New Developments in Hosting

Google's News Timeline
Somewhat quietly (at least for Google) Google Labs has relaunched two new products. You can read the details regarding the relaunch here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/hard-at-play-in-google-labs-with.html.

One that caught my eye was a service that Google calls Google News Timeline. The tool is pretty simple: you type in some search terms into the search box just like you do in Google News - for instance: 'web hosting'. The Google News Timeline service then displays a scrollable calendar with daily news items related to that search topic. That's it. Pretty simple, but pretty powerful too. You can click here to the 'web hosting' search in action. The stories at this point are somewhat loosely related to web hosting - but I'm presuming that the search capabilities will be refined over time.

GeoCities Goes the Way of the Dinosaur
Another attempted stealth move recently enacted was the quiet dismantling of Yahoo's GeoCities. The personal web hosting service that CNET recently referred to as a ''relic of the Web's early days'' - GeoCities - will be closed later this year. Search behemoth Yahoo purchased GeoCities at the peak of the dot-com boom for $2.9 billion. At that time GeoCities had over 1 million users. While the idea of getting the masses online via a drastically simplified interface turned out to be spot on - services such as Facebook and WordPress have eclipsed GeoCities many times over as the service has fallen behind in both technology and features.

In its statement regarding the closing of GeoCities, Yahoo issued this language: "We will be closing GeoCities later this year. We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer." Not surprisingly, a number of GeoCities ''refugee'' offers have sprung up among web hosting companies hoping to profit from the fallout.

UK Hosting Company Offers Professional Accounts
UK based hosting provider, 34SP.com, released official information this past week on it's new Professional Hosting account. You can read the full details in HostReview's coverage here. According to the company, the new plan specifications break down as follows:

5GB storage
20GB transfer per month
FREE spam and virus filtering
FREE SMTP
FREE weekly backups
100 mailboxes
100 subdomains
10 databases
Shell access
Java support

The new Professional Hosting plan is priced at £3.95 per month. There is no minimum contract, and every plan is sold with a 30 day money back guarantee. To learn more please visit: http://www.34sp.com/professional-hosting.

Amazon and IBM Team Up in the Cloud
Also announced this past week in hosting was that Cloud hosting provider Amazon Web Services has teamed up with IBM to let users pay by the hour to run IBM applications on its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, better known as EC2. The applications may be run without licenses or long term upfront commitments.

System administrators can flexibly scale IBM applications up and down and only pay for what is effectively used. If you already have an existing IBM license, you may also have the ability to run that license in Amazon EC2 as well, by simply pay the service's normal Amazon EC2 hourly prices for On-Demand or Reserved Instances. You can find out more about the latest developments in Cloud Computing in this great article from BusinessWeek

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