The good people over at Fat Cow have decided to support a worthy cause for the month of October.  In support of the fight against breast cancer, the company has decided to donate $1 for each new sign up this month. The donations will benefit breast cancer research, education and advocacy.

In 2005, there were over half a million victims of breast cancer world wide and in the US alone there is a 1 in 8 chance that someone in her/his lifetime will develop some form of invasive cancer and 1 in 35 chance of breast cancer causing their death. Breast cancer can also affect men as well.

Fat Cow is a proud participant of the Pink for October Program and is the second year in a row that it has participated. I really think this is a worthy cause and I believe many people will of known someone who has fought this disease. Personally, I have close family members who have successfully overcome this and I hope that anyone considering a web hosting company to look at Fat Cow and support the fight against breast cancer in the process.

So jump aboard and change some stats today! You can support them by visiting them here.

According to the Netcraft’s September 2008 web server survey which managed the responses of over 180 million websites and takes the sample of 44.5 million, it shows three quarters of web server software was powered by Apache and 2.6 million sites was hosted via The Planet’s network.  However, these are mostly polish (.pl) link farms that can artificially inflate figures. A link’s a link I assume!

Resin, a lesser known open source web server, is found to be the choice of 343 thousands websites.  The software is owned by Caucho Technology and pitches the product be a high performance application server product based on JAVA and PHP technology.  This makes it the 12th most popular web server on the Internet.

Another interesting statistic was SmugSmug, a photo sharing and sales web service, that has now over 18 thousand (subdomain) websites.  The company uses F5 BIG-IP devices to handle the traffic and uses over half a petabyte of storage space using Amazon’s Simple Storage Server (S3). That is impressive but not surprising as it provides photo storage facilities including watermark protection for artists and photographer’s works.

I am very happy for SmugSmug’s success particularly as I read through its about us section and see it as a very family oriented business.

Recently, SAVVIS and Internap announced the renegotiation of its credit facilities so they can continue to operate in a slowing economy - the news was published on HBM. Given the state of some of US banks and its reluctance to lend, it was a victory of sorts.

More importantly, it’s comforting to know that network service and infrastructure operators (NSPs) have the confidence of banks as I think they should considered to be as safe as blue chips. Yes, they have high investment expenditure but so are utility companies. Even in a depressed economy, companies still need to connect to do business. From banks to manufacturers, particularly those with a global presence, rely on NSPs to condense time and space.

I believe we can lose sight of how important NSPs are to the circulatory system of the Internet, sometimes, the flow of information and data are just as important as money.

I have finally done it! I have completed the revamp layout of the site after so many months delay!

As you can see, the layout has been widened and the navigational menu has been moved from the left hand side to the right.  This should give the site’s secondary page layout more expansion room and make it easier for readers to browse our website.

I have also made some decisions to remove some functionalities including for web hosting providers to input web hosting plans and services into our backend.  It was no longer feasible to maintain the thousands of plans and sometimes - too much - choice can be complicated.  As such, I have removed the search engines and specials section from the site. With regards to the reviews of webhosts, I have decided to also remove these and focus on a handful of hosts instead as I have personally have accounts with each and can provide a more independent review of them.  The reviews section was continously spammed and certains hosts were abusing the rating system even with the controls put into place.

You could say I am now strictly focusing on our core objectivity which is to provide information and commentry to readers regarding the hosting industry. I believe this consolidation will be a positive step as we move ahead.

If you feedback regarding the change, feel free to leave a comment.