Month of July, 2008

So here's a question for you: is it possible that free hosting will ever completely displace paid hosting as the solution most personal and small-business users turn to? Is it possible that 10 years from now, a large majority of hosting accounts will either be on free shared hosting servers or dedicated servers?

Yes and no.

Google announced that its URL index has reached one trillion entries, eight years after passing the one billion mark. Each of the entries represents a unique URL, and there are 150 of those in Google's index for every living person on the planet.

For the ninth consecutive year, the last Friday of July is celebrated internationally and with much fanfare as the Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. Well, maybe not with that much fanfare, but it seems to roll with more momentum than other contemporary dates of importance like, say, The International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19), and GoDaddy's Webmasters Day (April 29).

From the sysadminday.com website:

Google released its own version of a free online encyclopedia. Currently, Wikipedia is the undisputed leader in collaboratively edited content, with 2,400,000 articles in the largest English edition, and scoring tens of millions unique visitors every month. Google's Knol will rely on experts in specific fields to edit articles, rather than open the process to the anonymous wide public.

Joe Wishnoff, a member of the ServerCentral team and a friend of ours, has passed away. Everyone at DevStart sends condolences to Joe's relatives, colleagues, and friends. He will be missed.

Recently Rackspace announced the results of their second annual green technology customer survey, the completion of an energy-efficient data center, a second annual GreenDay for employees, and an expanded partnership with NativeEnergy to reduce the company’s carbon footprint. We talk to Mr. John Engates, CTO, Rackspace Hosting, about the company's latest green hosting initiatives.

Recently, Layered Technologies announced that the company became the first hosting provider to launch dedicated servers running Microsoft Windows 2008 and Hyper-V. In this exclusive interview, we talk to Mr. Todd Abrams, COO & President of the company, about the challenges and promises of virtualization technology.

HostReview: How long have you been in the webhosting business?

Con Zwinkels:We now manage more than 11,000 servers and I started with only one in 1997. Many of our clients from those early years still use our services to their full satisfaction.

3.9 million new websites appeared on the world wide web last month, according to Netcraft's June 2008 Web Server Survey. The highlights: "The largest gain [is] at ThePlanet.com, where 632,000 new sites maintain its position as the 6th largest hosting company in the world. A large switch to the Bahamas was seen at Secure Hosting Limited, where 1.2 million sites were gained from Nameview Inc. The offshore hosting company offers web hosting and dedicated servers from its data centres located in the Bahamas and Jamaica, and even provides dual-homed hosting for a 100% uptime guarantee."