HostReview announces winner of biggest HostingCon giveaway

editor — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:15:39 -0500

Who thought attending trade shows could be so much fun? At this year's HostingCon, visitors to the HostReview booth were able to test their mettle against our team at Mario Kart Wii. We throw them blue sparks! Now one of our visitors is having the entire gaming setup delivered to her workplace, to the great envy of her co-workers.

Will free hosting completely displace paid hosting?

Daniel Briere — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:03:22 -0500

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.

One trillion pages in Google's index

editor — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 06:48:05 -0500

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.

Happy Sysadmin Day!

editor — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:22:51 -0500

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's answer to Wikipedia

editor — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:34:25 -0500

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.

In Memoriam: Joe Wishnoff

editor — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:50:01 -0500

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.

HostReview talks to John Engates of Rackspace about green hosting and the sweet spot of performance and efficiency

editor — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:21:42 -0500

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.

On virtualization and Microsoft's Hyper-V: an inteview with Todd Abrams, COO & President of Layered Technologies

editor — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:11:28 -0500

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 talks with Con Zwinkels, Managing Director of LeaseWeb, about green datacenters, customer advice, and more

editor — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:12:34 -0500

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.

Almost four million new websites go online in June

editor — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:34:53 -0500

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."

Unlimited/Oversold hosting and how it's changing the web hosting industry

Daniel Briere — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:26:03 -0500

Unless you've been living in a hole in the ground, chances are you've heard about (and probably participated in heated debates discussing) Web hosting overselling over the past couple of years. However, one aspect of overselling is rarely discussed: the long-term effects on the Web hosting industry.

This is often not realized, but any trend has a long-term effect on something. In this case, how does overselling affect the Web hosting industry a year from now? 2 years? 5 years? This is what I hope to shed some light on.

Don't expect your custom .mynamehere TLD just yet

editor — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:20:19 -0500

Yesterday the big news hit -- ICANN will allow an unprecedented expansion of the range of available top level domains (TLD). An almost unlimited expansion, in fact, since the governing body for internet domains approved the use of any word, within the limits of the law and common sense, as a domain extension.

Building a datacenter: time lapse video

editor — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:14:50 -0500

Assemble racks, servers, and cables together, according to a detailed plan. Ensure the presence of electricity and a flow of air. Introduce technicians to the mix, and a datacenter is born. In this post, you can see the whole two-week long process, documented in a time lapse video by Knürr, producers of rack equipment. Video after the jump.

A good week for open source

editor — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:57:48 -0500

An increasing number of projects, ranging from the significant to the curious, are being opened to software and web developers worldwide. The trend is especially pronounced this week, with three different teams making important announcements about open sourcing their products. Let us welcome Java, Symbian, and reddit to the list of (fully) open source projects.

Kill This Box: a DDoS challenge

editor — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:19:21 -0500

If you happen to be in control of a sizable botnet, and in need of nerdy stuff from the ThinkGeek online store, killthisbox.com has a mission for you. The website's creators offer a fifty dollar gift certificate to anyone who takes the site off the internet, and keeps it offline for fifteen minutes.

Free internet of old headed to history books

editor — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:42:10 -0500

Forget about net neutrality and torrent throttling, major ISPs are bringing up new issues to stir the public opinion. Verizon has unanimously limited access to Usenet for its subsribers, and three other big US internet providers reportedly announced plans to end unlimited access plans and switch to selling metered bandwidth.

Why offer Linux hosting plans?

editor — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:58:42 -0500

EasyCGI used to be something of a rarity among web hosting providers, offering Windows Server hosting exclusively. This changed last month, when the company started offering Linux Virtual Private Server (VPS) plans. We contacted Mr. Ted Beckwith, Vice President of EasyCGI, to ask him a few questions about the company's decision to expand into Linux territory.

Yahoo and Google reach ad agreement

editor — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:23:29 -0500

Advertising from Google will be displayed alongside Yahoo! search results, after the two companies reached an agreement for shared use of AdSense technology. The non-exclusive advertising agreement was announced shortly after Yahoo! ended talks with Microsoft over possible investment and acquisitions by the software giant.

USB 3.0 controller spec will be freely available

editor — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:52:37 -0500

In a blog post, Intel employee Nick Knupffer reported that the USB 3.0 host controller specification will be released to the public in the second half of 2008. He rebuffed rumors that Intel was the single developer of the new technology, or that it intended to keep the new wired USB standard away from the competition.

June 17 set as official release date for Firefox 3

editor — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:11:38 -0500

The Mozilla Foundation announced that the new version of the Firefox web browser will be released on June 17th. Firefox 3.0 will improve standards compliance, fix performance issues, and add new features. The latest release candidate version (3.0 RC3) can be downloaded here.