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.

According to our good buddies at the WHIR, Los Angeles county has halted plans to build a $68 million dollar data center facility because of the animals that have already claimed that spot as their home. Now these are not bears, monkeys or sea lions oh no, they are much more dangerous than all three of those put together. They are 150 wild cats with a bad attitude.

Finding new homes for these cats have put a strain on the local government. The new data center was suppose to start construction back in 2007, but those cats, those wild homeless felines have another idea. Here are some facts about the data center that could have been according to the article:

The new high-tech data center, which was supposed to begin construction in 2007, will be the county’s first energy-saving “green” facility - with a vegetated roof and built partially underground - and is to be constructed in the derelict buildings just south of the Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey.

According to reports by Data Center Knowledge, the county is planning to build a 46,000 square foot data center that will be used to process employee payrolls, welfare payments, court documents and other county department records. Planners are also designing the facility to meet the criteria for a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification.

Now I tried to do my best to get a quote from the cats in question, and they at first had no comment but then told me all the talking they had to do would be done so through their lawyers, because they are cats and “normal” people usually can not make heads or tails out of what they are saying. They also wanted me to tell the public they really don’t like the LOL cats all over the Web.

There has been lots of talk about web hosts offering and clients needing upgrades to PHP 5. For those of you who might be outside the loop, let me first explain what PHP is. PHP is a framework that works on your hosting server’s side of things. It is a programing language that allows web developers to create content that dynamically interacts with databases.

Now the main reason you would want to upgrade to PHP 5 is that development for PHP 4 ceased at the end of 2007. You will no longer get updates for it, unless they are security related. Critical security updates for PHP 4 will be provided till August 8, 2008. So this is another good reason why a move to PHP 5 might be a good idea.

Where are the advantages of PHP 5 over PHP 4? Well without getting too geeky on you there are a number of improvements that just make it more robust, faster, more secure and easier to work with. What was wrong with PHP 4? Well, nothing really - it is just getting a little long in the tooth. PHP 4 you have to remember was released back in 2000. Think of it as a pair of old shoes you really love. the laces might be lost and your holding the heel on with duct tape but you can still put them on your feet and use them. PHP 5 would be the pair of sneakers you always wanted.

There have also been several public movements to help lead the charge to PHP 5, one of the more popular ones was the GoPHP5.org project that shared information about PHP 5 and kind of helped push a lot of web hosts in the right direction when it came to supporting the most recent stable release of PHP 5.

The name of the game is evolution. As with any technology, we need to move forward as soon as there is a solid stable release because in doing so we can continue to make things bigger, faster, better and stronger.

There are many server monitoring services out there, but not many have ways for you to easily take in and read that information on your own. One of the few that do is WebSitePulse. They provide a Firefox addon that will give you a brain dead simple way of keeping a watchful eye over your own domains.

Here is a little more about the extension from the developers:

The WebSitePulse Current Status extension provides an easy way to keep an eye in real-time on the status of your servers, websites and web applications when you are using the WebSitePulse monitoring service.

The WebSitePulse extension is broken off into two components. The sidebar will display all targets and their current status. To get more details, all you have to do is click on the name of the target in question.

At the bottom it will also give you a counter telling you when was the last time it was refreshed.

The second component would be the status bar icon which indicates if everything is alright. Here you pretty much play red light, green light. Red is bad and green, well… green is good. You can then right click the status bar icon to customize the extension’s settings.

You will need to also login to WebSitePulse.com and create a free account to use this tool. This current status addon for Firefox does a good job at doing real time status tracking. If you are interested in keeping a watchful eye over your server, it might be worth checking out.