hosting

Pee1's new website design is a great example of modern, user-centric, ergonomic design. Professional, yet fun, easy to navigate, stunningly beautiful and appealing, it inspires the emotions of trust, reliability, feeling of cutting-edge. Combine that with the promise of 100% network SLA and 24/7/365 support, plus different marketing messages cleverly spread-out across different pages and you get a website that immediately grabs user's attention.

I just wish they provided more modern services like virtual servers, server clouds and distributed CDN. Service packages from last century do not go well with the design of the future. Hopefully, in time, they will re-think and update business strategy, as well.

OK, it's official: I am in love with a hosting company. I never thought I would ever say something like this. I have tried many hosting companies over the years, some horrible, some overpriced, some barely decent. Never have I ever felt so strong (at least positively) about any of them.

SliceHost is an absolute perfection of a hosting company for personal, small and mid-size businesses. I can not think about a single thing that I would not love about them: from incredibly affordable plans, to stability, performance, reliability, quality, instant activation, Drupal-based control panel, even the Campfire-based support line, where you can get answers to your questions 24/7 and right away from highly knowledgeable experts and share experience with other customers.

If I was to build a perfect affordable hosting company myself, and I could implement it exactly the way I wanted, I still would not be able to do it better... frankly, I probably would not even be able to do it as well.

Wonderful job, guys! Seriously!

Keep up the good work!

P.S. So far I have been helping some friends with their SliceHost servers and enjoying their accounts. I will be moving my blog to SliceHost as soon as I find some time to migrate all the stuff I have accumulated on the current server.

Web 1.0: Global reach to content publishing.
Web 2.0: Web becomes a two-way publishing avenue: readers contribute content and play central role.
Web 3.0: Let's try make sense of the enormous content published. Smart aggregation becomes key.

It looks like the reality in which content aggregation plays equally important role, compared to publishing, is arriving quietly but steadily:

Image courtesy of Amazon Web Services Blog

P.S. Thanks to Doug for pointing to the blog post.

Some extremely exciting news in the world of Agile and Dynamic languages:

• Passenger (mod_rails) released and the popular, mass-hosting provider DreamHost is now offering mod_rails hosting.
• A legendary, rock-solid MediaTemple hosting is now offering Django GridContainers for scalable deployments.

The way I am cut-out, I get in physical pain if I don't have a root access to a server. Considering this, I would much rather get a VPS or (for massive, scalable solution) a combination of Amazon EC2 and RightScale management console, but for industry at large, the availability of mainstream RoR and Django hosting solutions is a big deal... huge deal. And we welcome it wholeheartedly.

These are very exciting times to be in the software business, indeed.

MediaTemple is a remarkable virtual-dedicated and dedicated hosting provider for numerous reasons. It is well-known for legendary reliability, quality of service and the level of expertise of the support staff. MediaTemple solutions like grid-deployed MySQL hosting are at the very frontier of industry innovation.

Recently, though, MediaTemple pleasantly surprised its clientele (including yours truly) with an iPhone-friendly control-panel. First in the industry, as far as we know. This sweet thing is definitely worth checking out: http://www.mediatemple.net/iphone/

You can bet that when a company is great, it's great in more than one way. Our deepest respects go to you, MediaTemple!