It seems like everyone posted their best-of-2007 lists early in January. We like to be a little bit different, so we’re doing it now instead. In February…
We had a hard time deciding on what articles to include, but we feel that we ended up with a nicely mixed bag of goodies and food for thought that you will hopefully enjoy reading, if you haven’t already.
Where NOT to keep your servers according to Mother Nature
If Mother Nature has anything to say, there simply are some places where you shouldn’t place a data center. Do you really want to have your servers where there is a high risk of earthquakes, tornadoes or hurricanes? Have a look at this heat map of hazard areas.
What the Web’s most popular sites are running on
TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockPhoto, YouSendIt, Meebo, Vimeo and Alexaholic. These are some of the most popular websites on the Internet. This article dives into the facts and figures about the underlying hardware and software that keep these sites running smoothly.
FedEx still faster than the internet
When you need to transfer very large amounts of data over the internet, sooner or later you will hit a limit where it will actually be faster to send that data on disks over regular mail. We explain the limits and how Google handled 120 terabyte of data from the Hubble space telescope.
There is no “in the middle of the night” on the web
One of the best things about the web is that it’s global, but this can also be a great challenge for webmasters. When you want to do maintenance on your website, you have to keep in mind that it’s always daytime somewhere. As the saying goes, the web never sleeps.
Theoretical vs real-world speed limit of Ping
Ping is the favorite tool of network administrators for testing connectivity and response time over networks, but there is a limit to how fast response times can get. And it’s not as simple as “the speed of light”.
What nine of the world’s largest websites are running on
Have you ever wondered what technology some of the really big websites use? The likes of Digg, YouTube and MySpace?
How downtime can kill all your SEO efforts
If your site is unreliable, this can cause some serious problems when Google comes to visit. You can lose search rankings, and if you’re really unlucky your site can even be dropped from Google’s index altogether.
Keep track of your shared hosting performance
When you have your website on a shared hosting account, you are sharing a server with potentially hundreds of other websites. This can work well until one of them starts misbehaving and use more than its share of the resources. Here’s what to look out for.
The weirdest hardware you can find a web server on
It seems that people are running web servers on basically any hardware they can get their hands on. This is a list of some very unconventional choices of web server hardware. There is even one that’s powered by potatoes.
A history of the dynamic web
This is a look at the history of the dynamic web, from 1993 to 2007, especially the server-side programming languages and frameworks that make it all possible.
The major incidents on the internet in 2007
Thirteen of the most notable internet-related outages and incidents of 2007.
We hope you liked it! We will of course keep posting new material all through 2008 and beyond, so if you like what we cover, please keep an eye on this blog. Gracias, danke, merci, arigato, tack and thank you for reading. (Being international here… We have to consider our audience… 😉 )
(There’s a lot more in the archives, so please feel free to browse around.)
