Archive for January, 2010

Hosting Companies Donating to Haiti

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Haiti

There are times when we all need to come together and do whatever we can to help people that are under distress. Just recently we saw how an entire country got affected, in the most horrible way, by an earthquake. Thankfully people all over the world have raised millions of dollars that, of course, can’t make up for all the human losses but it can still improve the quality of life for the people in Haiti. With a death toll at about 200,000 and with yet another 1.5 million people homeless they really need all the help they can get. It makes me happy to see that some web host’s have decided to help out as well. Hostgator has donated $100,000, GoDaddy $500,000 and SingleHop has contributed with $10,000. I hope to see more web hosting providers making contributions to help out the one’s affected in Haiti.

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Rent a movie via Youtube

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Youtube

Youtube, who made a name for themselves by offering free streaming videos, made a step, although small, towards the rental market. They have a long way to go before they will be able to compete on the same level as Netflix but it’s still an important step that is well worth noticing.

At the moment Youtube, who is owned by Google, will begin with only offering five movies and they are not of the blockbuster type. They are not even old forgotten classics. They are something much better – at least according to a movie geek like me. The films that will be up for rental are part of this year’s, or was part of last year’s, Sundance Film Festival so expect something that is a bit more independent than say Avatar. You’d better be quick if you want to try out this service as the movies will be available for a limited period, from Friday 22nd to the end of the Festival which is January 31.

It’ll be interesting to see how this service gets received by the users. If a success I guess that Google will put even more efforts into getting the full version launched as soon possible. Youtube has already held discussions with many of the major studios so in the future I guess that it will be possible to watch all your favorite Mel Gibson movies as well and not only the ones made by directors with unpronounceable names.

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Google leaving China?

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Google China

This Tuesday Google threatened to shut down all of their operations in the People’s Republic of China. The reason is that they discovered a very advanced cyber attack against Chinese human rights activists.

According to Google, Chinese “cyber spies” hit the company, along with at least 20 other companies whose identity has not been revealed. The purpose of the attack apparently was to gain access to email accounts belonging to activists all over the world.

The company said that they now are looking over their business in China and that they’ve made the decision to no longer filter search results in China.

Many bloggers claim that Google’s filter in China already is long gone, or at least that it’s gotten a lot softer. When searching for the Tiananmen Square while in China you apparently get a much broader set of results than you used to.

China is still to respond to the threats made by Google. The Chinese authorities are “looking for more information” regarding the alleged attacks, according to a Chinese official.

What can one make out of all this? It’s difficult since Google once in a time agreed to allow very strange censorships, at least according to me, in China but I think it’s a good thing that they now finally decided to take a stand against pointless ruling by “Big Brother”. What do you say? What’s the best thing Google can do now?

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WHS on Youtube

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Hope that everybody had a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year! I know that it’s been a while since I last posted something. Sorry for this but I simply haven’t had the time to blog, in combination with some technical issues. However, a lot of things have happened with WebHostingSearch since last time and one of the great things that I’m proud to be sharing with you is the release of our own page on Youtube. The theme (so far) is Sherlock Holmes and the aim is to provide you with useful tips and interviews with the interesting people of the web hosting industry – yes, there are quite a few.

Click the video above to learn how to work with search engine optimization – and get access to all of our other videos.

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