Virtual Web Hosting Plus

New domain names coming soon to an Internet near you?

www.virtualwebhostingplus.com — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:14:03 +0000

Nyc.nyc. Africa.africa. Sport.sport.What do the fictional domains above have in common? They could become real in the near future if the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approves a list of hundreds of new domain name extensions. On November 9, ICANN will post its latest guidebook for applying for new top-level domains (TLDs). The guidebook is expected to be approved at the next ICANN board meeting, scheduled for Dec. 5-10 in Cartagena de Indias, Columbia. If approved, the corporation will begin accepting new applications in May 2011, and the sites could go up in 2012.New TLDs have been on ICANN’s to-do list for a whilein fact, since the corporation was founded in 1998. New domains extensions have been added twice in the corporation’s history: seven new ones in 2000 including .info and .biz and six new ones in 2004, including .asia and .jobs. That makes for a total of 21 generic top-level domains and 250 country-code TLDs. There are 196.3 million top-level domains registeredbut not every extension is created equal. In fact, almost 50 of those domains are registered with the original .com extension.The new domains can be between three and 63 characters long and can support Chinese, Arabic, and other international scripts. Paris (.paris) and Berlin (.berlin) both plan to apply for new domains, as does Latin America (.lat) and UNICEF (.unicef). The application process costs 185,000, regardless of whether the domain is approved. ICANN has announced a limit of 1,000 TLDs in the market per yeara monumental change compared to the 271 currently in existence. What new domains will make it in? And will they go the way of the .com, or the .jobs? Only time will tell.

Know your cloud types

www.virtualwebhostingplus.com — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 03:47:05 +0000

Not cumulus, nimbus, and stratus, but rather the clouds that are changing the face of modern computing. In fact, the new shift towards cloud computing is as monumental as the shift from mainframe to client-server strategies in the early 1980s, which allowed for smaller business (and the first personal) computers.The cloud has already been praised for its easy adaptability (no hardware to install) and ability to scale with an expanding website. However, “the cloud” is not actually “the cloud,” if you know what we mean. Rather, there are several different shapes that the cloud can take.Public cloud: The public cloud is also called the external cloud, and is the most mainstream sense of the word. Resources are offered on a self-service basis through web applications or web services. A third-party provider is in charge of these services, and bills consumers on a utility computing basis.Community cloud: This is a scaled-down version of the public cloud, available to a group of organizations with the same needs and the desire to share their infrastructure. The cost is higher than in the public cloud, but users are generally assured of more privacy and information security.Hybrid cloud: This is the form expected to become most common in the future. Consisting of many different internal and/or external cloud providers, organizations can tailor their own experience and avoid some of the difficulties of the public cloud, most notably PCI compliance. There’s also such a thing as hybrid web hosting, in which the infrastructure is made up of a cloud-hosted web server and a managed dedicated server for the database server.Private cloud: The private cloud concept is not a new one, but it is only now that the technology for it is becoming available. However, they do not yet offer the economic or management advantages of a public cloud, since the organization must build and manage the cloud on its own private network.

While GeoCities is gone, fond memories last forever

www.virtualwebhostingplus.com — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 14:57:50 +0000

When GeoCities was launched in 1995, it offered millions of people the chance to make their first web sites. As web hosting sites go, it was fairly rudimentary, but it was also free. Comedians, writers, musicians, hobbyists, and anyone else who wanted to share their thoughts with the world now had the opportunity to do so. The “typical” GeoCities page is crude by today’s standardsanimated GIFs, flashing text, hideous background wallpaperbut back then no one seemed to care.And then, in 2009, Yahoo! (which purchased GeoCities in 1999) announced that it would be shutting GeoCities down. This move received criticism from several sectors: market analysts, security experts, rival companies who wanted to purchase the hosting service rather than have it shut down. The users were at a loss for what to do, and other web hosting services offered “lifeboat” services for people to leave the sinking GeoCities ship. On October 27, 2009, GeoCities became unavailable, and those sites that had not been transferred were thought to have been lost forever.However, thanks to the work of digital internet historians, that’s no longer the case. GeoCities is still shut down (except in Japan), but almost every site ever made can still be viewed, as a testament to a bygone era. Jason Scott of the Archive Team is just one person who felt that the GeoCities sites were historically relevanthis team spent six months cataloging every GeoCities site they could find, and their results are now available as a 641.32 GB torrent on Pirate Bay.Web browsers can also access several “mirror sites” without downloading all that data to their hard drive, which Scott says will primarily appeal to “academics, historians, and collectors.” Those sites include Geociti.es, Geocities.ws, and Reocities.com. Even if you’re not an internet academic, you might want to spend a few hours browsing through the millions of sites. Despite their aged appearance, they showcase a bright and hopeful vision of the futureone in which one person’s words could be seen by millions.