Rackspace, one of the MAJOR dedicated server hosting providers of the world, went down severely for more than an hour yesterday, resulting in with many popular websites going down like eventbrite.com, Timberlake's blog, Malkin's blog and etc. As Rackspace was found quoting,

We are having an issue that is affecting part of our DFW data center. No details yet. Will update as we get more information.

But even with that, people are asking why was there a single point failure (SPF) for something as big as Rackspace. Apparently one out of Rackspace's nine global datacenters went down, which still consists of a scary number of websites having suffered the unexpected breakdown from a sevice that promises 100% uptime. The outages also affected the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) cluster hosted by Rackspace, apparently making e-commerce and other functions that depend on SSL inoperable for Rackspace-hosted sites Full article (405 words) »

URL redirection service is not new. Recently it has become extremely popular thanks to Twitter and its draconian 140 character limit on messages. Let's find out what URL redirection really is and what you can get out of it; advantages, disadvantages and finally some popular URL redirection services.

URL Redirection Service

URL redirection service fundamentally forwards one URL to another, normally in a different domain. For example if you want to tweet about 10 cheapest digital cameras below 100$ then the url itself will consume 63 characters, leaving only 77 characters for your tweet. Now that's bad. This is where a URL shortening & redirection service like bit.ly helps you. It will not only shorten the URL to a meager 21 characters - http://bit.ly/digicam but also gives it a meaningful name for your end users. When you click on the new URL (give it a try - http://bit.ly/digicam ) or type it in the browser, you are redirected to the original web page.

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Subversion is a highly popular version control system used worldwide. It succeeds CVS and aims to rectify its shortcomings. Subversion, like any other version control system, is used to maintain current and historical revisions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation.

Hosted Subversion Service allows you to host your subversion server and data on a remote server which you can access securely (must-have feature) over the internet. Most hosted subversion service has a minimal free plan followed by a paid subscription.

We have previously posted comprehensive review of hosted subversion services. Today we will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of hosted subversion services in details.

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There are so many web hosting providers these days, all claiming to be the top of the line and with lucrative packages, you are bound to get confused. So we have started this series where we will review a web hosting provider a month based on our personal experiences. We have written about LFCHosting Web hosting Provider last month. Today its about WestHost. They offer Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting starting out as low as $3.95 per month.

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Web hosting companies are the first visitors you will have when you intend to make a website of your own. There are so many of them in the internet that its pretty normal to get confused with too many options available. Also, it depends upon the kind of site you want to host. A personal website may normally take only a starter's plan to start with, whereas corporate and enterprise setups need their namesakes. So we are starting a series of reviewing web hosting companies individually and then we will make a comparison of all that. For now, let's focus on LFChosting i.e. Loose Foot Computing.

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Setting up a DNS server (with software like Bind) has two major components, the first being setting up the server itself and adding all the records. I will not delve into it as it has been discussed ad-nauseum on the net. After you have setup your DNS servers (say ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com), there remains the task of appointing your DNS server as the the DNS server for your domains. Sounds confusing? Well it is, so read on for details.

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I was amazed to find this GoDaddy coupon which allowed me to save over 42% for a .net domain registration for 2 years. It works for .net and .org domain registrations and for any number of years.

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China is always trying to replace what US did and revolutionized. The newest one is Tudou that has grown considerably to challenge the likes of Youtube.com. We are eager to see the battle. What is Youtube thinking? And more importantly, since the olympics, don’t you think the whole process of China-US cold war have come forward with an alarming rate?

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This GoDaddy coupon code worked for me: gdp1018aa. I renewed 1 domain for 2 years at the total cost of $17.50, a discount of $4.28. Few other prospective GoDaddy coupons for renewal that you may try are: Full article (81 words) »

There are several ways to implement virtualization. Two leading approaches are full virtualization and para-virtualization.

Full Virtualization

Full virtualization provides total abstraction of the underlying physical system and create a complete virtual system in which the guest operating system can execute. No modification is required in the guest operating system or application; the guest OS or application is not even aware that it is running within a virtualized environment. The guest OS executes on the VM just as they would on a physical system. This approach can be advantageous because it enables complete decoupling of the software from the hardware. As a result, full virtualization can streamline migration of applications and workloads between different physical systems. Full virtualization provides complete isolation of different virtualized applications, which makes this approach highly secure by design. Microsoft Virtual Server and Vmware ESX Server are examples of full virtualization.

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