Industry News

Earlier this week, Amazon announced the launch of its new Simple Email Service (SES). SES is part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) division. That’s the division that also provides Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon S3 and Cloudfront. What is Amazon SES? Amazon SES is not an email service like Exchange or Gmail. It’s designed […]

If you’ve read about CloudFlare and W3 Total Cache, you’ll understand how a content delivery network (CDN) can benefit any website or blog. The CDN is an optional extra to your regular hosting plan. But for some businesses, the CDN is a core part of the service they offer. Valve’s Steam platform is a digital store and a […]

Gawker Media operates a series of popular blogs including Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku and Jalopnik. They recently suffered a security breach that (potentially) has exposed the passwords of all of the commenter accounts on their sites – all 1.25 million of them. Hackers gained root level access to Gawker’s servers and were able to obtain a […]

Hosting isn’t often thought of as ‘exciting’. However, the industry is evolving fast. Modern hosting is sold in a very different way to the hosting used during the evolution of the web. Data centres are also smarter, stronger and more secure. So what are the most bizarre and extreme data centres? What are they doing […]

Have you read 15 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Blogging by Daniel Scocco? Point number 11 is interesting. “Shared Hosting Sucks When I started my first blogs I obviously went with a shared hosting plan, and since I couldn’t compare it with anything else I thought it was a decent option. A couple of years […]

At the University of Advancing Technology’s Techforum, industry representatives talked about forthcoming hosting trends. Here are six that could change the way your hosting company works.

In 2010, sex columnist and blogger Violet Blue registered the domain vb.ly to use as a one-page link-shortening service. She didn’t anticipate too many problems. She was already well-experienced in hosting adult content legally. But NIC.ly, the domain registrar for the Libyan TLD .ly, revoked the domain with no warning. It said the URL violated […]

Cryptome, a site dedicated to whistle-blowing and leaking sensitive documents on the Web, was hacked this week. Its front page was defaced (there’s a NSFW image here) and, according to the site’s administrators, some 7GB of data was deleted from the server, including all of the leaked files. According to reports, at least two different […]

A new .xxx top level domain (TLD) is on its way, according to ICM Registry. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved the new TLD, and ICM says it’ll sell .xxx domains sometime in early 2011. If all goes to plan, this could open up the door for a gold rush […]

Digg, while still a popular site, seems to have “dugg” itself quite a hole. Not only is site traffic down some 34% after a controversial redesign of the site, but content creators who get their work promoted to the coveted front page are seeing only 60-70 percent of the traffic they used to get. There […]

‘Cloud’ is an industry buzz word. It has evolved to mean a variety of different things to different people. In this article, we’ll look specifically at cloud hosting: what it is, and what it can offer. We’ll also see why you’ll eventually end up using a cloud host. What is Cloud Hosting? Cloud hosting is […]

On July 9th, 2010, the Blogetery blog hosting company took down its website with no warning. The company reportedly hosted 73,000 blogs. These also disappeared. Blogetery was hosted by BurstNet, which took down the site against the wishes of its webmaster,Alexander Yusupov. Blogerty made a brief reappearance a few years later, but quickly fell to […]

Does your host have a blog? Surprisingly, many don’t. A blog is an excellent, free and easy way for a host to stay in contact with their clients at times other than when a trouble ticket is filed. It’s a chance to put a more human face on the company, let clients see what goes […]

Those who had accounts at 3FN recently received a shock when they found that their hosting accounts were completely down. However, it wasn’t a server error, network interruption or even a natural disaster that took the host down, it was the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which won a permanent injunction against the host in April, […]

Google’s recent entry into the cloud storage market has only spurred Amazon on to compete harder. Amazon responded quickly to announce a new form of storage for its S3 product. But it’s an oddball plan. The cloud is supposed to provide reliability and redundancy, yet this new Amazon storage is inherently less reliable. Reduced redundancy storage is designed […]