There is a company out there providing for free, performance monitoring, availability monitoring, and traffic monitoring?  Yes, there is.  Mon.itor.us might have a silly name, but it delivers awesome and free monitoring tools for your web site.

Here is how the web site describes the services they provide:

We provides a “24 x 7″ network and web site monitoring service to help its users quickly identify faults and deficiencies to ensure continuous operations of their IT infrastructure and maintain business operations that provide the ultimate web experience.

From within an Ajax-powered dashboard, you can check server performance and availability, generate uptime reports, track visitors, CPU, memory and other system resources you need to know about.

Mon.itor.us is currently monitoring over 134,000 web sites right now, and I am sure there will be many more to come in the future.

With both paid and free versions, Site24×7.com looks to be a great web site monitoring package.  They do monitoring of uptime and performance of your web sites, online services and servers.  They also promise to deliver instant alerts the moment something goes wrong.

You can set the monitoring tools to check the web site in question you wish to monitor in intervals ranging from 5 to 60 minutes or above.

If the worst might happen, and you need to be told, here are the various ways they can alert you to trouble:

• E-mail
• RSS
• SMS Messages

For those of you just wanting to beta test the service; when you first sign up, you are given a fully functional, 15-day trial account. At the end of 15 days, your account will be downgraded to free unless you upgrade to either Standard or Premium account.

Check out the screenshots, then give them a shot at Site24×7.com.

How fast is your hosting support? Well Peer 1 has recently brought that challenge to a whole new level. They recently sponsored two of their system administrators in the 24 Hour LeMons race.

For more information on the race, and to check out some gallery pictures, check out this link: The 24 Hours Of LeMons South 2008 Uber Gallery

Connecting the massive amounts of people, from the server grunts to the high dollar CEOs of the hosting industry isn’t such a bad goal.  Sure, it might be a big one but that is what the Hosting Industry Organization is looking to do.

Based around what started as a group on LinkedIn.com, this project has flourished into an organization to connect people in the web hosting world.  Around the end of July, the Hosting Industry Organization setup a member directory, classifieds, a job posting board, and a hosting companies for sales section.  They are also looking for suggestions, just in case you have any other big ideas to pass to them.

Just looking over the directory section of the web page, they have listings for:

• Brokers/M&A for the Hosting Industry
• Datacenters and Rack Space
• Marketing Services
• Job Resources
• Server Hardware Providers
• and more!

Right now membership stands at over 2,000+ with, I’m sure, more members joining every day.  Want to sign up?  Use this special link to do so now.

I am not the one to tell you how to turn your basement into a datacenter.  In my opinion, that is the last thing you really want to do.  Sure it sounds like a fun geeky projects, and yes - maybe somewhere down the line you might be cutting a few percentages off your overall costs.

Is it all worth it though?

Services You Can’t Provide with Home Hosting

Looking at the services that a datacenter could provide that you may have trouble with, some of the most important aspects of hosting may be missing from your host it from home server.  People like having redundancy.  Are you going to be able to provide backup generator power, diesel generators, redundant routing and multiple carriers?

More Work for YOU!  (and explosive diarrhea)

Now not only are you managing your own hosting company, you are also in charge of keeping that machine updated, secure and running around the clock, 24/7, 365 days a year. Think of it as having to baby sit a child that you can’t take anywhere because it has unpredictable explosive diarrhea.   You never know when it might strike, and as far as taking care of a server goes - you never know when the worst might happen.

Professionalism: Who Would You Rather Do Business With?

The last point I would like to bring up is that people don’t feel comfortable with it, so don’t expect to get many customers to sign onto the deal.  If company A told me they were hosting out of their basement and company B told me they hosted out of a real datacenter.  I’m going with company B, and you know you would too.

The moral of the story is that people often greatly under estimate the time, devotion, costs and more that it takes to get this type or project up and going.  Between server security, updating the server, and administering it too your not going to have much time for anything else.  Best to go out and find a good data center or dedicated hosting partner to help you with that side of the web hosting business.

Did you know the peaceful Swiss people have problems with spam?  The king of all spam has also met his fate.  Spams not the only thing we got on the line up today, there is a lot of hosting news, and information coming to you.  So stand back, there is a Web Hosting Show coming through!

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 157!
Running Time: 10 minutes | File Size: 4.97 MB

Here are just a few topics from this week’s episode of the Web Hosting Show.

• Why Not Setup a Data Center Out of Your Basement?
• The King of Spam to be Sentenced to Hard Time!
• What is Domain Name Front Running?
• What Country Tops the World in Spam?
• ICANN Blames What Domain Register for Recent Hack?

Short on words this week, but since we do have an awful lot of SPAM talk this week:

Have you taken the Web Hosting Show’s fan survey yet? If not, listen to the show and then get it done. Your feedback given there could dramatically change the production of this podcast! Be heard and give me you thoughts!

Ever wonder how a web hosting data center is put together?  Sure, with love and care - but what else? Here is an interesting video that goes through the step by step process of building a server farm (very quickly!).

Have any other interesting hosting videos to share?  Sent ‘em to me at mitch@mitchkeeler.com and I’ll share them with the web hosting world.