Chris May

Microsoft appears to be ready to offer a windows based service similar to Amazon's ec2.

I am not sure that I would make much use of this type of service, as I am looking for something more like GoGrid or Mosso (which I wrote about a few days ago).

Should prove to be very interesting...

In the next 72 hours, you expect the new campaign to generate 10x more traffic than you have had in the last 72 days.  How do you scale to deal with this problem?

Do you buy more servers?

A few companies are starting to offer instant scalability for needs like this.  Amazon has been doing this for a while with their web services, but it isn't very useful for people who need the site to be running 24x7 (and it isn't very MS friendly).  But now there are other companies coming into play to provide the service I am talking about.

https://www.gogrid.com/

and

http://www.mosso.com/

Both offer the ability to instantly scale up your infrastructure as needed.  You can buy more CPU cycles, storage space, bandwidth etc, for a short time period.

This may (or may not) be ready for prime time, but it an interesting development for sure!

FreeNAS allows you to quickly convert an old PC into a NAS hosting machine for extra storage.

Finally someone is taking computer manufactures to task for advertising hard drive sizes in a false manner.

Hard drives store BINARY data. 1000 bytes != 1 KB, 1000 KB != 1MB, and 1000 MB != 1 GB.

So what does that mean?

1 GB is really 1,073,741,824 bytes. So the result is that a hard drive that is a "150GB" hard drive is really only going to store around 140GB of data. You just got screwed out of 10GB!

Here is the story.