Tagged by Isabel Wang on 5 things that you probably didn’t know about me.

Just read the latest post on OpenDNS blog, How OpenDNS saved Caio’s job — Caio from Brazil used OpenDNS when his ISP’s DNS server was down, and was able to complete his job.

Similar event happened to me today. No, it did not save my job — it was not work related. Let’s just say that OpenDNS has saved my day.

Kir Kolyshkin wrote on the OpenVZ blog, Why Virtuozzo is good for OpenVZ,

The first version of Virtuozzo was released about 6 years ago, so it is not something new. Virtuozzo costs money, and is used by big corporations for mission-critical applications. Virtuozzo customers expect it to be very stable, fast, bug-free, well documented, etc. And to sell the product successfully, those expectations must be met.

(Note: I was going to post this as a reply to Matt’s blog post, but his Typo kept on giving me “500 Application Error”. Well, I am now posting it here.)

Stuart Brown wrote about switching to a dedicated server after getting digged, and had experienced (1) much better page rendering time, and (2) more referrals from Google. Thus he concluded speculated:

Perhaps the effects of a quick page response are more important than the rate of spidering — could Google be using this data (site response time) to build a profile of responsiveness across sites? Could this be yet another factor in ranking?

Perhaps — perhaps not. I don’t think page response time is a major factor in ranking quite yet, but with the introduction of this feature in the Webmaster Console, perhaps sites that take a long time to load will see a slow decline in Google traffic?

“Is there any non-overselling web hosting company out there?” It seems to be one of the most frequently asked questions on WebHostingTalk forums. There do exist a few typical answers. “Yes, my web host doesn’t!” “No, everyone oversells in this industry.” “Don’t buy from DreamHost/Site5/MediaTemple — they oversell like crazy!”

Overselling is indeed a very touching subject in web hosting. I previously wrote against it earlier this year when I first discovered this terminology. Then I read DreamHost and Site5’s take on this issue, and was convinced that overselling is a “business strategy”, rather than a fraud or trickery.

However, with popularity of today’s dynamic database-driven web-based applications in hosted shared servers, “overselling” is no long as simple as “having less bandwidth/disk space than the sum of all users’ allocation”. I will try to take another shot on it in this article.

This post is a continuation from my previous post, searching for an affordable VPS on the East coast Australia. At the end I was choosing between two offerings — GPLHost’s Xen package 4 in Sydney, or DarkStarX’s VDS package in Perth. Although DarkStarX is cheaper, but (1) it’s on OpenVZ with only 128Mb guaranteed (2) it’s on the west coast so 60ms ping, at the end I picked GPLHost.

3 weeks later, I am writing this review.

One of the things that is worse than having your web site going off-line — DNS servers for your domain are under DDoS attack that renders your entire domain resolvable. That’s something HostingFu is facing at the moment.

Amazon Web Services is expensive, if you compare them with the overselling dedicated server market.