Over at the collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers Stack Overflow, people from the trade are discussing the most interesting server names they've encountered. Server administrators can give human-readable names to their machines so that they are easily distinguishable from other network locations.

The global volume of junk e-mail went down by a double digit percentage on Tuesday, after web hosting company McColo Corp. was cut off from the internet. The company, located in Northern California, had been identified by security experts as a major host of spam operations.

Google has extended the Service Level Agreement for the paid edition of its online productivity suite to offer 99.9% availability. Strictly speaking, the "three nines" uptime guarantee translates to less than 9 hours of service interruption per year, total, but Google's calculation of uptime will disregard outages shorter than 10 minutes. Read on for details.

In separate announcements this week, both Google and Microsoft stated their intentions to join the ranks of OpenID providers. OpenID is a protocol which gives users a way to sign in to multiple websites and web services using a single login. At first glance this is great news for everyone, since OpenID has the potential to change the tedious "different login for every site" practice. However, the specific implementations of the two tech giants may harm the wider community of OpenID providers and supporting sites.

Last week, Rackspace announced the acquisition of two companies - VPS provider Slicehost and cloud storage service Jungle Disk. While both acquisitions are indicative of Rackspace's new cloud hosting strategy, Jungle Disk is an interesting case, being a cloud storage/backup service originally based on Amazon S3. JungleDisk uses Amazon's global cloud service to allow the sharing of an unlimited amount of information through a secure, mountable network drive and automatic backup. The pricing model is also innovative -- users pay only for the amount of data they store, per gigabyte, without additional setup and support fees.

SmashingApps--are they related to the ever excellent Smashing Magazine?--published a list of 13 online tools that help you create and host a site, for free. Not exactly material for professional web designers and high-traffic websites, but still an inspiring and interesting selection.