Back from the Ashes: The Internet Appliance
Earlier this morning I read a terrific article from cnet’s Ina Fried about the state of the “Internet Appliance”.
Basically, the Internet Appliance rested on the idea that there were, to paraphrase Ms. Fried, many “on-ramps” to the Internet (more specifically the web). These “on-ramps” would give relatively fast, simplified access to the web in order to access information.
There’s no doubt it was a great idea, but the execution was hampered by spotty, slow, and expensive internet access and a lack of justifiable content. The result was a swift and untimely death for the entire concept.
But fast forward to today and you’ll find the Internet Appliance is alive and well. While there isn’t a single product or category that can claim the “appliance” concept outright, most of us have and use these devices everyday.
Be it an iPhone or Android, a PS3 or a Wii, all of these devices have constant access to the web to some degree.
Looking again at Ms. Fried’s article, one of the most glaring examples of an appliance’s “revival” of sorts is the concept of the “Network Computer”.
Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison dreamt up the concept of a modern mainframe computer, a “thin client” that simply accessed a core computer for its computational muscle. In the 90′s, the idea fell flat. These network computers looked and acted like standard desktops, only they were designed to be used completely differently and simply didn’t have the muscle of your standard PC.
Today? Mobile “thin client” devices are everywhere and this space is slated to get a lot more competitive with devices like the iPad and the upcoming Chrome OS.
From the standpoint of a hosting provider, the needs of web users have changed dramatically since then as well. In 1999, web pages were largely static and couldn’t break. When all you’re doing is throwing an animated “hamster” gif up with a looped audio track, well, that could very well stay up forever without a hitch.
Today, even the most basic sites require databases. Whether it’s video sharing sites, online gaming, or even a simple blog with comments, it’s hard to imagine an internet that didn’t involve real time user participation of some kind.
That got me thinking, I know how my internet creation and consumption habits have changed in the past decade, but what about everyone else’s? For those who own and operate businesses, how has your company or business adapted to the modern web? For consumers, how has your experience consuming content changed with this latest generation of internet appliances?
Let us know in the comments, on Facebook, and follow ServInt on Twitter!
Follow Eric Morales on Twitter.
Photo by Steve Rhode.
Happy Canada Day from all of us at ServInt!
All of us at ServInt want to wish our friends up North a very happy Canada Day!
Fire up your barbecues and (safely) light up your (legally obtained, I’m sure) fireworks. ;-)
Supporting Open Source One Download at a Time
We’ve always been vocal about our support for open source software and the communities surrounding the movement. After all, we wouldn’t be around without Linux and the myriad of open source components that help us run our business. This isn’t a simple reaffirmation of the obvious here, we are true believers and we want to show it. Below are a couple of the open source initiatives we’ve been involved in the past few weeks, with even more to come!
In April, we decided to double down and become Silver members of the Linux Foundation. We did it for two key reasons.
First, our entire product line is is based on Linux, so we felt compelled to help ensure that the platform is sufficiently protected and represented in the growing tech world. Secondly, we believe that real innovation comes from a level playing field.
There is no fairer platform than Linux.
A little while later, we also became official sponsors of the CentOS.org. Our VPS, SuperVPS, and Solo Series all leverage the power, and flexibility of CentOS Linux and we’re proud to put our money where our mouth is. We’re also hosting a CentOS mirror on one of ServInt’s Solo Series Dedicated servers, so those interested can download our favorite distro!
Finally, ServInt’s COO, Christian Dawson, will be visiting LinuxCon 2010 in Boston this coming August. If you’re in town, don’t forget to say hi!
In the near future, we’ll be announcing even more open source initiatives so stay tuned!
Questions? Comments? Let us know below, on Facebook, or on Twitter!
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Photo by sidereal.
WordPress Reaches Out
Last Friday, I commented on the outage at WordPress.com.
Over the weekend, WordPress contacted us in response to that post. They took issue with a few points and sent us a heartfelt and thoughtful response outlining some of the work they had done to battle their outage. The conversation was enlightening and caused us to reflect differently on the outage.
As you may know, we’ve never shied away from defending a competitor that was doing the right thing. We were very public in our support for Rackspace — one of our largest competitors and industry colleagues — last year during its series of tragic outages.
We’ve also never had a problem challenging those that weren’t. When a new wave of “solar powered” hosts began targeting eco-oriented blogs and lambasting them for hosting with companies like ServInt, we called them out on it and pointed out our own green credentials.
We have always treated our blog as a public facing forum for ideas, we want readers to know that real people with real emotions and opinions work at ServInt. I think it’s that willingness to engage in constructive and frank conversations that set us apart from other people in this industry who would rather play it safe.
So, thanks again to our friends at WordPress for sharing the information with us that they did. WordPress powers our blog and is the cornerstone of our own Blog VPS line, so it goes without saying that we’re fans and love the platform. As an active member of the Linux Foundation and as open source stewards for more than a decade, we love and admire innovative companies that help make software development free and community driven. The WP staff and community have done great things for the Internet and are clearly talented, brilliant assets to the web.
Here are a couple of the responses the folks at WordPress pointed us to:
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s blog post detailing the outage.
Again, we appreciate their reaching out and setting the record straight.
Have something to say? Don’t forget to comment! You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
On the WordPress Outage
When I walked into the office today, my various RSS feeds, Twitter apps, and news aggregators were lit up with news of WordPress.com’s outage.
Now, we’ve made our position on the viability of free platforms known before. They’re great if you’re just goofing around, but they’re not so great if you’re trying to make a living. WordPress.com hosts millions of blogs, the vast majority of them being relatively simple “Here’s what I’m having for lunch” fare, and that’s absolutely fine.
However, they host lots of popular blogs and they have a VIP program with some pretty big names including TechCrunch, GigaOM, and a couple of CNN’s blogs. Those are sites that have a lot of users counting on them and WordPress made them look really bad today. With almost no outward communication other than a cheeky 404 page, a lot of businesses were in the dark about why their sites were down.
Outages happen, we get that, and we certainly don’t fault WordPress.com or Matt (Mullenweg, WordPress founder) for what happened without knowing more details. We love WordPress at ServInt – we use WordPress software right here on this blog – and we truly appreciate their contributions to open source. WordPress does not, to my knowledge, have any sort of issue with recurring outages. By and large, they have been extraordinarily successful, historically stable, and until last night their millions of users were probably 100% happy.
But, this outage is yet another example of the danger small businesses have when they rely purely on free services, and it’s also further proof that many of these services simply don’t understand the need for urgency in keeping their users informed. I understand not wanting to jump the gun and announce speculative or preliminary information, but the fact that really nothing was said is troubling.
I know this is going to sound incredibly cheesy but it’s true; ServInt has nothing but VIP clients.
Because we’re accountable to each and every one of our customers, and because we have an exchange of goods and an associated Service Level Agreement, we have a vested personal and financial interest in ensuring that you stay up as close to 100% of the time as is physically possible. As a result, our VPS and SuperVPS platform has an average of five 9′s of uptime (99.999%). We’re not perfect – those five 9′s aren’t a 1 and two zero’s – but we do everything we can to get as close to perfection as possible.
ServInt already hosts incredibly popular blogs like Android and Me, Sports by Brooks, and The Mac Observer, just to name a few, so rest assured that this is an apples to apples comparison. This isn’t so much a criticism of WordPress as a company; after all they make a great product and are a tremendous benefit to the internet as a community. This is a larger critique of companies that treat hosting as little more than cheap, forgettable infrastructure. It’s like building a mansion on clay instead of concrete; you learn – quickly – that skimming costs off of your foundation is a bad idea.
People come to us so they can start small and grow. We’re a service company that manages the foundational infrastructure of the web. Because we do what we do so well, incredibly powerful and complex sites can grow and thrive, make lots of money, and spawn even more terrific sites. When a foundation is solid, success is contagious, WordPress as a platform is a great example of that. Their hosting infrastructure and communication, however, has room for improvement.
I don’t want this to sound vindictive, nor is my aim to “poach” customers or do some sort of “rescue” pitch to angry WordPress clients. Events like this make our industry look bad as a whole, and I’m saddened whenever a company as stellar as WordPress drops the ball.
When real hosts – people who know this business – have a catastrophic outage, they’re communicative, responsive, and as transparent as possible. Companies that take their hosting customers for granted quickly prove they have a lot to learn.
Think I’m way off base? Let me know in the comments, on Facebook, or on Twitter.
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Introducing ServInt’s New Blog Server Line!
ServInt helps you spread your message
Yesterday we told you about SPORTSbyBROOKS, one of ServInt’s most popular blogging customers.
If you didn’t catch it, Brooks talked about the harrowing burst of traffic he experienced when he broke the infamous Tiger Woods story last November. After one phone call, ServInt built Brooks a custom solution that more than quintupled his previous resources, and we did it over Thanksgiving Day weekend!
So, needless to say, we have a great wealth of experience with high traffic blogs.
That’s why we’re excited to talk about our new Blog Server initiative! After consulting with our most popular blogging customers, we built the foundation of what we think will become the premiere blog servers in the world.
Our Blog Server line is a modification of our existing VPS, SuperVPS, and Solo Series products. They each feature the traditional LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack and come pre-loaded with cPanel/WHM. Most of the unique features of this line happen on the backend, making it even easier — not to mention faster — for us to upgrade VPS and SuperVPS customers with popular sites on the fly. This technology also allows us to further optimize the virtual environments on our Solo Series Dedicated servers which combine powerful Dedicated hardware with the flexibility of virtualization.
Because WordPress is the most popular blogging software in the world right now, we’ve rolled out our new line with WordPress in mind. New customers will receive a detailed, step by step instruction guide on getting set up with WordPress along with their server turn up information.
While WordPress is certainly the most popular application, it is by no means the only one. Our Blog Servers are fully compatible with competing software such as TypePad, and can also be loaded with apps like Drupal or Joomla should you prefer to grow your blog in a different direction.
The point is, the choice is yours. Try getting that level of flexibility from free blogs.
What we’d like to make clear with this announcement is that it is, at its core, a foundational addition to our products. ServInt’s Blog Server line is proof of our ongoing commitment to what we believe to be the future of news and opinion on the web, and we’re incredibly proud to be a part of that.
Check out ServInt.net/blog for more info!
Sinking A Birdie With Sports by Brooks: A ServInt Success Story
SPORTSbyBROOKS Survived Tiger's Drive Off The Fairway
Generally speaking, sports reporting tends to focus on stats, facts, and predictions.
Sure, there are always exceptions. There are plenty of human interest stories on doping and cheating; but tune into ESPN at any given hour and you’re more likely to get a breakdown of a particular team’s performance than you are the juicy gossip behind the stars themselves.
So its no surprise that Brooks Melchoir, the man behind SPORTSbyBROOKS, found a lucrative niche in sports gossip reporting.
Like all of us, professional athletes have complex motivations for doing what they do, they straddle a line between performing for themselves and performing for the adulation of fans. Because they are so often larger than life, the mistakes they make tend to be larger than life, too.
So, when SPORTSbyBROOKS broke the now infamous Tiger Woods story over Thanksgiving weekend in November of last year, his already incredibly popular site was in trouble.
3 Lessons We Can Learn from the Resurrection of Palm
Palm Lives After All
If you follow the tech industry, it was hard to miss HP’s recent acquisition of Palm, Inc.
The Sunnyvale based smartphone maker was in serious trouble after its seemingly meteoric rise from a very similar grave in January of last year. Palm was on the ropes, its wonderful webOS platform overshadowed by ineffective marketing and distribution. The company’s audacious reentry into a space dominated by Google, RIM, and Apple seemed to be a lost cause.
Then HP, probably the most bland hardware manufacturer in the world, came to the rescue. The marriage of the two seems like the perfect solution, Palm will invigorate the stale HP brand with a fresh new mobile operating system that is light years ahead of HP’s own offerings, and HP provides the firm with the financial footing and market share to take some serious – and expensive – risks.
So what can small online businesses learn from this soap opera? Here are a few things that stuck out for me.
The State of the Web According to Web 2.0 In San Francisco
Gotta love O'Reilly Expos!
Last week, myself and Christian were in San Francisco for O’Reilly Media’s famous Web 2.0 Conference.
There were some really compelling keynotes, fascinating panels, and the show floor, while small, did its job of showcasing the current focus of the tech industry. What I found most interesting was the seemingly laser-like focus the entire tech industry seemed to have on three key development priorities, and Web 2.0 showcased them handily.
After four days there, I have a few take-aways that I think do a good job of summarizing where today’s developers see the future of the web.
ServInt: We Support Our Local Police!
Lauren Presents ServInt's Gift to the Fairfax County Police Department
A few days ago, ServInt made a donation to the Fairfax County Police Department as a token of our appreciation for all of their hard work. ServInt’s founder, Reed Caldwell, is the son of a police officer and has made respect and admiration for all public servants a part of what ServInt is culturally.
Perhaps more than anything else, ServInt is and has always been a people-driven company. From our ongoing efforts (see here, here, and here) to help those affected by the earthquake in Haiti, to our environmental work to further minimize our effect on climate change, we’re a company that cares about people.
How do you help out in your community? Let us know in the comments, on our Facebook page, and on Twitter!
