I have just realised that I have not written anything here for more than a week! Sorry I have really been busy, but let me assure you that this blog is still alive! Some of the things that I have recently been doing:

By this time everyone should have already knew it — ICANN has terminated the accreditation agreement with RegisterFly because of the issues that I will not talk about here, but are thoroughly tracked and documented at RegisterFlies.com. The fiasco has caused 900,000+ domains in limbo over the past few weeks — people cannot log into their account, cannot renew nor transfer the domains to other registrars. To some it might mean $10 registration fee doing down the drain. To others it might mean lost of a few very important domains!

Jeff Atwood blogged about Google building their own servers instead of buying off-the-shelf boxes, probably to justify his over-the-top workstation at work. The argument is,

• Google built their own servers on plywood back in 1999.
• Google is still building their own servers today, 450,000 of them!
• Therefore, build your own PC is good! Pre-built might only work for typical users, and programmers are not typical users!

Therefore Jeff concluded,

The best way to truly understand the commodity PC is to gleefully dig in and build one yourself. Get your hands dirty and experience the economics of computer hardware first hand— the same economics that have shaped the software industry since the very first line of code was stored in memory.

I disagree.

NearlyFreeSpeech.net is not your typical vastly oversold shared hosting companies that give you gigabytes of space and terabytes of data transfer for $10/month. Instead of charging you a fixed monthly fee, it went the way of micro-payment — you are only paying for the resources that you are using. It is in the same spirit as Amazon S3, except you get a proper web hosting with PHP, CGI and MySQL support.

Web Hosting Unleashed is currently running a contest, where you can win an Xbox 360 game console by writing reviews of your current web hosts during the month of March. Your reviews will be verified by WHU to ensure its authencity (see their review policy here). On 1^st of April (let’s hope it is not April fools), WHU will randomly award one lucky reviewer with an Xbox 360 console + 20Gb hard drive.

Too bad I will be very busy “soon” for up to three months — won’t be able to play even if there is one right in front of me! Oh wait, maybe just for 5 minutes…

While Xbox itself has little to do with web hosting, I think I might also need to announce that Web Hosting Unleashed is a new sponsor of this site, which is obvious with its nice looking blue banner on the sidebar. Just to make it clear :)

Jeff Atwood of Vertigo blogged about Reducing Your Website’s Bandwidth Usage. He had a look at a popular post that used almost 9Gb in one day, and analysed how he could have reduced his site’s bandwidth usage.

Ben at WebHostingUnleashed has written an excellent article, giving us 9 Tips For Not Getting Screwed By Your Web Host. So far I have counted myself lucky that I have not been “screwed” in any way by web hosting companies, but I have read countless bad stories on Internet and web-hosting related forums. As I have previously blogged about Lunarpages’ article on why web hosts suck, hopefully Ben’s article can help you to choose the web hosts that suck less.