Hosting Heartbeat

For those of you on GoDaddy, they’ve just made a few small cosmetic changes in the back-end UI to help simplify administrative tasks. You can read more about it on their blog.

Photo from here.

This is a bit old, but HostGator recently donated $25,000 to the one laptop per child fund. I really like the OLP initiative, but as HostGator points out, the initiative has been bogged down with some controversy recently.

In terms of the donation, I think it’s a great move, and I wish more businesses would try and give a little back whenever they can. If you’ve heard of any other cases (especially in the area of hosting), then please let us know.

It’s still a ways out, but read all about it here.

Alot of people immediately go out and get shared hosting whenever they want to set up a blog. While that’s a great solution, alot of people can probably make due with the free WordPress.com service. At WordPress.com you can sign up for a free WordPress blog in the form of myblog.wordpress.com. For a small fee, you can even map your own domain to it, as pointed out by Raul in Vancouver.

So if all you need is a blog, then you might want to consider something basic over at WordPress.com.

Amazon made history two years ago by diving head first into the new realm of cloud computing. Their popular Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2 for short) allows users to provision servers at will, allowing them (in theory) to scale their web company on demand.

The main limitation of Amazon’s offering is that it doesn’t really include any usable persistent storage. If your EC2 instance dies a horrible death, all the data that was with it dies as well. You can, of course, using their S3 service to make backups of some of your data, but it’s really not meant to be used like a fast-access disk drive.

Amazon has recently announced that they are in the middle of developing a persistent storage (PS) solution for their cloud offering. What that means is that when your instance barfs, you’ll be able to bring it back up without losing any of the data that was stored on the persistent drive.

With that new offering, it suddenly becomes realistic for someone to set up a complete web hosting company on Amazon EC2. If the demand suddenly spikes, the hosting company could simply fire up a few more EC2 instances to handle the extra load. When the traffic dies down, they could free those instances to save money.

There are obvious technical hurdles to that approach, but it’s definitely possible. We’ll see how things look in a few months.

According to Media Temple’s official status blog, the recent issues involving their Grid-Service are now resolved.

This issue was around for well over a month. I know many people were affected by this (including this guy) so it’s good news that it seems to be behind them.

Drop a line here if you are still having some issues.