Part of my research has been investigating how to build storage systems that can provide availability and durability despite failures. It’s been interesting to see recent papers that characterize failures, such as Ethan Katz-Bassett’s NSDI paper about Hubble, or last year’s papers about drive failure characteristics from Google and from several high performance computing [...]
Excellent customer service speaks for itself. SmugMug’s CEO, Don MacAskill gave an interview last month where he said:
We also provide really great customer service, which is sort of unheard of on the net. Not only is it unheard of, it’s almost expected that you get the opposite.
Don is not kidding. [...]
Decline in storage costs, Web 2.0, and other trends have led to a profusion of online services clamoring to host your data. At this point, even if you are the most conservative user and a stalwart late adopter of online services, you have likely heard about a wide range of online services: storing and sharing calendars, lists, photos, bookmarks, [...]
My hosting provider charges by the byte and so that motivates me to try and keep track of my bandwidth usage. Right now, most of my traffic comes from search engines (like MSNbot) and RSS aggregators (like Bloglines). The former could be managed probably by improving my URL structure and judicious instructions in my robots.txt; the latter ultimately [...]
My new hosting provider is Nearly Free Speech and I am now running WordPress.
One benefit of Wordpress over Typo is the maturity of its plugins and regular releases of the software itself. Even without much knowledge of php or Wordpress internals, I think I’ve been able to get my site set up to behave the way I like. I’m [...]
It seems that Typo lacks good ping/trackback integration (e.g. for pinging services like Technorati). I’m playing with moving over to Nearly Free Speech for hosting: their prices are good and their infrastructure seems more advanced than what PlanetArgon currently has. There will be some DNS cache incoherency and URL changes as I migrate [...]
I’ve been thinking about having a blog for a while and now here I have one with my own domain name running on outsourced hosting. That doesn’t really seem like me–I usually like to have more control–but I think Dan Sandler has really summarized the whole argument: it’s a lot of work to have featureful blog software and if someone [...]
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