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.

In Memoriam: Frank McCumber

DLTabor — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:23:26 -0500

The DevStart Family lost one of its members last week. Frank McCumber passed away suddenly at his home in Tennessee. Frank had been a well-respected and invaluable member of company since 2006 and will be deeply missed by all who had the privilege to know him.

Frank is survived by two sons, Sean and Patrick. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends during this difficult time.

Darren Tabor
CEO
DevStart, Inc.

Upcoming Mac OS X Server to support ZFS filesystem

editor — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:29:53 -0500

Mac OS X v.10.6, codenamed Snow Leopard (rawr!), will feature the innovative ZFS file system among its line up of extras. ZFS was developed by Sun Microsystems and offers numerous performance improvements over NTFS and ext3.

From the official website: "For business-critical server deployments, Snow Leopard Server adds read and write support for the high-performance, 128-bit ZFS file system, which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots."

Web hosting gone wild

editor — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:45:12 -0500

A series of two short videos that starts with a single 4U rackmount server, and then goes through cable chaos, blinking LEDs, and coffee abuse, in order to end with romance and the destruction of expensive appliances. And yeah, it's a PEER1 (viral?) ad. Well worth a chuckle and a couple of minutes of your time.

Videos after the jump.

"Whatever we do, it is paid attention to," says VMWare CEO

editor — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:10:32 -0500

An eWeek.com interview with VMware CEO Dianne Greene provides an overview of the company's history, current projects, and goals. VMWare pioneered commercial x86 virtualization back in the 90s, which in turn lead to the increasing virtualization of the datacenter. Mrs. Greene also touches on the changes VMWare's technology brings to security, cloud computing, and the development and deployment of software.

Sun: 2008 "tipping point" for SSD technology

editor — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 08:53:03 -0500

Sun is aiming for a leadership position in the Solid State Drives (SSD) arena, by announcing new product lines of flash drives and backing them with significant developments on the software side. The company claims it is the first major systems vendor to add an end-to-end Flash-based disk product line to its portfolio, giving customers 3x better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of spinning disk drive offerings.

Come play with us at HostingCon 2008

editor — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:46:50 -0500

For the third consecutive year DevsStart's HostReview.com will be exhibiting at the HostingCon industry event. Starting July 28th at the historic Navy Pier in Chicago, you will be able to visit us at booth 611, meet the team, and win cool prizes.

We continue the tradition of glamorous giveaways. If you stop by booth 611 at HostingCon 2008 (see map), right next to Microsoft's expo space, you will be invited to test your gaming skillz on Mario Cart Wii.