Hosting, hosting, hosting. This week's updates are all about the cool sites we host for our great customers. And it's about the stuff we do to make hosting better, faster, and stronger for our customers.  

Looking for some northern Maine adventures? Try checking out the great, cycling, travel packages on Discover Northern Maine's web site! We've begun to revamp the web site with road biking getaways as well as German and French translations for our bi-lingual friends. Discover Northern Maine is a web site connecting Aroostook County small businesses with eager travelers from New England, the United States at large and Europe. Cycling Travel packages in Northern Maine: http://www.discovernorthernmaine.com/travel-packages/cycling/

Our friend and client Leslie Wagner of Leslie Wagner Photo has been busy! The Art Directing LLBean veteran is working regularly in the field but it seems she's going where the fun is! Leslie has recently been photographing numerous rock and pop bands (Neon Trees and The Avett Brothers) both in concert and candid portraits as well as charity events (recently the Maine walk for Haiti) and professional tennis players. Shouldn't we all be doing this? Check out Leslie's web site and follow her on Facebook!
http://www.lesliewagnerphoto.com
https://www.facebook.com/lesliewagnerphoto

Holz Creative of Atlanta Georgia tapped us to host the great new site they're working on now, even now, from faraway Germany, for Jeff Brickman Law. (Hey there, Cory!)

The righteously bad (bad meaning hot; righteously meaning, well, shooot) folks at BAD Studio and Packawhallite and Yellahooser Jim Cradock are building sites for Diane de la Rue, one she and her daughters are using to write about her benign brain tumor being shown the door – think of it as kind of TV situation comedy with one of the lead characters, though not the straight man, being the tumor – and another site for her legal consulting business. The tumor has a name, and the site is here: http://www.byebyebillybob.com/ Stay tuned for more!

Making hosting better:  

We recently upgraded our server in Texas to make use of Cloud services. There's a buzzword for your: Cloud. But it's a buzzword with some real substance behind it. Cloud services allow resources, whether bandwidth, drive space, processor cycles, to be shared across computers plugged in to the Cloud on the 'net. Practically, and really basically, it provides an even higher level of redundancy. Think of it like this: Cloud is to hosting and serving what RAID is to harddrives and storage. It's about keeping our customers' stuff online. Always. Just one of those proactive things we're thinking about in a meangingful way and utilizing when it appears ready for prime time.

Hey there. 

Quick heads up, because we know some of you were starting the weekend early, i.e. last (Thursday) night, and if you're in Portland-town we know some of you were super productive attending the Abstract conference, but if you're hosted with Packawhallop our server (one of 'em) on which we host your stuff was upgraded. Thursday night. Cloud upgrade. Sorry, no iTunes gift cards... Maybe next upgrade... 

Good news is that because of Packawhallop's proactive measures to always make things better, your hosting with us got better. Even if you didn't notice. Which is kind of the point. We're always thinking about and doing stuff to grow our hosting business and to make it better without interrupting the things you need your site to do. 

Cloud. It's really great. Well, we're digging it. Our propellers are spinning really fast on our beanies right now so that we're floating – really, floating! – like three feet in the air. And yes, we love all our customer, and we understand and appreciate that you host with us because it's great having geeks, actual geeks listening to oftentimes dissonant music (although in our case that music isn't metal but Hungarian folk, but, alas, that's stuff for another post) doing your hosting. 

Have a great weekend! We have your hosting covered! 

Or two plane crashes, one Thursday and another Friday. But that's beside the point:

Cloud computing, the thing that tripped Amazon up last week, and using the cloud for providing access to online servers, is where hosting is going. It might not be 100% there yet. But it is where it's going. Part of this is managing expectations. The airline analogy from NYT is a good one. Extend it:

Sometimes flights don't happen. They're cancelled. Handle it gracefully, professionally, and the customers with a rudimentary understanding (they don't need to be "techies") for how hosting works will in all likelihood understand. They'll give Amazon and Amazon's customers, like Foursquare and Netflix, the understanding they deserve.

The folks who don't understand and who react first by calling Amazon-Foursquare-Netflix "idiots," well, those are the ones who are going to call to yell and swear at you that their email doesn't work, when they've not entered their correct email password. Like most people working hard to provide what we believe are good services, like Amazon, like Foursquare, and like Netflix, we love all our customer. But are these the customers you really want?

Here's the article tracking the original outage Thursday:

http://nyti.ms/dQErAO 

Here's the Saturday NYT article:

http://nyti.ms/fQBvEW