• lacking any controls: unrestricted
• boundless, infinite
• not bounded by exceptions

Apparently to many hosting providers, the word unlimited actually means:

• a whole lot less than you think
• as much as it can until it becomes a problem for them
• Sharing the resources of a three year old server between a thousand sites; incapable of handling serious load.

For most bloggers on the Internet today, these two different ways to interpret what unlimited is won’t ever become a problem. However, if you vaguely aspire of gradually building a successful blog with thousands of readers, there is when this could become a problem.

Success can take you by surprise! What if someday one of your posts ‘goes viral’?

While I would love to hang up the 9 to 5 job in favour of becoming a professional wordsmith, that’s just not in the cards right now. ‘Cheap and cheerful’ is the order of the day for everything that goes into my blog, including hosting plans, platform, domain registration, using only public domain images, and even using free software to produce the content.
Most folks would agree that you get what you pay for, but when everywhere you look talks about cheap hosting and free this, and unlimited that, it is fairly easy to convince yourself to go with a low cost provider. Most of these companies do a great job of providing affordable hosting, and they do a good enough job for most blogs, right up until the first post really hits it big.

I’m talking about making it to the front page of Slashdot, or being dug on Digg, hitting a trending topic on Twitter, or getting some national mention on the evening news. The next thing you know, your site visit counter looks like a spinning odometer, your blog’s response time starts to get erratic, then slow, then suddenly stops completely. A moment later and refreshing your browser reveals one of the following…a 500 error, or worse, an account suspended page. In both cases, what you have discovered is that your low cost provider has low costs for a reason, and you just exceeded your thresholds. Now you know why they were so cheap.

One of the blogs I work on recently had an article make it to the front page of Slashdot. While the initial surge in traffic was exciting and extremely gratifying, it quickly degenerated into a disaster. The provider, Bluehost, suspended our account. Apparently they don’t have a copy of Webster’s dictionary.

This not only impacted the blog in question, but others operating under the same shared plan. Apparently the bandwidth consumption was so high that the hosting provider could not handle the load, the surge was affecting other customers, and they opted to disable the account to ride out the storm. When contacted about the suspension, they allegedly refused to reinstate the account until the viral post fell off the front page of Slashdot, which of course killed the buzz and caused several other blogs to be down.

Don’t let this happen to you. There are several things you should consider when setting up a blog that will help you to avoid this situation, and ride out the wave of a viral hit with ease.

1. Read the Terms of Service
Unlimited means something different in marketish than it does in English. See what your plan actually offers, and what happens when your site exceeds the limits of your plan. Some hosting providers have built-in allowances for occasional surges in traffic, while others may let you roll over your account to the next billing cycle.

2. Read the SLA
Should something go awry, what is the provider’s SLA and how do they address issues? Disabling your site until it falls off the front page of Slashdot is an arbitrary reaction more in line with a child’s tantrum than a professional hosting company.

3. Determine how many sites are on a host
This site shares it’s server with 78 other domains, according to http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/. I have seen as many as 2000 sites on a single host before. Any one of those could go viral, and impact your site the same way your viral success could impact theirs.
4. Consider your images
Downloading images can consume the majority of bandwidth associated with a post. Use the smallest image size possible, saving files to the required resolution rather than simply resizing them in the HTML. Consider hosting your images with a dedicated media hosting company like ImageShack or PhotoBucket to reduce the traffic consumed by your blog.

5. Three words…caching, caching, caching
If you use WordPress, implement one of the great caching plugins like WP-cache or WP Super Cache to reduce the CPU load on your host and increase the load speed for your pages.

6. Watch your ‘extra stuff’
Plugins, analytics, and ads can all impact your site’s load time. Even if your site is wicked fast, a slow ad server or plugin that pulls content from another host could make your page painfully slow to load during peak times. In the event of a post ‘going viral’ be prepared to disable plugins and widgets to slim down your page and improve load times.

7. Mirror, mirror, on the wall
If you happen to catch a slashdotting or digg-effect happening in the early stages, consider setting up a quick mirror. NetworkMirror.com and DuggBack.com both exist to ease the effects of instant popularity on smaller sites, and may have already mirrored your post. Replacing your post with a quick redirect may be enough to stay ‘up’ without exceeding your hosts’ caps.

Basically at this point, you need to make sure you have Success Proof Hosting!

Once one of your posts has ‘gone viral’ the likelihood of another doing this increases dramatically. There are several things you may want to look into in addition to what is above.

1. Dedicated hosting
Whether that means a dedicated server per blog, or per account, one reason many hosting providers will throttle your success is because it can impact all of the other one thousand sites on the server hosting your blog. Dedicated hosting is much more expensive, but ensures that your success won’t cause issues for others.

2. Virtual Private Server hosting
VPS is a nice compromise between a dedicated host, and a free for all. With a guaranteed percentage of system resources, and with the possibility to upgrade quickly, you know you will get a share of the pie and not be left with only the crumbs.

3. Burstable bandwidth
Look for providers that offer a steady bandwidth minimum with burstable peaks. You won’t be paying a premium every month, but your blog can weather the storm of another viral post with ease.

4. Multiple hosts
While this will greatly increase your admin overhead, using several inexpensive hosts across different providers, and using DNS round robin can be cheaper, and more resilient, than one large-scale hosting plan. It also reduces the likelihood that a hosting provider issue could take your site down.

Surviving a slashdotting or digg-effect is a badge of honour on the Internet. Not surviving is a close second, since both mean you had a post ‘hit it big.’ The difference between winning the gold, and taking home the silver, can be as easy as choosing the right host, making some prudent decisions with your setup, and reacting quickly when the storm begins.

HP Enterprise Services says its new 360,00 sq. ft. Wynyard center is 40 percent more energy-efficient than conventional data centers thanks to its harnessing of wind to lower temperatures of IT equipment and plant rooms.

Data centers are known to be electrical power hogs and major carbon emissions culprits. Traditional data centers use thousands of megawatt of electricty per year. Much of that energy usage and emissions are the result of cooling systems. HP’s data center, is trying to take a more intelligent approach by harnessing the natural cold winds.

The system keeps the hall at a constant 24 degrees Celsius, or approximately 75 degrees Fahrenheit. The outside temperature only rises above that for about 20 hours per year. (The facility uses traditional chillers for those occasions.)

By 2011, HP expects the average U.K. data center to spend $15.33 million per year on cooling systems. That means efficiency and going green is a smart financial move, too.

Here’s how Wynyard cut its carbon footprint:

• Eight 2.2 meter-diameter steel and plastic fans in each of the four halls in the data center are used to supply air. Another eight are used to exhaust air.
• A mixing chamber in the facility recirculates air to maintain conditions in the 5m-high pressurized plenum, or cavity, below the computer equipment.
• There are 8,100 square meters of technical space at an average capacity of 2,260 watts per square meter to a tier 3 standard.
• Humidification and cooling coils in the data center tune the outside air condition, while modular filters remove contaminants.
• The facility is harvesting rainwater, which it filters and stores in 80,000-liter tanks. It uses this water to maintain proper humidity levels in the air that’s brought in from outside.
• The facility uses light-colored server racks because they reflect light, allowing for 40 percent less lighting to be installed compared to using black cabinets.

The average price per kilowatt-hour? About $0.117, which will save Wynyard approximately $1.4 million per hall with a carbon footprint of “less than half” the competition.

Taking occasional backup of your data is relatively easy to do, you can simply copy your important files to a CD, DVD or a flash pen/memory card. If you have a lot of data you might want to also consider getting an external drive to hold all your precious data. For more vital data, one should also consider storing backup copies of the same data off site, in case of physical damage due to fire, floods, explosions or earthquakes.

The main problem is to actually remember to do your back-ups! One could opt in to a simple reminder on your schedulers or cell phones, however the best option would be to install a backup software to handle this task for you.

Some time ago, we reviewed GFI backup, a FREE and easy to use backup software that could help you manage such a mundane task. You can read the review here or take action now, and get started on your backups! Click here to download GFI Backup for FREE.

• Slow – the iPhone has become slower and slower with every OS upgrade. Every time I noticed that the applications would work slower than my grandma on a good day! Scrolling sometimes isn’t so smooth and a application hang-ups are becoming very common. A slow device is something i really don’t need.
• Carrier Locked – I travel very often, and I have the need to be connected to the web all the time. With the iPhone you have a great wi-fi connection, however most of the times, this is just not enough. I love to be able to just buy a pay-per-use topup card whenever I travel and be able to use a 3G connectivity everywhere I go. With the iPhone, you are locked to one provider, and any other sim card wont work! (unless you unlock).
• On screen keyboard – Whilst I can’t say the on screen keyboard sucks, it’s just not good enough as a physical keyboard. You have to constantly look at the keyboard to make sure you are touching the right button. A physical keyboard is so much better!
• Battery life – The iPhone’s battery life is just awful. On a normal day use, it can barely stand for a whole day. I need to carry around my charging cables or external battery all the time. And this got even worse with the latest 3.0 firmware. The non-removable battery doesn’t help in this case either.
• No Multitasking and background applications – This is just one of the features I miss the most. On the iPhone, you cant just have a background instant messaging application running, if you want to check your email during a chat session, you have to close the window to switch to something else – this is just so wrong
• Flash support – I’m very surprised that such a capable device has no support for sites that use Flash. It shouldnt be a big deal. There are tons of sites that use flash, and with the iPhone, you just wont see anything.
• Ancient Camera – Come on! only 2mp on the 3G version and 3.5MP on the 3Gs! That is just so encient, and by the way… no flash!
• Apple is too bossy – Apple have the right to decide what apps can go on my phone and which of them cant. I just don’t like that. I wish to have all the applications I want without any restrictions. (Thanks ~Cydia!) Apple can just decide freely to reject any application to their app store and also kill any application.
• Not enough reasons to upgrade to the 3GS - A speed boost, video camera capabilities, magnetic compass, and voice controls are not good enough to make me fork out my cold hard earned cash for a new iPhone – sorry.

Is there anything i messed out? – let me know! I’ll be glad to add more to the list, please list the features that you don’t like in the comment area below.

I will be upgrading to the Nokia N97 very soon (I’m eagerly waiting for it through the post!!), and I will try to do a comparison review between the Apple iPhone and the N97 soon after I try it out for a couple of days.

It surprises me how many website owners don’t realise this, but the web is REALLY world wide. Once you put something online, everyone who is connected to the Internet can see this information.

This fact occurred to me some days ago while browsing around some online shopping sites. I was trying to find a particular product, and I was lucky enough to find a ton of sites that offered this particular item. However, when I was going through the usually painful purchasing options, the sites would not offer shipping outside of their own region/country.

This really surprises me since this information would be best shown to the user well in advance, not right at the end of the purchasing process (that most of the times require a long user account registration form and e-mail address verification!!).

Current technologies allow the sites to understand where the visitor is coming from, and therefore, it would be relatively simple to notify the visitor that the website accessed does not offer any shipping to his current location. If this is not possible due to any imaginable excuse… it would be extremely simple to just add a small banner/image saying that “We only ship to X, Y and Z” No big deal right?

A good example of a website ordering system done right is at www.overstock.com. Once you visit the website, it shows you right near the search bar that shipping to your country is possible. Well done to Overstock for such functionality! On the opposite side, a shopping system done wrong would be Amazon.com. They allow you to browse their entire catalog, and by the time you are almost finished to order, you are taken to a page that informs you that “Sorry, this item cannot be shipped to this address!”. I understand that companies would have some restrictions where they might want to sell their products, however, please do let us know in advance!

This lack of “international” thinking is also often present when certain companies organise events, webinars, web conferences etc… they usually just point out times and dates in their own local format and time zone, whilst completely ignoring other country time zones.

But nothing’s perfect, and some things that keep happening over and over again are some of the reasons that make me cringe or hit something/one

Here’s my list of Twitter Pet Peeves: – in no particular order

• People who only post URLs in their tweets.
• Impersonal auto direct messages when you follow someone (argh!!!)
• Impersonal auto direct messages expecially when you actually started following me first, and I just reciprocated! (double arghhhh!!)
• People who post loads of quotes from popular people… that is just so boring!
• Twitter is all about being social, read other posts, reply and comment back – not just only posting messages regarding yourself or your business.
• People who request information that you can’t send as a public message (like an email address) – and then don’t follow you – you cant send a direct message!
• Constantly mentioning and bragging about your followers count or posting messages about your recent drop of 5 followers and posting messages like… OMG lost 5 followers since yesterday… I wonder why!
• People who like to share EVERYTHING they are doing. example…
• I’m at the bar
  I’m having a beer.
  There’s a hot girl in the bar looking at me, should I go talk to her?
  I’m going to the bathroom first, then ill go talk to her.
  Came out of the bathroom, it smelled awful!
  Walking towards the girl!
  I said hi!
  She said hi, and smiled!
  I offered her a drink, her name is <insert name here>
  She wants a tequila… (hmmm! hardcore!) Nice boobs too!….
  and the story goes on…….!

• Twitterers who just follow to be followed, and then they un-follow you, that’s just LAME.
• I guess you got this a MILLION times – HEY, I just found a method how to get 16,000 visitors in a month! Visit this page for more details – its expecially bad when you receive this from a user with just a handful of followers… LAME!
• Horrid, very busy, overly colourful or very badly made profile background. eww!
• People posting a tweet with all the top trending topics hash tags in one message… whats the point??
• Site functionality pet peeve – when you press enter in the message box on top, it should be posted immediately! you have to manually click the update button!!
• Negativity! – If you had a bad experience with a company, its OK if you post a message explaining your bad experience. You should however post a follow up if the issue was resolved.
• Longitude and latitude for location – who cares really?
• Integrating your twitter feed into Facebook – That is SO bad! I wonder what your Facebook friends who are not familiar with twitter will be saying when they will start seeing stuff like RT @whoever , and #whatever!
• Welcoming every new follower you get. “Welcome, @john, @steve, @tracy, @wholefoods, etc…”

There are plenty more, but i’m leaving this open to some discussion, please post your worst pet peeves in the comments area below, and ill post them in an updated list, together with your twitter link (if you post it together with your comment of course!)

Feel free to start following me on – http://www.twitter.com/codem

2. You live for months in a 10×10 room with someone you barely know who you fear might kill you while you sleep.

3. You always talk about what life will be like once you’re out.

4. You get excited when the cafeteria serves you something resembling real food.

5. You take classes that are completely useless to you in the real world.

6. Everyone around you is an amateur philosopher or poet (or coke dealer).

7. You’re looked at as a scourge on the community.

8. Beer is more valuable than money.

9. Riots are a usual occurence.

10. You try to make friends that can help you ‘on the outside’.

11. You only go outside for an hour a day.

And of course…

12. If you go in unprepared you’re probably going to get f*cked in the ass.

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