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This summer, the Mindsite team spent time spinning our wheels in search of a good name – it seemed like all the good ones were taken and the available ones were too pricey. Initially, we conducted a survey and found that our friends rated headspace.com highest among a large list of options. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and we did not buy the pricey domain.

Back in 2004, when Michael Dougherty and I were choosing a name for Redfin, Michael came up redfin.com and identified that the word was a great empty vessel, short, and an anagram of finder and friend. In contrast, it reminded me of a highly aggressive shark fin. Despite the gap in our word associations, we ended up moving forward and purchasing the domain name. This time around, it wasn’t as easy.

Guy Kawasaki posted a great piece on naming where he detailed some considerations for doing it right and a personal experience on doing it wrong:

“…we made a big mistake when we started what is now Garage Technology Ventures. We called it “garage.com.” Yup, with a lower case “G.” It was a brief lapse into modesty and eBay envy.”

Guy's self deprecating style is funny as usual and the post is packed full of good advice. Finally, we brought in the Name Inspector, linguist Chris Johnson, to sort the situation out. After a thoughtful discussion of our naming problems he came up with several creative solution.

With Chris’s permission, we’ve added his proposal below.

 

From:Christopher Johnson []
Sent: Monday, August 20, 2007 9:19 PM
To: David Eraker
Subject: name list

Hi David,

Here's my report on the naming work.

One challenge in this project is finding different ways to suggest "mental health". Not many words do this successfully. The word "think" focuses too much on cognitive skills as opposed to mood and other dimensions of mental health. The word "mental" has unfortunate associations due to its British and American slang use meaning 'crazy'.

The word "mind" is really the best at suggesting the full range of mental health issues, and many of the names on the list below have accordingly been based on it. "Brain" isn't bad but suggests something physiological rather than psychological.

Here are ten recommendations based on the longer list of names that I created. I made a point of including different styles of name and some names that are definitely available to register as domains. The first name is definitely my top choice, but don't take the rest of the numbers too seriously as a rank order. Pay more attention to the comments about the different names.

I haven't included any of the names that you sent me, but some of those are strong as well. We can talk on the phone if you'd like to hear my opinions about those. We should anyway to follow up about this list.

1. mindsite.com for sale: asking $[]

I love this name. The word "site" of course can refer to a website, but also suggests "sight" and the metaphor of knowledge and wisdom as vision. The whole thing rhymes with "hindsight", evoking the idea of having the "benefit of hindsight", which is what people would get by having access to so much information about others' experiences with mental health diagnoses and treatments. The look of the name is simple and clean, and sound is great, with a repeated vowel sound and a simple consonant cluster.

The major downside of this name is the spelling of "site". "Mindsight" would more directly communicate the vision metaphor, but it's clearly unavailable. The "site" spelling is actually cleaner, though, because it doesn't have the silent "gh". This is a winner, and it's cheaper than some of the other domains you're considering.

2. wholemind.com parked on NetworkSolutions, site "under construction"

A really strong, simple name. "Whole" is a great word because it suggests both the full range of mental health issues, and wellness. There's also the positive idea of using one's whole mind to understand one's own mental health. I'm not sure about the availability--maybe it's going to be a real site, maybe not.

3. selfspring.com available

Something a little different. The word "self" gets at the idea of the mind and mental life, but it's harder to work with than "mind". There's something about this word combination that I find really appealing, though. "Spring" can mean a source, a rebirth, and also an inner mechanism (what makes you "tick"). This name is offbeat in a memorable way, and it's very positive.

The downsides of this name are (1) that it communicates much more indirectly about mental health, and (2) the consonant cluster in the middle is a little complex.

4. brainalyzer.com available

The one goofy/geeky name on the list. This blend is a little complex, but works largely because of the familiarity of the word "breathalyzer". This is a fun name and it won't cost a thing (except the price of registration). People will get it immediately and be able to spell it. A downside is that the goofiness may be off-putting to some.

5. mindweb.com for sale (apparently), no asking price

Almost the default name you would expect for a site like this. Emphasizes the networked intelligence aspect of the site. Communicates really well in only seven letters. The downside is that it might be a little TOO comfortable and expected.

6. mindstay.com links page, maybe for sale?

I like this name because it suggests "mainstay", something people rely on. It also suggests steadiness, "staying the course". A downside is that the consonant cluster in the middle is a little unclear--the name may have to be spelled for people who hear it first.

7. rightmind.com registered, but no site

There's something simple and lovely about this name. "Right mind" is a principle of Buddhism, but this name is brought down to earth by the vague allusion to the expression "no one in their right mind would...". Downsides are (1) that it may not be available, and (2) people may associate it with the idea of brain asymmetry (all that left brain/right brain stuff).

8. strongmind.com links page

A really straightforward, positive name. Easy to understand, spell, and say. "Strong" is a great way to talk about mental health--very apt and very positive. The main downside is that it may be unavailable.

9. toughmind.com available

I like the way the word "tough" suggests health through resilience. The people who use and share the site might also be thought of as independent and tough-minded, not controlled by the health industry. A downside is that the connection to mental health is a little indirect.

10. fitbrain.com links page, maybe for sale?

This is just a really neat, succinct little name. The word "fit" makes health seem fun. The name will be understood immediately, people will be able to spell it, and it's easy and fun to say. The major downside is that it may not be for sale.

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There are a lot of crucial decisions to make when building a start up from scratch. One key call is your hardware strategy.

Matt Kenison, Mindsite’s first employee and our development architect, wrote a report earlier this summer on the hardware setup we should use and why. Taking into consider some of our business constraints- such as optimizing for scalability and cost- Matt thought that the EC2/S3 system was the best fit. We can’t speak to Amazon’s performance as a production partner just yet, but we’ve been incredibly happy so far. We think, if you’re looking for this kind of information, that Matt’s report will give you valuable insight to some of your options.

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Mindsite Production Architecture

Last modified: 17 July 2007

This document compares architecture choices for hosting the Mindsite production website through the first two years.

Architecture choices

The hosting options we are comparing are:

• Virtual Private Server (VPS): each server instance runs in a virtual machine on a server shared by other VMs in a data center owned by a hosting company. This means we get root on the VPS, but can’t control the hardware or network.
• Dedicated server: a physical machine rented by a hosting company. This is a step up from the VPS in that we get access to the whole machine (providing better performance), but can’t upgrade it or control the network.
• Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2): Amazon provides an API for creating and tearing down VPSes, charging per-hour-per-instance. EC2 integrates with their S3 storage system.
• Purchasing hardware: Purchasing our hardware to run at a colo is too expensive and time-consuming for us to consider it a viable option at this point.

Managed hosting needs to either be fully automated or have 24x7 support.

Criteria

The main goals of the production site are scalability, reliability, performance and price. Scalability is the ability to add more hardware as load increases (e.g., more webservers to handle traffic or more database slaves to handle read queries) – the one exception to scalability is a master database, of which we will have only one for the near future. Reliability is the ability of the hosting environment to detect and route around failed hardware; if a database slave dies, web servers should stop sending it queries. Basically, have redundancy built everywhere. This allows individual parts to fail without bringing down the whole application. Performance is affected by a number of factors: CPU, memory, hard disk, network speed, network latency, other users (in the case of a VPS), etc.

In general, a scalable architecture negates performance problems since we can add more hardware, but the hardware may not be customized to suit the specific bottleneck causing the problem. Because of the performance requirement, latency overhead will require that all parts of the system be hosted with the same provider. Price includes the total cost of ownership including hosting fees, bandwidth, and any additional constraints required by the hosting choice.

Hosting environment

It is possible and easy to run a small-scale website off of one or two servers, if you don’t worry about reliability (if either server goes down, the whole site is dead – it’s easy to just restart it, though). While we may start with this, pricing will be generated by assuming we will use the following setup in the future:

• 2 front-end load balancers
• 3 web servers
• 3 cache servers
• 2 slave databases
• 2 master databases (1 primary, 1 replicating secondary)
• 1 monitoring server / batch processor
• 2 extra servers for testing and staging

We’re planning for this now so we don’t spend a lot of time migrating to a new architecture every time we increase capacity. Overall, I am assuming a highly redundant setup, but not at the level of HA. A few failed requests are acceptable provided they are actually using the server when it fails.

I think two servers and one slave would be sufficient for base load, but the additional hardware is required to handle spikes in traffic gracefully.

Dedicated

Dedicated hosting is essentially renting out a physical box at a data center. The data center will manage the rack on which our boxes are located and the network/internet connection they use. Dedicated hosting easily provides the best performance, since boxes can be customized for their purpose (e.g., extra RAM in the caching server, faster hard drives on the database, etc.), and placed next to each other to reduce network latency.

Since the hosting company manages our machines, any changes to the architecture would need to be planned a few weeks to a month in advance. Additionally, we would be unable to respond to traffic spikes without prior planning – this means that most of the time we would have unused machines. We may be able to alleviate some of the cost by using these machines for testing, but that would add some overhead time to switch them into production when they’re needed. It would also screw up the testing schedule to have the machines unavailable.

Dedicated machines provide more power per instance, which really becomes useful when we get more machines – instead of having to manage 20 VMs, we would have far fewer dedicated boxes – 4 or 5. Since we need redundancy early on, however, we have a minimum requirement of n+1 boxes, where n is the number needed to satisfy our load (+1 is so that in case a box fails we do not hit our capacity limit). This also manifests in being able to provide customized machines – instead of 3 cache servers, we can have 2 with more memory, or possibly even put them on the web servers to start. The downside to this is that it requires more environment configuration, which means less development time.

Overall, dedicated hosting is the “safest” bet – it provides us the advantage of controlling our hardware without the overhead of purchasing it and configuring it for a colo. It’s also the most expensive and least flexible – we would pay for a lot more than we actually use, especially at the beginning. In the long run, the ability to deploy customized hardware makes the overall cost of dedicated boxes much cheaper.

VPS

Virtual private servers tend to be run on physical machines with other VPSes, so performance is lower, but the hosting is cheaper. For the most part, we can expand by adding more VPS instances to the point where it becomes cost-ineffective. The benefits of VPS over dedicated hosting are that VPS instances are generally quicker to provision – dedicated boxes require new hardware, but VPSes can run wherever a system is underutilized.

In general, unmanaged VPS instances can be used in the same manner as an equivalent dedicated box, but the overall throughput and capacity will be more limited. We may be able to mix VPSes with dedicated hardware (this is not provided by Rackspace). This would alleviate some scalability problems for the master database, since we can run it on more powerful hardware.

A VPS solution would still require leasing load balancers, and depending on the company may require us to roll our own in software as VPS instances.

Overall, the VPS solution may be good to start out, but I think unless the company is really helpful in managing our environment, we would be better off getting dedicated hosting. They are not drastically cheaper than dedicated machines, but offer less customization per box and less flexibility than EC2.

EC2

EC2 provides dynamic computing instances, charging per hour per instance running. Each instance is a VM providing the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s network bandwidth [NOTE: additional options are now available]. Internal bandwidth, and bandwidth to S3 from EC2 is free. The benefits are mainly in its flexibility: we can provision new instances as we need them. This makes responding to traffic spikes almost free, and won’t require up-front planning to ensure the hardware is in place beforehand.

There are a few negative aspects of running on EC2. The minor ones are that it is still in beta, doesn’t have an SLA, and there are no real competitors yet. A bigger concern is the lack of persistent storage on each instance. If an instance crashes, we will lose everything stored to disk – this only affects the master database. We can eliminate a lot of risk by using master-master replication, but we may still lose a few records if it crashes before synchronization. VPS and dedicated hosting would lose the data until the primary master is back up. This can be caught in software with some extra planning. Another concern, also about the master database, is that the equivalent hardware of an EC2 instance is pretty low for a highly-trafficked database. We will need to start clustering the data very early in comparison to other solutions – with a large enough site we will have to do this anyway, but not for a long time.

The biggest consequence of using EC2 is that they do not provide static IP addresses. They are supposedly working on this feature, but don’t have a release date. If we register a load balancer’s public name as the CNAME for our domain, and the load balancer fails, we can update the DNS entry, but clients will not refresh it until the TTL expires (ideally), or their cache expires the entry. The second scenario is the problem – we cannot control for how long clients will cache the bad DNS entry.

Round-robin DNS against multiple load balancers would reduce the number of users affected, but would not mitigate the problem. We could have the DNS entry point to a hosted reverse proxy that connects only to good instances – this adds the cost of the reverse proxies, plus a few milliseconds of latency to every page request. Lastly, instead of reverse proxies we can simply send redirect commands to the hostname of the good load balancer -- www0.mindsite.com, www1.mindsite.com, etc. This would be visible to the client and it looks weird, but it would be temporary, and load balancer failing is a low-probability occurrence; it also adds the cost of running the web servers.

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Why start a company focused on mental health? It’s a good question and a great subject for our first blog post. At a 10,000 foot level, we think that online consumers' needs are not very well met and that many people are looking for answers to real offline problems.

Widespread Problem – The incidence of mental illness is much more widespread than most people might think. The World Health Organization estimates that 1 of 4 US adults experience a mental health illness during the course of a year. Despite the large amount of mental health illnesses, three quarters of the individuals with an illness do not seek professional treatment.

Social Stigma – Mental health is one of those topics that is not widely discussed. While there are many reasons for this – access to healthcare, costs, motivation, beliefs – one of the primary drivers is the negative stigma sometimes associated with mental health treatment.

Professional Confusion – Mental health treatment remains one of the most contentious fields in medicine. There is widespread disagreement between different professional groups about what actually works for various mental health problems. Even if you normalize your professional sampling to one group, you’ll find significant disagreement in terms of what type of treatments are recommended depending on who you see. As a consumer, the situation can be highly confusing.

We think that David Brendel sums it up best in his recent book “Healing Psychotherapy: Bridging the Science/Humanism Divide” when he writes:

“The human sciences at the beginning of the twenty-first century remain mired in a quite serious and abiding conceptual crisis. Nowhere is this crisis more urgent than the area in which I practice, psychiatry, which faces an ongoing ethical challenge to define what it means to be a human subject in an increasingly scientific era of genetics, neurobiology, and psychopharmacology-and in a fast paced world that craves self-help books and that seeks the kind of quick fix that popular television psychologists dispense to millions of their viewers each day. Thoughtful, deliberative, tentative accounts of human experience and suffering are hard to come by these days.”

The Internet is ubiquitous, private, and able to bring coherence to large amounts of data. Although our website is not live yet, we think that our approach may have a reasonably good chance of fundamentally improving the field of mental health for the world by better informing common questions about what works for different types of problems.

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