1. Keep backups of everything. Even if you have already made it clear to clients and users that the server will soon be gone, you should still keep backups around for a while, just in case.

2. Announce the shutdown well in advance. Do not wait until a few days before such a major change. Give anyone else involved time to prepare.

3. If you are migrating to a new server, have everything set up on the new server before you pull the plug on the old one. There should be minimal downtime.

4. Help customers adjust. If you were running some type of reseller or hosting business, refer your customers to another good host and help them move their sites. You never know when you may want to do business with those customers again.

5. If your website was particularly valuable in terms of content, consider selling it intact or passing off the content to someone who may want to use it and preserve it.

6. Keep or sell your domains. If they were at all valuable to you, they might be valuable to someone else or to you in the future. Do not just let them expire.

7. If you know of any places that recommended your site or advertised for you, make sure to notify them that you are closing.

8. Accept that change is part of life and move on with your life.

Photo Source: Flickr

Lately, Drew has become quite popular with the announcement that ARM is bringing their chips to the server market. In an arena that has been dominated by behemoths, Intel and AMD, it might surprise some to even think of an ARM processor in a server. But it is no surprise to technology experts working in web hosting, especially in data centers.

Power costs money. Energy consumption is an environmental and financial expense that many data centers are trying to significantly cut. As Drew explained,

“While the x86 world focused on pure megahertz, we have focused on the megahertz per milliwatt”

ARM-powered servers will introduce boxes that are powerful enough to still perform well on the Web, while also reducing energy consumption and, as a result, cost. Drew says the ARM advancement into the server realm will not happen overnight. They will begin testing next year and expect to produce market-ready low-power server chips within the next three to five years.

Source: GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2010/07/29/arm-server-foray/
Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons

Naturally, she won. Hopefully this lawsuit didn’t cause her too much stress, because her waist is already a tiny 15 inches. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, that’s about the size of a mayonnaise jar.

Source | Domain Name Wire
Photo | Flickr

1. If you are on a limited budget, you should definitely consider a free and open source operating system like Linux, FreeBSD, or OpenSolaris.

2. You can support your own server if you have the technical knowledge. Otherwise, you should get a commercial operating system (open source or proprietary) that comes with support.

3. Make sure the OS you choose is one you can live with for a long time. It is never a good idea to change the server OS once the server is live.

4. Think long term. You want an OS that will be stable, updated, and supported for years to come.

5. If you are trying a new OS like Linux for the first time, test it using a virtual machine like Virtualbox. You can learn a lot from it before ever even installing it on your server.

6. Make sure the software and web applications you want to run will be compatible with the server operating system you choose. You do not want to find out that they are not compatible after the fact.

7. Paying more will not necessarily get you better quality. Weigh the pros and cons of features, security, and stability to make your decision.

Photo Source: Flickr

1. Always use a remote backup server. Although there are some benefits to local backup, it will be useless when the entire server crashes.

2. If possible, avoid using your home computer as your backup server. Use a dedicated backup server or lease backup space from a web host.

3. Use rsync or similar program to perform remote incremental backups.

4. Automate the backup process with a cron job.

5. Backup all website files and databases.

6. Periodically test your backups to make sure the process completed correctly.

7. Make sure users or clients also perform their own individual backups for added protection.

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons

Background checks at both the entity level and the individual level will be conducted for all applications, to confirm eligibility. The background check may include, but is not limited to any of the following areas:
• Corruption and bribery
• Terrorism
• Serious and organized crime
• Money laundering
• Corporate fraud and financial regulatory breaches
• Arms trafficking and war crimes
• Intellectual property violations

This has caused quite an upset in the Middle East, where some are afraid background checks by the American-run ICANN could turn into racial profiling. Either way, something tells me that terrorist groups would much rather invest $100,000 in missiles instead of the gTLD application fee.

This particular site, a WordPress blog, normally uses 2GB of data transfer in a month, but had gone through 6GB and was using quite a bit of memory. As it turns out, I had forgotten to setup hotlink protection after switching server providers a few months ago. I was lucky to catch the problem before it became much worse. Lesson learned– it never hurts to double-check your hotlink protection.

There were a number of other miscellaneous odd sales. RandomActsOfKindness.org sold for $25,000, which is quite a bit for such a long name. Kinderspiele.de (German for “Kids games”) garnered €16,000. Two more long names, IndependentFinancialAdviser.co.uk and DressUpGamesForGirls.com, sold for £9,975 and $15,000, respectively. Booking.travel also fetched $11,000– one of the best sales ever for the forlorn .travel TLD.

Generally very long names are not thought to have significant value. But these sales show that a domain is always worth what a buyer is willing to pay. In this case, it was quite a bit.

Photo | clix

In the event of an Internet failure, five of the seven individuals would have to bring their key to a U.S. military base. Each key contains a portion of the DNSSEC root key.

Although I doubt the new cyber guardians would ever need to use the keys, the idea of this is just really cool. Props to ICANN for being a little less boring for once.

Source | Popular Science

The sites sold for so much because of their high traffic and revenue, but the sites’ enormous success is no doubt due in part to the use of premium domains. Quality, single-keyword domains convey a sense of confidence to visitors and are easy to remember.

Although it can be hard to justify a high price tag of a premium keyword domain, these domains really do pay off in the long run.

Source | Newfound News