Latest from the HostReview Blog

The team at HostReview is proud to announce the opening of beta version of the fully redesigned web site to the public. We believe that the new format of presenting content and interacting with you, our readers, will create a more vibrant online community, dedicated to web hosting and internet technology issues.

Yahoo! GeoCities, the free web site service offering tools for early Internet surfers to publish their own web pages, closed its doors.

In the 1990s, when most hosting options were extremely expensive, GeoCities gave anyone the opportunity to build a custom web page for free and secure a small amount of virtual storage to keep their pictures and documents. Indeed, GeoCities’s free hosting space was the home for thousands of personal web pages and became perhaps the most significant virtual museum in the recent history.

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Microsoft launched its Windows 7. This new windows operating system was developed more than 1.5 years ago. It is faster and much better than its predecessors, Windows XP and the little-loved Windows Vista, which seriously damaged the company’s reputation.

Vista turned into one of Microsoft's biggest lapses. The operating system that was initially pitched as a revolutionary evolution in computing, failed to gain the consumers after it became clear that Vista was sluggish, with poor security features and didn't work well with third-party software.

Since you're going to need hosting anyway - isn't it great to get a good deal on top of that? Here are a few cool hosting offers that are circulating around. Perhaps you can take advantage of one.

October Giveaway

CA and VMware announced the results of a sponsored study investigating the impact of data centers virtualization. The study, conducted by the IT Process Institute (ITPI) in December 2008, identifies specific procedures and controls that should be considered to reduce risk as organizations virtualize business-critical systems and when production virtualization objectives beyond server consolidation evolve to high availability, disaster recovery, and dynamic resource management scenarios.

In the coming days the team at HostReview is planning to open up a preview of the new,fully revamped HostReview web site, and to gather your valuable feedback. But before its launch, we wanted to give you a little more background on this move.

HostReview has provided insights on the hosting industry for over ten years, since its launch in 1998. As web hosting is a rapidly shifting technology and understanding all the types of web hosting services is not an easy task, now the website is being updated to respond to all these changes and to suit the visitors' expectations:

HostReview had an opportunity to speak with Cameron Bahar, founder and CTO of cloud storage start-up ParaScale. In the interview, he discusses the market for cloud storage solutions, the current trends and the future of cloud computing, and much more.

Would you tell us a few words about yourself and your professional background? How long have you been involved in the cloud computing space?

The time for HostingCon 2009 has finally arrived. I arrived last evening (Saturday) to get a jump start on things and get oriented. This year's event is being held in the Gaylord Hotel just outside Washington, D.C. The first day here I took a short 20 minute shuttle ride to the nation's Capitol then viewed the Smithsonian Institute and Washington's popular downtown monuments. It was an easy ride back to the Gaylord. It is a large hotel with a huge atrium housing shops and restaurants of various descriptions.

There are many websites devoted to web hosting reviews. Each of these sites offers something slightly different. Some focus on listing a large number of hosts in a comprehensive database. Others tout user reviews that grade the web hosts on a scale from best to worst. Yet others slim down the list to a ''Top 10'' format - listing just the top performers in website hosting. Using these hosting review sites along with forums devoted to web hosting can help form a strong opinion on a web hosting company.

In a recent article in Ad Age’s DigitalNext, Warren Lee’s article entitled "What Sank Veoh and Joost? Too Much Cash Too Soon" suggests that young companies raising too much money in a short amount of time is apt to cause them to misuse their cash. This, in turn, ignites a cascading effect of bad business choices leading to near certain failure.

On Monday, Microsoft introduced the new Office 2010 and Office Web Apps.

Google’s browser-based Apps products and its new Chrome OS obviously put a lot of pressure on Microsoft urging it to come up with something new. Microsoft responded to these challenges with the introduction of its Microsoft Office 2010, which is a free, web based version of Microsoft office.

HostReview very recently had an opportunity to speak with Mr. Horstmann, and asked him a few questions pertaining to his insights, and relevant to where our industry appears to be headed.

Netcraft has released its survey of the most reliable hosting companies for May 2009. Netcraft is an Internet services company based in Bath, England. The company provides Internet security services, including anti-fraud and anti-phishing services, application testing, code reviews, and automated penetration testing. Additionally, Netcraft provides research data and analysis on many aspects of the Internet - particularly hosting servers and domain name activity.

The situation involving the American automakers in Detriot, Michigan is astounding, disappointing, and yet predictable. The companies (specifically General Motors and Chrysler) built poor products for too long, and now must live with the consequences. I've spoken to many people who assume their businesses are immune from the issues which brought down GM and Chrysler. But they're wrong - these issues can affect any business in any sector (even the Internet!).

In my last entry http://www.hostreview.com/icontent/the-blog/anti-virus-approach-not-enou... I wrote about how we need to inoculate ourselves, our data, and our identities against the poisons of the online world. It makes no sense to use 20th century technology to protect our networks against 21st century threats.

Here's how 21st-century protection works:

Surviving a downturn is difficult and there are no silver bullets to increase or maintain your current level of revenues. However, there are ways to alleviate the pain of declining sales.

1. Communicate with your customers large and small on the phone or better yet, face to face. This also means listening and learning about their business as much, or more so than talking to them about yours.

2. In a slow economy, everyone on staff must increase their sales effort relative to their function in the organization.

I come from the traditional advertising world where packaged-goods titans like P&G would buy millions in mass advertising which would stimulate billions in sales. A predictable, reliable engine.

But then the Internet happened.

It opened up virtually all heretofore closed systems: distribution, marketing, promotion. It held the promise of creating a level playing field for all types of merchants – large and small. This was the promise that drove the explosive growth of e-commerce for the past 5 years.

US Senate Bill S.773

President Obama has, on multiple occasions, promised to take the government’s initiatives against cybercrime to the next level. With US Senate Bill S.773, the Obama administration has shown, at the very least, that it’s willing to put its money where its mouth is and push cybersecurity to the next level.

Which web hosting companies and related businesses operate the largest number of servers? Rackspace announced they had hit the 50,000 mark recently, and DatacenterKnowledge took the opportunity to determine who is in the same league. Three web hosting companies lead the pack: 1&1 Internet (55,000), Rackspace (50,038), and The Planet (48,500). They are followed by Akamai Technologies, OVH, SBC Communications, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and SoftLayer.

Once upon a time, all you needed to start your web-based business was to put up a website, create an online store, buy some Google ads and then sit back and watch the money come in. But E-Commerce has been evolving. Current E-Commerce tools like SEO and Pay-Per-Click advertising are no longer delivering the bang they once did, so online merchants have been looking at alternatives for building their businesses.