To help keep up with ever-increasing traffic, Twitter is set to open up a new custom-built data center in Utah later this year. Considering 300,000 new Twitter users log on every day, the site desperately needs to expand its capacity.

The data center is being built especially for Twitter’s needs. The site currently leases data center space for third-parties. The new configuration will give the company more control and better performance. Jean-Paul Cozzatti of Twitter stated:

Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter.Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications.

Other social networking sites like Facebook are also in the process of expanding.

Source | Tech Crunch
Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Twitter to open Utah data center later this year

Twitter announced yesterday that World Cup Final on July 11 marked the highest period of activity in the site’s history. During the last fifteen minutes of the match, Twitter users sent out more than 2,000 Tweets per second. This number jumped to 3,051 when Spain scored its winning goal.

The Tweets came from 172 countries and were posted in 27 different languages. Twitter received so much traffic that it experienced temporary outages.

Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: World Cup Final was most-Tweeted event ever

According to uptime service monitor Pingdom, social networking site Twitter had a June uptime figure of 99.17%. Although this sounds high, it is actually low by industry standards, especially for a large site like Twitter with so many resources at its disposal.

The 0.83% downtime figure equates to 5 hours and 43 minutes of lost Tweeting. Network configuration issues as well as spikes of traffic due to the World Cup and NBA Finals caused the downtime.

Unfortunately, Twitter fanatics will not be able to get the lost time back. Maybe the site will have better uptime this month?

Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Twitter has 99.1% uptime for June

One common mistake that web hosting resellers make is jumping into the hosting business without any solid plan for customer management. In an ideal world, customers always pay on time and upgrades always go according to plan. The fact is, however, both you and your customers will make mistakes. The important thing to do is to have systems in place to remedy any problematic situations.

There are many customer management tools on the market, but not all of them are catered to web hosting. In particular, the best way to make sure payments are received on time is to have some type of recurring billing setup. Hosting is usually relatively inexpensive, and most customers will not mind having a small amount deducted from their credit cards or PayPal accounts each month.

The other important aspect of customer management is communication. Keep in regular contact with your customers. Many conflicts that happen when dealing with people online are the result of misunderstandings. With email, social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, and your website’s blog, you can stay in contact with your customers without being overly invasive. Welcome to the world of web hosting, and good luck.

Photo Source: Flickr

Continue reading: Managing Reseller Payments

Twitter announced plans yesterday to move from its managed-hosting provider to its very own data center. The social networking site is currently the twelfth-busiest on the Internet and growing.

To give you an idea, Twitter’s traffic grew 1,358% last year alone! During peak hours, as many as 1,000 tweets are sent per second and users perform searches on the site 600 million times per day.

Running the site from its own data center will not only save Twitter money, but also give it much more flexibility in how it hosts its content. But isn’t it amazing that even big sites like Twitter still use managed hosting?

Continue reading: Twitter to move to its own data center

According to blog Domain News, Twitter has acquired a new domain name: twee.tt. While the company has yet to relegate the Trinidad and Tobago name to any specific purpose, there are rumours that it will be used to create a URL shortener.

If this is true, it could spell the end of bit.ly, the most popular shortener on Twitter. But considering how many names companies like Twitter own and never use, I think it’s a bit early to make predictions. My guess is the social networking site just bought the name preemptively and will probably never use it.

Continue reading: Is Twitter going to launch its own URL shortener?

One of the most important things you can do for your website is to make sure you have some type of monitoring. The last thing you want is to get an email or call from an irate customer because your site is down. Here are four web-based monitoring tools that alert you when your site is down. They also provide many other features, and one, Sucuri, checks your site for attacks and malware. They are listed here in no particular order.

Basic State

Checks every 15 minutes, sends email and sms alerts, daily uptime reports (including graphs), and unlimited sites.

Pingdom

Allows users to have 1 website and provides sms, email, and twitter alerts, uptime reports, and error analysis.

Sucuri

Includes integrity monitoring, DNS and Whois hijacking monitoring, website defacement, malware, and blacklist detection.

Siteuptime

Offers 1 monitor, 30/60 minute checks, uptime reports, statistics page, and multiple protocols.

Continue reading: 4 Tools to monitor site uptime

Ever since Jack Dorsey published Twitter’s first tweet on March 21, 2006, the online service has skyrocketed in popularity. Almost four years later, the 10 billionth tweet has been broadcast.

It is unknown exactly when the message was sent. Twitter’s best estimate is some time within the last 24 hours of the announcement.

Personally, I’ve never really understood Twitter. It looks like a great way to make short announcements, but the everyday individual does very little that is newsworthy on a day-to-day basis. Something tells me my friends don’t want to know that I just bought a cup of coffee or that I’m sitting bored at work. But hey, if that’s your thing, tweet on!

Source | The Hosting News
Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Twitter surpasses 10 billion tweets

With a name that even sounds like the beautiful love interest of a secret affair, Cassandra appears to be positioning itself to steal the hearts of those once in love with MySQL. Twitter is now set to replace its MySQLdatabase system with the open source home wrecker.

Cassandra was originally developed by Facebook and was released to the public via Google’s code repository in 2008. In 2009, the Apache Foundation added it to its project, and in February of 2010, Apache made it a top-level project. It is designed to work with large amounts of data by spreading the data across multiple servers. Its notable feature is that it has no single point of failure.

Twitter joined a growing list of major companies that have adopted Cassandra. Among them are Digg, Cisco, IBM. Cassandra is free and open source software released under the Apache License 2 and is available for download from Apache.org.

Photo: Flickr

Continue reading: Twitter the latest among big players to leave MySQL for Cassandra

Twitter has become very popular in a short amount of time. With it, users can post short updates about what they are currently doing, working on, thinking, or viewing/accessing. For businesses, it is a good way to communicate with others who might not be in the same office or even the same city or country. The downside to this is that Twitter is used by so many others for other purposes, and users are often inundated with requests.

Running a micro-blogging server of your own might be very appealing, particularly if you only need it for a company’s business and do not want outsiders to view it. While hosted solutions like Twitter offer privacy options, you would still be trusting your security to a third party. StatusNet is a free micro messaging platform that powers the also popular Identi.ca.

You can host it on your own domain, share files, create groups, add plug-ins and applications, and access it via both desktop computers and mobile devices. It is a PHP application that stores data in MySQL databases. StatusNet is free software released under the GNU AGPL and is available for download directly from the project’s website.

Continue reading: Micro-blogging on your own domain with StatusNet

To speed up performance on its one billion tweets-per-month network, Twitter has started using BitTorrent to distribute files faster.

Codenamed “Murder,” the project involves transforming Twitter’s servers into BitTorrent distribution clients. User bandwidth is not be utilized, but rather, one seed server distributes files between thousands of other servers owned by the company. This drastically increases the speed at which code updates can be performed.

According to Twitter engineer Ryan King, the new system has already been in place for several months. It’s great to see companies utilize technology like BitTorrent in such innovative ways.

Source | Data Center Knowledge

Continue reading: Twitter uses BitTorrent to boost performance

Bored of traditional domain registration? There’s a new service on the market called Tweetname that lets customers buy domains using Twitter. Simply sign up and tweet the name you want to register. You will then get a message back stating whether or not the registration was successful.

Is the service a good idea? It’s definitely innovative, but nothing more than a novelty in my opinion. The biggest downside is the price- $11.95 (£7.46) per domain. That is 33% more the price of many competitors. So I think I’ll stay with my current registrar, thanks.

Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Register domains with Twitter