Wikipedia to build new data center
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced plans to build a new data center in the United States. The non-profit cited the need for a fail-over in case the main data center goes down as the main reason for the expansion.
Wikipedia already has a primary data center with 300 servers in Tampa and an additional 50 servers in Amsterdam. Wikimedia realized how vulnerable this setup is to outages in March, when overheating at the Amsterdam facility sent all of its sites down.
The non-profit will most likely build the data center in northern Virginia, a key hub for network traffic. It has budgeted $3.27 million for the project.
Photo | Flickr
Tag: data center, data center expansion, wikimedia foundation, wikipedia
Overheating takes down Wikipedia
It wouldn’t be wrong to say things were heating up at Wikipedia yesterday. According to Data Center Knowledge, a server shutdown caused by overheating at a European data center sent the online encyclopedia down for several hours.
Normally when an incident like this occurs, a fail-over mechanism reroutes traffic to another data center. But in the case of Wikipedia, this measure failed and the entire take went down worldwide. An announcement on the site’s blog stated:
As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries. However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally
The data center in question is located in Amsterdam and houses 50 servers. It uses energy-efficient passive air cooling. Wikipedia has not announced why this cooling system failed.
Tag: downtime, server cooling, wikipedia
WIPO Orders Transfer of Two Domains to Wikipedia
Yes, anyone can edit Wikipedia. Anyone can theoretically add their input into the participatory encyclopedia that has been both lauded and shunned, depending on who you ask. With 262 languages and hundreds of thousands of articles, nearly everyone has access to it. But not everyone can be Wikipedia, as Kevo Ouz also called Online Marketing Realty, has discovered.
According to the documentation of the case, the respondent registered wikipeadia.com and wikipediia.com in an effort to capitalize on inevitable typos. The practice has become a common sub-hobby within cybersquatting called typosquatting. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. owns the trademark Wikipedia, and it is clear to anyone who can read that the two domains are confusingly similar. It actually took me a few seconds before I could even see the difference. The foundation owns both wikipedia.org and wikipedia.com.
The respondent did not bother to even respond to the case, and the WIPO ruled that the respondent had registered the domains in bad faith. He even went as far as putting the Wikipedia logo on the fake websites and then linking to commercial sites for pay-per-click revenue. The respondent also has a pattern of similar offenses against other trademarks, including such ingenious concoctions as appl-e.com, aple.com, newyorktime.us, and wwwworldcupsoccer.com. He should at least get points for creativity.
Tag: cybersquatting, domains, typosquatting, website, wikipedia