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Who commits to five nines 99.999% availability?

June 14, 2011 Hosting
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Can anyone point me to a cloud hosting provider who will really commits to 99.999% availability? From what I’ve seen some offer this but only back it up with meaningless compensation if they fail such as refunding a months hosting fees which for any business which really needs 99.999% availablity will be out of propotion with the damge unscheduled downtime brings. The other catch that you often see is 99.999% planned availablity which means that they can schedule as much downtime as they like as long as the plan it and let you know in advance.

I ask this question because although i’m very much in favour of cloud hosting i increasingly feel that where clients really need 99.999% availablity they need to look at a hybrid solution which eiether combines your own hosting scaling out to the cloud which has been done succesfully or maybe ultimatley a mix of hosting over two or more cloud providers which as far as i know no one has really done on a large scale successfully yet.

So while contracts often call for five nines can the client afford that extra nine, are they prepared for the complications it brings and even if they are is it more of a target than something anyne will actually commit to in application hosting today?

Google Web Master Tools site verification with 123-REG.co.uk

June 12, 2011 Google / Google Web Master Tools (GWT) / Web Development
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If you run a website you should register for Google Web Master Tools (GWT) because they provide a wealth of useful statistics and diagnostic information that you can use to improve your site.  Anyway when you register with GWT you have various options for verifying your ownership of the your website.  My preferred option is to add a special DNS entry against the domain name.  I like this approach because its much less likely to be undone by a software update or someone tidying up files on your website.   The GWT verification screen gives you all the options and if you select DNS then asks you which registration company is responsible for your DNS records, they then talk you through step by step you to enter the special DNS record.  For various reasons I mainly use 123-Reg.co.uk for registrations and DNS and Google didn’t provide a walkthrough for this company so I had to select Other from the list and then workout what was needed.   Incase you also need to verify ownership of a site for Google Webmaster Tools using 123-REG.co.uk the steps involved are:

  1. In GWT select verify ownership, DNS and then Other
  2. They will now give you a unique string which will look something like “google-site-verification=tfUN8-Fj_jy6n2c76IZXXXXXxwpdqEmHsRLXXXXEvE”, highlight this and copy it to your clipboard.
  3. Login to your 123-Reg account
  4. Select the domain name you want to verify ownership of
  5. Under the advanced domain settings select Manage DNS (A, MX, CNAME, TXT)
  6. Scroll down the page until you get to Add New Entry
  7. You should now see 3 input fields
  8. in the first field enter an @ sign
  9. in the middle field select TXT from the dropdown list
  10. in the third field paste in the id string Google provided
  11. Scroll down a little further and click on Update DNS
  12. Wait a few minutes for the DNS change to propagate
  13. Go back into GWT and now click the Verify Now Button – if this does not work give it a little longer for the DNS changes to propagate.  It can take up to 24 hours but its usually much faster these days.
  14. If it still does not work exit 123-Reg and then go back in and make sure it saved your changes.  I’ve occasionally found that changes fail to commit the first time.

 

Finally the health warning, if you don’t understand DNS entries then be warned that making DNS mistakes can easily knock out your website, so if you’re not certain what you are doing get someone else to do it for you.

 

Looking forwards to Apples WWDC 2011

June 5, 2011 Apple Mac OS X / iPad
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On June 6th we’ll finally get to hear Apple’s next batch of announcements.  This time it has been a little different.  Normally Apple are very secretive and there is no official word in advance about what is going to be announced but this time we’ve seen several press releases about iCloud and other product updates ahead of WWDC.  But even at this stage we know little more than the product name and several of the new features that we’ll see is Lion.  This is an important event for the whole IT, technology and Electronic industry these days as Apple set the standard and in many cases make the market for so many innovations these days.   In the time honoured tradition I thought I’d better go on record and say what I would like to see Apple announce at WWDC:

  1. iCloud for streaming and storing any content you have in iTunes.  I worry that my iTunes isn’t backed up properly because its so large and I don’t currently buy a lot of video based content that I would like because it will consume too much disk space on my Mac.  If you add to this the problem that the content you want tends not to be on the Apple device you have with you when you are traveling unless you are very organised and sync what you want in advance then iCloud can’t come soon enough.
  2. iCloud for backup and storage of iPhoto and other content.
  3. MobileMe either replaced or upgraded so that I can access all of my iCloud content on the go.
  4. The Post PC Era.  When Steve Jobs said we’re now in the Post PC Era I couldn’t help feeling he was slightly ahead of the technology.  As of iOS4 you still need to plug your Apple device into a Mac or PC to register it, upgrade it and sync content onto it.  For many people with old printers you still need a PC to print!  iOS5 needs to truly remove the need for a PC or Mac base station.
  5. Facetime, I would like to see an upgrade so that you can conference in two or more people on the same video call.  Now that Microsoft own Skype I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Apple counter this by brining out a Facetime client for Windows.
  6. iBooks, we need a reader application on the Mac.
  7. Time Capsule.  There have been a lot of rumours that Apple will be upgrading their router / Time Capsule and this makes a lot of sense.  A device which can sit in the home and cache or backup your content from your Apple devices acting as a buffer between your home and the iCloud would be a great solution.  I would not put it past Apple to take this one stage further.  They could allow these devices to talk to each other across the Internet to form a grid, where all the communication are coordinated via their new data centre.
  8. Lion – Security.  I’ve always recommended Mac’s over PC’s to non-technical friends and family because of their ease of use and better security.  I would like to see this taken a stage further in Lion so that by default Applications can only be installed from the Mac App Store.  Of course there would need to be a way to switch this off for more advanced users but for most of my non-technical friends this would be a welcome security improvement.  As we have seen with the recent Mac Defender Malware it’s currently too easy to trick non-technical users into install software.
  9. Voice Recognition.  I want to see this done really well on every Apple platform.  I want to be able to be able to select tracks, listen to e-mails etc while driving or laying in the bath.  I don’t want to have to press a button to initial the voice command, it needs to be triggered by a phrase.  I want this to work like the LCARS Computer on the Enterprise, “Computer: Lights Off.”

Anyway not long to wait now, I’ll be back later in the week to review my wish list and review by 2011 Wish list from back on New Years Day.

We’re back…

June 4, 2011 News
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We’ve been busy over the last few weeks moving some of our older sites to better hosting platform and this has taken longer than expected.   There are a few lessons that have been learnt along the way.

  1. When you are just starting out with a brand new blog you don’t worry too much about the hosting.  It’s easy and cost effective at the time to just put your blog on a low cost shared server.  A few years down the line and as the blog traffic takes off it becomes more important and you need to move it to a professional hosting platform.  My advice to people now is when starting a blog or probably any website buy the smallest hosting package you can from the provider you will want to be with in a couple of years time.  The good hosting companies will be able to upgrade your package and move you to their bigger servers with minimal disruption.
  2. We’ve been doing this for a while now but back when we originally set-up this blog site we didn’t document the build and all the server tweaks.  For any hosting I really recommend that you keep a log of all the build steps and tweaks that you make.  We do this now by having a Word Document which details our procedure for building a WordPress site and then a site specific document which details anything unique to the site such as the name of the template used and any extra plugins.   This will save you a lot of time later wonder how something worked.

We’ve got lots of great ideas for articles over the coming weeks but as ever we are also interested in receiving guess blogs or products or services for review.  If you would like to get in touch please see the Contact Us section at the top of the site.