for the life of that application (some will last longer than others). Additionally, because people tend to favor “the devil they know over the devil they don’t,” once an engineer is hooked on AWS for example, it may be much harder to get him to use Rackspace or Azure at his or her next job.

Azure has tried to broaden its base in recent months by adding new support for languages, such as Node.js, which has become a hot one for web developers, while rivals in both the infrastructure and platforms as a service space are racing to add features that will appeal to the enterprise. When asked how many startups are on Azure, Doug Free, a Microsoft spokesman, said that there are “thousands using it,” but he couldn’t give me a percentage. Microsoft added discounts to Azure as part of BizSpark program for startups when Azure launched, but this offer with TechStars is far broader and more significant in terms of how much it provides for startups.

Azure is said to be a quality platform, so perhaps all it will take for startups to hop on Microsoft’s cloud is an introduction during their formative weeks. If so, then this deal could help Microsoft make strides with tomorrow’s big cloud customers.

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As target data center availability nears 100 percent, each small increase in availability requires an order of magnitude increase in complexity, which further increases depending on the level of data center. For instance, running a Tier IV facility is vastly more complex than running a Tier III facility, running a Tier III facility is more complex than a Tier II facility, and so on. So, naturally, each availability improvement is more difficult and complex to achieve at each corresponding data center level. As a result, many leading cloud providers with in-house data centers are actually operating at a Tier II facility level.

Keeping all of this in mind, public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers face one of two choices: either build in-house facilities, or co-locate at externally administered data centers. Most large cloud providers choose the latter, but the choice has a cascading impact on a cloud provider’s operational abilities and strategy, which is often overlooked.

Pros of in-house data center ownership

1. High degree of control over facilities
2. Guaranteed capacity and easier expansion planning (within one building anyway)
3. Potential for greater power efficiency through specialization
4. Easier security management with a single-tenant facility

Clearly greater control means that a cloud provider that owns and runs its own data center facilities can more easily plan capacity and expansion needs as appropriate. Likewise, the ability to control low-level systems within the data center can enable a high degree of specialization for its particular use case, which can result in significant power savings. Similarly, metrics such as power density limitations can be determined in-house by the cloud provider. Google  and Facebook are two companies that are excellent examples of highly efficiently run data centers that also take a very transparent approach to their facilities with the Open Compute Initiative.

Cons of in-house data center ownership

1. Limited geographic expansion abilities
2. More limited connectivity options
3. Tendency to choose locations away from premium areas and network hubs
4. Tendency to run lower-tier facilities
5. Distracting to the core business
6. Very capital intensive

One of the most profound effects that choosing to run and own data centers has on a cloud provider is its strategic direction. Purchasing and running a data center is a massive undertaking that requires significant amounts of capital investment up front. This means that it is difficult for cloud providers to expand geographically in a timely manner. What’s more, building permissions and power supply contracts can be time consuming to secure. There is also a tendency to want to choose fewer locations given the heavy logistical burden of adding each additional location to the operation. This can lead to a less localized offering with few larger silos, which results in higher-than-average latency to customer access locations.

Finally, data centers that are owned and operated in-house tend to be in less desirable locations and lower-tier facilities than those provided by specialized data center operators. The result is significantly lower reliability and security with limited connectivity options as it’s challenging and costly to get carriers to connect to a new data center. Consequently, cloud operators running their own data centers tend to rely on a reduced number of carriers, and at a higher cost due to the lack of competition as compared to a carrier-neutral data center with significant economies of scale and connectivity options. Overall, for in-house operated data centers, this creates reduced redundancy, reliability and performance in comparison to using a specialized and focused data center operator. 

Why public IaaS cloud providers should outsource their data centers

While there are some advantages for cloud providers operating data centers in-house, including greater control, capacity, power and security, the challenges, such as geographic expansion, connectivity, location, cost and lower-tier facilities can often outweigh the benefits. In response to many of these challenges, an increasing number of cloud providers are realizing the benefits of working with a third-party data center provider.

Running a cloud isn’t like running a data center

The job of effectively operating a data center would be a huge distraction from cloud IaaS providers’ core service proposition. Fundamentally, operating a public IaaS cloud is a networking and software management/development task. Whereas, conversely, running a data center is a utility operation akin to operating a power station! They require a very different focus, skill set and staff. Furthermore, the challenge of keeping redundant power and cooling systems in place is a substantial proposition.

Phil Collerton, former head of operations at Interxion, the leading European carrier-neutral data center operator, comments:

“There are so many moving parts within a data center to consider. Everything from the facility’s security and power to its redundancy and cooling need to be running at peak performance to ensure customers’ maintain high availability and reliability for their infrastructure and services. There’s no question that running a data center is a full-time job.

Add to that the complexity of operating a cloud and you’ve got a hefty undertaking that requires double the staff, each with very different areas of expertise. For instance, the same person responsible for ensuring immediate failover for power supplies in the data center most likely does not have the same level of expertise to maintain backup systems for data stored in the cloud. Both tasks are essential, but maintaining responsibility for data center operations when you’re primary business is providing cloud infrastructure is a distraction from your core competency and vice versa.

The solution? Having these tasks operated separately — each by true data center and cloud experts — ensures the most highly performing services are delivered. This not only hones the focus of the providers’ business, but also gives customers a more reliable and effective structure for their own company.”

Supply-driven versus demand-driven

Furthermore, the data center business is a supply-driven business. Data center operators make a few infrequent decisions about creating and deploying capacity (supply), then aim to sell out that capacity as soon as possible. By contrast, a public IaaS cloud should ideally adjust capacity very frequently in line with demand. Whereas a data center experiences a steady growth in demand with relatively stable (but rising) utilization over time, a public cloud must manage dynamic demand in real time, as well as an overall growth trajectory.

Fundamentally, therefore, a public cloud should have dynamic capacity abilities and cloud operators need to focus on managing utilization and resource allocation. By doing so, public clouds can deliver performance for customers, as well as the elasticity they require, entirely on demand. That’s a totally different mindset and approach from a data center orientated approach.

Connectivity options

Unlike the connectivity limitations outlined in the “cons of in-house data center ownership” section, by outsourcing data center operations, especially to a carrier neutral co-location facility, cloud providers get access to a wide choice of connectivity providers. This not only allows customers to ensure the most optimal connection is in place for their business, but that they are protected from outages and have an immediate fail-over option that ensures redundancy. What’s more, this choice of provider creates competitive economies of scale, giving customers the most cost-effective options for high-performing services.

In reality, taking a look at public cloud providers, those with legacy businesses in hosting, including Rackspace and GoGrid, tend to run their own facilities, whereas pure-play cloud providers, like my company CloudSigma, tend to let others run the data centers and host the infrastructure. The business of operating a data center versus operating a cloud is very different, and it’s crucial for such providers to focus on their core competency. If a provider attempts to do both, there will be sacrifices and financial choices with regards to connectivity, capacity, supply, etc. By focusing on the cloud and not the data center, public cloud IaaS providers don’t need to make tradeoffs between investing in the data center over the cloud, thereby ensuring the cloud is continually operating at peak performance with the best resources available.

Patrick Baillie is the CEO of CloudSigma, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider offering a flexible web based and API driven platform based in Zurich, Switzerland.

Image courtesy of Flickr user The Planet.

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Go Daddy, the largest domain registrar and a web hosting provider, is reportedly close to being sold to a group of private equity firms including KKR and Silver Lake Partners. The purchase price is about $2 – 2.5 billion, according to several news outlets. 

Go Daddy was founded in 1997 by Bob Parsons, a decorated military veteran who has built his company into a reliable money-maker. The company has about 48 million domains registered. It also runs a web services business, and earlier this month, threw its hat into the cloud computing ring, announcing a new service called Data Center On Demand, which could compete with Amazon Web Services or Rackspace. Go Daddy is white-labeling Cloud.com’s CloudStack private-cloud software and is expected to launch its service in July.

Parsons has gotten attention for his steamy television ads, which have featured buxom women undressing. More recently, he has been in the spotlight for participating in an elephant hunt as well as Go Daddy’s charitable work.

Go Daddy, which had previously scrapped plans to go public in 2006, has been looking for suitors in the last year. It reportedly hired Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners last September to shop it around. The company, the Wall Street Journal said at the time, had $750 to $800 million in revenue in 2009.

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According to a marketing brochure for the service, GoDaddy plans to offer three options for users. However, all three levels provide fixed resource amounts for a monthly fee, with additional resources available “a la carte.” This is a deviation from the standard infrastructure as a service model of charging for resources on an hourly basis and allowing for the number of servers to be spun up or down on demand.

In a fairly major deviation from the standard IaaS value proposition, GoDaddy’s offering also “requires technical expertise,” so the company suggests customers have a professional IT staff in place. Arguably, IaaS always requires some degree of server administration know-how, but those tasks have been handled largely by developer-friendly APIs and GUIs.

Here’s GoDaddy’s disclaimer regarding its management process:

Currently, Data Center On Demand machines do not come with control panels installed. This means, to use Data Center On Demand, you should be comfortable managing machines’ Web services through shell commands (bash) or installing control panels yourself.

Update: A GoDaddy spokesperson informed me that Data Center On Demand will, indeed, include a graphical interface for server management when the service is publicly available. I can attest to this, having seen screenshots of the interface in its current form. GoDaddy’s cloud uses Cloud.com’s CloudStack private-cloud software for the resource-orchestration layer, making it one of many service providers white-labeling the Cloud.com product.

GoDaddy’s take on Infrastructure-as-a-Service looks like it has some shortcomings in terms of developer-friendliness and  pricing flexibility, but the company does have household-name status and a large contingent of satisfied web hosting customers from which to pull cloud users.

Not surprisingly coming from a domain-name registrar, too, GoDaddy is hosting the Data Center On Demand at least two URLs: datacenterondemand.com and elasticdatacenters.com. The company’s support forums seem to indicate that the service has been available to early users since some time in May.

I have contacted GoDaddy for further details and will update this story should I receive additional information.

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The usual suspects. By simply searching for the term “Top 10 Web Hosting,” you will find several lists, all vying for the honor of the definitive top 10 list of web hosts. I’ll save you a lot of trouble, and point you to hostmonster.com, justhost.com, fatcow.com, bluehost.com and hostgator.com, all of which appear ranked highly in most of these lists. Be sure the package you select supports hosting domain names on the account, and be aware of page limits and bandwidth caps on entry-level accounts. You should be able to find decent virtual accommodations for personal use for less than $5/mo.

Domain registrar. Apple doesn’t provide a domain service of their own. You can point your registered domain to your MobileMe account, but Apple is not a registrar themselves. Many, if not all, domain registrars also offer web hosting solutions, too. I happen to use GoDaddy as my domain registrar, and have been looking at what they have to offer.  I was able to find a plan that suited my needs for less than $10/mo.

Squarespace. This is where things start to get interesting. Squarespace has lots of nice features to offer its customers. It is featured on many of the podcasts I listen to and watch. Squarespace’s strength lies in its easy-to-use, prefab template-based site development that is highly customizable supports multiple authors. But if you’re handling your web design and development elsewhere, this may be more than you need, and in order to avoid a ten page limit you have to start looking at plans that costs as much as $20/mo.

Apple may be getting out of the web game in favor of moving to the cloud, but it’s a feature that’s well-represented by many providers already, so it really isn’t a great loss. Nor is the demise of iWeb, which, truth be told, wasn’t a stellar web page creation tool to begin with. If anything, this may be the shot in the arm needed to get users to make some timely improvements to their personal websites.

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Linking Your MobileMe Web Content to Your GoDaddy Domain Name

Once you have a domain name, you will want to associate it with the content you have created on your web site. The servers that this content resides upon will already have an IPv4 address, something like 2.19.140.59. That address will have at least one domain name assigned to it. Most online hosting services allow you to associate your domain name with the content of your hosted solution. This includes MobileMe. Both domain names, yours and MobileMe’s, can be registered to point to your content. To associate your domain name registered on GoDaddy with your web content hosted on MobileMe, all you need to do is the following:

1. Log on to your MobileMe account in Safari
2. Navigate to your Account Settings and select Personal Domains
3. Click on the Add Domain button and enter your GoDaddy domain name (e.g. “ggeoffre.com”) twice
4. Log on to your GoDaddy account in Safari
5. From “My Account”, click on “View in Domain manager”, select the domain name you want to work with, and launch the DNS Manager from the Tools menu
6. Click on the www record in the CNAME section of the Zone Filter and enter “web.me.com”

At this point, your GoDaddy domain name, www.ggeoffre.com for example, is just another name or alias for web.me.com. MobileMe will take care of routing the incoming request for http://www.ggeoffre.com to your MobileMe account’s web site.

Fixing the Root Domain Problem

What you will notice is that if you try to access your domain name directly, without the “www” in front of it, you will be directed to what GoDaddy refers to as a parked page that claims that your domain name is for sale. To get around this, you will need to Forward your domain to the “www” address you created above as follows:

1. Log on to your GoDaddy account in Safari
2. From “My Account”, click on “View in Domain Manager,” select the domain name you want to work with, click on “manage” from the Forwarding item of the Domain Information section
3. Enter the URL you what to forward to (e.g. “www.ggeoffre.com”)

In the example above, ggeoffre.com will be forwarded to http://www.ggeoffre.com which again is just an alias for web.me.com. So now both ggeoffre.com and http://www.ggeoffre.com will each be directed to the appropriate web content hosted on MobileMe.

Getting Around iWeb’s Sites

Internally, iWeb has its own idea of what a ‘Site’ is. This iWeb ‘Site’ is not a separately hosted location to which you can register a unique domain name to. Each ‘Site’ created in iWeb will become a separate folder of your root domain name. Trying to create something like a “ggeoffre.com” ‘Site’ within iWeb, the resulting URL will actually be more like “http://www.ggeoffre.com/ggeoffre.com/home.html”.

To resolve this, you basically must stop using the convenience feature to publish directly to MobileMe. Instead you need to publish to a local directory on your Mac. At this point you can then elect to promote or copy the individual ‘Site’ content that you created with iWeb to MobileMe, not the entire contents generated by publishing from iWeb. I like publishing content to my Mac user account’s local ~/Sites folder so that I can test the site out before promoting it to MobileMe.

All you then need to do is replace the MobileMe content located in your iDisk’s /Web/Sites folder, with the content you published from iWeb in may case located in my user accounts ~/Sites folder.

1. Move all content on your iDisks’s /Web/Sites folder to the Trash.
2. Copy the contents of your locally published ~/Sites folder to your iDisk’s /Web/Sites folder.

Ready to Surf!

Now you have a unique domain name of your choosing that anyone can use to access the content you create in iWeb and publish (via a partial copy) to MobileMe. And by following the technique outlined above, it will behave exactly the way you likely expect it should.

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