Around the time that Amazon’s Cloud services began to have its lengthy downtime, another popular service went down as well – the PlayStation Network (PSN). Used by millions of PS3 owners to play games online, download digital content and connect with friends, the PSN has been, for many, a core part of the PS3 experience. [...]
Sometime around 1:41 AM PDT Amazon began to notice high error rates in its Elastic Block Storage and connectivity issues with reaching Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances at its Virginia datacenter. Unfortunately for Amazon and the companies that rely upon it, the problem was not quickly resolved and many woke up the next morning to [...]
The Web is in a constant state of change. Today’s Web looks almost nothing like the one we had five years ago and that, in turn, looked nothing like the Web that existed five years prior to that. This constant change means that no established convention is safe and even things that were once fundamental [...]
This sounds like a fairly basic question: “How many people visited my site yesterday?” However, despite appearances, it’s a surprisingly difficult request and one that a variety of companies, including Google, struggle to answer. There are a few technical and ideological challenges that sit between you and an accurate number for that query. Though many [...]
We all know that buying a hosting account is a complicated matter. Not only are there tons of ways to overpay, but cost isn’t everything. In fact, cost takes a backseat to difficult-to-determine things such as speed, reliability and support. This can make buying a host a headache-inducing frustration. But at least we can rest [...]
Web hosting is changing our lives. Cloud hosting allows us to stream our music anywhere we want, have a near-infinite library of movies at our fingertips, always have access to our key documents and be in constant contact with friends and family. The shift has been very gradual, taking place step by step over the [...]
If your website is running slowly or inconsistently, it can be very frustrating trying to understand why. Tools such as Pingdom’s full page site test, which provide a very thorough and detailed overview of site performance, can be a bit overwhelming. There’s also the risk that, to the inexperienced eye, the results can be misleading. [...]
Switching hosts is a tremendous pain. Even if you’re fortunate enough to be moving between two hosts that have the same control panel, meaning that you can simply backup and restore your entire hosting account, you have the hassle of waiting for DNS servers to propagate your new site’s information and that means that comments, [...]
Even if you understand that “unlimited” hosting isn’t actually unlimited, it can still seem like too good an offer to be true. Hosting for multiple domains and sites for just a few dollars per month – is it possible? There has to be a catch. There seems to be no way a host can provide [...]
In 1999 the record industry had a serious problem and its name was Napster. The upstart file sharing service was gaining quick traction, especially among college students with fast Internet connections (rare at the time). Millions of files were being swapped illegally and this prompted legal action from both the RIAA and various artists. However, [...]