As Yahoo! Research Chief Prabhakar Raghavan recently told Businessweek, “In a sense, there are only five computers on Earth.” These computers, vast data centers which have come to be called “clouds”, belong to Google, Yahoo!, IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft. Nearly all of our online activities, from sifting through CNN.com’s news stories to searching for risotto recipes to updating our family’s blog, are facilitated by a vast network of computers owned by one of these companies. These clouds are able to process huge amounts of data at amazing speeds, and many industry experts point to them as the wave of the future. The five big clouds are now opening up to smaller businesses, allowing them to compete in the world of data-intensive computing.

Clouds are essentially networks made up of a myriad of smaller machines, inexpensive servers, which can store and move huge amounts of data. These next-generation supercomputers are what allow Google to achieve their goal, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Most of these cloud clusters are not on a company’s central campus, but in various locations around the world. And when one machine dies or outlives its usefulness, it is replaced and the service goes on uninterrupted. Businessweek likens the trend toward cloud computing to a shift in how American’s receive electricity: “At the most basic level, it’s the computing equivalent of the evolution in electricity a century ago when farms and businesses shut down their own generators and bought power instead from efficient industrial utilities.”

Now, smaller businesses will have the option of shutting down their small “generators”, expensive, clunky, and inefficient servers which cannot compare to power of clouds like Google’s or Amazon’s. As Talkibie reported in January, Amazon’s Web Services Division is reaching out to businesses who would essentially “rent” a piece of the cloud. Applications, websites, data, and even documents could be hosted on Amazon’s cloud, allowing smaller companies to launch products without the risk or investment of their own data centers.

Yahoo! has also taken an active role in expanding cloud computing beyond the borders of Silicon Valley. They’ve pioneered an open source project called Hadoop, which mimics some of the functions of Google’s groundbreaking software MapReduce. MapReduce essentially breaks down every computing task into thousands of smaller tasks which can be completed by individual machines within the cloud, then reassembles the information gathered into an answer. Yahoo! is working to make this software available on other computing clusters through Hadoop. Ironically, Google is now using Hadoop for some its community projects (MapReduce is too secret). Yahoo!, like Google, is making some of its computing power available to universities for scientific research and teaching.

IBM has also made gestures to open its cloud to business customers. In addition hosting web applications for small and medium-sized businesses, they have collaborated with Google to build a prototype cloud for use by large universities. Fitted-out with Hadoop and IBM’s business applications, the joint Google/IBM university cloud will help computer scientists further develop the cloud computing of the next generation. Microsoft also sees the application of clouds to scientific study and higher learning. As Businessweek reports, Tony Hey, Microsoft’s vice-president for external research predicts that clouds will, “function as huge virtual laboratories, with a new generation of librarians - some of them human - “curating” troves of data, opening them to researchers with the right credentials.”

This trend towards open clouds will not only help small businesses, scientists, and students, but it will also change the landscape of the internet. It will likely increase its size and scope dramatically, and allow us to connect across boundaries in record speed. These five companies are essentially setting themselves up as the world’s computer, with the internet as their operating system. They are providing top universities with the latest research into computing, not the other way around. Though it’s too early to tell whether the trend toward large-scale clouds will benefit the average user, it is certain to change the way we interact with each other through technology.

tag: yahoo hosting

Here’s some of the latest street gossip about common problems people are reporting GoDaddy. 

As several astute readers pointed out, more and GoDaddy is displaying some serious glitches.

Usually when you enable privacy with your domain, this provides you with some layers of protection against people bugging you using your contact information. Privacy protection is supposed to keep your information concealed. If you don’t enable privacy for your domain, your private contact information is nakedly displayed for all to see in your public WhoIs data.  This means you could start receiving late night phone calls from Joey Patone, your stalker from your freshman year. Or you could have wonderful folks from Nigeria phoning you and asking you to transfer money to their account, which they will be then be happy to take off your hands.

So privacy is very important. We Internet Marketing Badgers prefer to lurk quietly in our burrows.

However, there are more and more reports surfacing of people having their websites shut down for no reason just because one person complained GoDaddy about that website.

Even if the website owner didn’t engage in any fraudulent activity.

GoDaddy, it seems, often acts completely without warning, providing no advance notice to the domain holder. One day you wake up and —poof! Your website is gone.

And this is without possibility of negotiation or review GoDaddy. It’s just a done deal.

This is serious business for anybody thinking of registering or hosting their domain GoDaddy.

All those days, months, or even years of work you’ve put in building your website can be gone overnight just GoDaddy was mad at you that day.

Read one man’s horror stories with this NoDaddy.com

So that’s pretty scary.

Most other hosting providers will let the website owner know there is a problem and at least make some attempt to help the website owner resolve the problem. This is good because sometimes a hacker can hijack your email and send out 100,000 emails in one day from your address, exceeding your hosting requirements and causing an instant review of your account. With good customer service, it shouldn’t be hard to correct this problem and unfreeze your domain.

GoDaddy seems very ……..jumpy. They’re fast to dump a website if they receive any complaints at all about it.

And that’s not good.

Another bad Godaddy is doing which is becoming more and more of a problem is that they are exposing the website owner’s private contact info to people upon request, especially if someone dares to use the word “lawyer” at them.  Just mention the word and Godaddy coughs up your private info faster than Paris Hilton giving up the goods to a new boyfriend she met five minutes ago.

(Which is pretty fast, last I heard. That woman has more miles on her than the space shuttle.)

Anyway, at the webmaster forums people are talking about Namecheap.com and other registrars as much less likely to expose your private info after you have privacy protection enabled.

None of this is bullet proof, of course, especially if somebody really comes after you in a lawsuit. But people report that just about every other registrar Godaddy does a better job of keeping your information private and at least giving you some benefit of the doubt if crazies come out of the woodwork to complain about something you did with your website.

So look out for yourself out there, kiddies. And I still recommend either registering your domain at Bluehost.com and also hosting it there, or for an extra layer of protection register your domain at Namecheap.com and point the domain at Bluehost’s nameservers and get hosting at Bluehost.

Your domains are your pieces of virtual real estate, earning you income 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You need to protect them fiercely - like a mother badger protecting her young.

GRRRRRR. Don’t you be messing with my GoDaddy. You’ve been good to me so far, but I’m growing wary of you. Too many webmasters are reporting serious problems with you.

Tag: go daddy

Top hosting affiliate programs are some of the highest paying affiliate programs around.  Now before you run off and start signing up under every hosting affiliate program you can find, let me tell you that it’s also one of the most competitive. You’d better have a game plan and some deep pockets or great resources before you decide to tackle this industry. If the truth were known, most people make little money off of Hosting affiliate programs. Most bloggers and some Webmasters ju

Tag: powweb hosting