Via Virtualization.info, TextDrive, the web-hosting arm of Joyent that is popular amongst web developers, has released OpenSolaris Container hosting. Probably the first in the industry.

Unixshell#, the VPS hosting company that I used for this site, recently had hardware issue with one of its dom0 box, which rendered many VPS hosted on that machine offline for a few days. It seems to be a complicated hardware issue as DC has replaced almost all components to try to single out the exact cause, but at the end Matt could only bring up that node with half the memory.

One disgruntled customer reported this incident on WHT, and Matt’s reply revealed something that I considered a potential issue for Xen-based VPS hosting.

Have you ever installed packages on Linux that just break everything because of those nasty “undefined symbol” errors? Don’t you just hate dependency hell? This is why Gentoo has always been my choice of Linux distribution. When some library comes with bug fixes, just re-emerge it, and re-build everything that depend on that library to make sure everything still runs — at exactly the version you want.

An interesting article written by Isabel Wang, The Future of Dedicated Servers, where she discussed whether the rise of Google and Microsoft Live and their abundant resources might make the dedicated server market obsolete, when people are switched to on-demand hosting.