In a parody of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, an American TV show where families in need receive free home renovations, a few happy-go-lucky folks from Microsoft redesign an outdated server room.

Though the Pentium 200 chips mentioned in the video are definitely outdated, I’m one of those people who likes to use equipment until it dies. Any decent web host will keep its servers up-to-date for performance and power efficiency reasons, however. If your host is still running old hardware, maybe you should send the Extreme Makeover guys in.

Continue reading: Extreme Makeover: Data Center

Everyone knows Apple for the iPod and iPhone, but few would believe that the company is investing £628.4 million ($1 billion USD) to build a server farm in the eastern United States.

No details about the server datacenter itself have emerged, but news of the plan has trickled out through state officials, who have been negotiating tax breaks with the Cupertino-based company.

The server farm will employ 100 people in a region hit hard by the economic downturn.

For years Apple has offered web hosting to iLife users through MobileMe. It is mainly meant for small personal sites, though, and isn’t as feature-filled as a typical web host. It is unlikely Apple will try to compete with web hosts any time soon, so it’s more likely that the servers will be used for applications with Internet capability or perhaps iTunes.

Source: Apple Insider

Continue reading: Apple Building Secret Server Farm in North Carolina

Yesterday, American datacenter customers received a landmark £1 million settlement from their provider after experiencing up to several weeks of downtime. This leads to the question: should hosts be held accountable for downtime?

A good host will have an uptime of at least 99.5%. This translate to roughly 1.8 days of downtime per year. This is time that your website is unavailable to the world.

All hosts have outages. It’s just one of those things we have to deal with. If your web host is any good, most downtime will be the result of maintenance. It’s not uncommon, however, to hear about a host experiencing up to several consecutive days of downtime or instances of poor performance lasting weeks.

Continue reading: Should Web Hosts Pay for Downtime?

A federal judge in Maryland today approved a £1.07 million ($1.67 million USD) settlement today for nearly 5,500 customers of NaviSite, a datacenter that suffered long downtime after several servers were accidentally unplugged.

NaviSite had told its customers to expect downtime for a server upgrade. Instead of upgrading the servers, however, they were unplugged when the company attempted to move them to a new location.

Nearly 200,000 websites suffered slow performance or were completely unavailable for as little as a few days to several weeks. The customers received four times their monthly bill in the settlement. The largest amount won by any one customer was £6,446 ($10,000 USD).

For ecommerce sites that lost customers, however, the equivalent of a few month’s free hosting won’t make up for the lost business. Some companies report losing as many as half their clients because of the outage.

The lead lawyer in the case, Stuart A. Davidson, made this comment:

Things just went completely awry. It may not be that big of a deal for maybe a book club … but for companies that actually sell, like e-commerce companies, being down for one hour, much less a day or weeks or more….

Source: Maryland Daily Record

Continue reading: Datacenter Customers Get £1 Million Settlement