I am not in the web hosting industry (merely an end-user here), but reading some related blogs help me to get an understanding on what’s going on with this hosting business. Here is a partial-list of blogs that I read, but do note that this is not a “definite list”, and will certainly grow/shrink over time.

Matt Cutts of Google busted a myth regarding to dedicated IP address for websites. No, your website will not be penalised, nor rewarded, for being on a named-based virtual hosting, or on its own dedicated IP address.

Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.

Funny that when you go and shop for dedicated servers or even VPS, you’ll find providers giving you “unlimited IP addresses” as long as you can justify it. What are other reasons people need more than one IP addresses for their web servers?

I have stated previously that I was looking for a virtual private server in Australia. I have 2-3 sites that are targeting the Aussies, and I want low network latency and better search engine optimisation for Google Australia (see why hosting in Australia). However, finding an Australian VPS that is “economical” (read: cheap) has proved to be very difficult.

I thought, maybe I’ll post my requirements here on HostingFu. Maybe someone knows a better deal than me.

Last time I wrote about Jumba was almost 6 months ago, and one of my websites is still hosting with them. I think it would be good if I can post some updates on their service. Overall, they still provide good Australian shared hosting with excellent value, however there have been quite a few issues surrounding Jumba lately which confirms “you get what you have paid for”.

According to Adam at Jumba, MD Web Hosting is Australia’s 2^nd largest budget hosting company, with SmartyHost the biggest and Jumba trailing behind.

However it appears SmartyHost might be a bit nervous with MD Web Hosting. Or may just want to make some quick bucks at someone’s downfall.

Netcraft’s November 2006 web server survey shows there are at least 100 million websites out there. Yup. 100,000,000 websites! I think the first thing that struck my mind was, how is a “website” defined? Netcraft used the hostname/FQDN model, and an unique FQDN that respond to HTTP requests constitute a website.

The fine guys at Joyent has come out with a podcast of their own — ps pipe grep, with a tag line surveying all the processes.

160kbps MP3 for a podcast is a bit unnecessary, and I don’t really like their choice of music. However they scores in the category of geekiness. Stuff talked about in the first episode — virtualization, Oracle vs. Red Hat, Sun’s Blackbox, Ruby on Rails and Java — reflecting the expertise in Joyent as both a software developer and hosting company.

Jeremy Zawodny’s blog post from early last month has prompted me to look at offsite backup solutions again. Currently I am backing up all my websites, from various servers and accounts, to my home server using rsnapshot, running at 4am every morning. So far so good, and I loves the flexibility of rsnapshot. I guess if one of my server dies, it would be trivial re-populating another server, moving the DNS records, and start serving again.

Moreover, the cost of running a home server is in fact less than what Jeremy has calculated. My home server (a 1Ghz Duron + 3 smaller disks) uses less juice, but more importantly, it needs to be running anyway regardless whether I am using it to perform backups or not, as it also provides a few other services. Like, acting as a file server for my home network.