Hosting and Managed Services - News and Blog

I've recently seen a growing number of people encouraging businesses to look at 'cloud hosting' solutions such as Amazon's EC2 and Rackspace's Mosso.

Cloud hosting takes the concept of cloud computing into the realm of hosting.

An often overlooked factor in maintaining a high level of website uptime is having a reliable DNS service.

If your DNS fails or is slow to resolve, your uptime will suffer - even if your website itself is technically "up".

Scaling can be tricky for consumer internet startups, especially when it comes to hardware and infrastructure.

Many startups have failed in part because they couldn't successfully scale effectively and sensibly.

A number of companies now provide white label social networking platforms that enable other websites to build out their own communities.

These services can be either hosted or based on your own server and can be used by blogs and other websites to create a community around the content and brand.

We take a look at ten of these services:

With cookie deletion rates leading to significant problems with tracking online campaigns, a solution finally exists.

However, with greater tracking comes responsibility and consumers are becoming more savvy, as the Facebook 'Beacon scandal' has shown.

Yahoo!'s Merchant Solutions service was hit by a series of outages yesterday, costing many small business customers dearly on what is thought to have been the busiest day of the year.

Partners of the hosted e-commerce service complained that shoppers were receiving "system unavailable" messages when trying to complete transactions.

And all on a day in which online sales were predicted to reach $700m in the US. 

PayPal is reportedly set to launch a virtual payment system to extend its reach onto sites that don’t currently run its software.

Called PayPal Secure Card, the browser plug-in can detect when a shopper lands on an etailer’s checkout page and automatically fills in their stored financial details to save them time.

Frustrated Northern Rock customers are being badly let down by the company’s website, which is being put under considerable pressure following one of the worst PR disasters in recent times.

The company sent out an unfortunate message to its customers last week after turning to the Bank of England for an emergency loan. It has since been ‘besieged by savers’ who have swarmed to its branches to withdraw their savings.

There has been much discussion and comment recently about the quality of online customer experiences. Even small companies, run by specialists in their chosen field, need to provide a good online experience if they are to capture a share of the rapidly growing online spend. 

Here’s my novice's guide to improving the quality of your online experience... 

Usync is an online resource which allows indie bands and artists to establish an online presence and distribute their music without the need to go through a major label.

The site was launched by in Australia in 2001 by Aussie band Gabriel's Day, which had been overlooked by major labels yet still had a fanbase.