Who Is Hosting This

To the visitor, all content delivery networks operate the same way. Edge locations across the globe provide critical content to them at a great accelerated pace due to their proximity. However, to the webmaster, they often work in radically different ways. The biggest difference to weigh is whether or not the CDN is a “Push” [...]

  photo credit: getButterfly via photopin cc From database hosting to servers hosted in the cloud, Amazon offers a wide variety of Web services. However, most webmasters find themselves considering just one of the two: Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or Amazon Cloudfront. While Cloudfront is actually built on top of Amazon S3, these two [...]

At 7:30 CST one morning earlier this month, I was awoken by my phone ringing. It was Techout, my site monitoring service, informing me of an outage at my main URL. Thinking it was just a false alarm or a simple need to reboot Apache, I leapt out of bed and headed to my computer. [...]

The vast majority of Web hosting companies tout their support proudly on their front page. Hostgator, for example, proudly lists “24/7/365 Technical Support” as one of its bullet point features. Site5 takes it a bit further and touts “Amazing Support – Always Friendly & Helpful”. Finally, LiquidWeb, refers to it as “Heroic Support” with “24x7x365 [...]

Just weeks after Amazon announced its new reduced reliability storage service, the company has once again shaken up the cloud hosting field again, this time with a series of upgrades to its Cloudfront service. The new additions include a new edge location, this one in New York City, a 25% drop in price for HTTP [...]

Quickly, what is the uptime guarantee that your host provides? Is it 99%? 99.9%? Or 99.99%? The correct answer is: It doesn’t matter. Though uptime guarantees feature prominently in hosting advertising, including being splashed in big letters on home pages, they rarely, if ever, pay out. Though I’ve already talked about uptime guarantees, it is [...]

Mac vs. PC. IPhone vs. Android. Firefox vs. Chrome. Plesk vs. CPanel All are great examples of debates that send the geekier among us either into rampant fanboyism or into a flame war depending on who is having the conversation. However, if you are just looking to host your site, don’t care about the cult [...]

Most Webmasters know that, when you start seeing referral traffic from Digg it’s a good idea to batten down the hatches and prepare for a Digg effect. However, Digg is not the only site or service that can delivery a tremendous, potentially server-crushing spike in traffic to your site. There are several other ways you [...]

Web hosting is a highly-competitive industry. With thousands of hosts, not counting resellers, all vying for a limited number of customers, it can be a very cutthroat industry with low prices, slim margins and, at times, downright sneaky marketing tactics. Many Web hosting companies, including many legitimate and major players in the field have taken [...]

June 1st marks the beginning of hurricane season for the east coast of the United States and the Gulf of Mexico. As a New Orleanian, this day means a lot of things to me. It’s a chance to check and make sure my insurance information is up-to-date, a chance to catalog my personal items, to [...]