The green buzz is being exploited all over the web and abroad lately. What does it mean to be green exactly?

ok thats not what I meant, but kermit would be proud nonetheless. It means having little or no impact on your environment in short. Consider the materials needed for all the computing and server parts to the ridiculous sums of energy needed to run server farms 24/7. To be quite honest datacenters and server farms are one of the worst things to hit the environment in the modern decade.

Take a look at your homes electric bill and consider how cool it needs to be so your tv doesnt burn out if left on all day and night for years straight. The tv itself is chewing up energy and the a/c is working overtime to cool that system, fans and other systems are working nonstop to remove the heat. Now imagine your one pc in your home office has to remain online all day and night. Now imagine you have one thousand offices in your home, besides declaring bankrupcty since you cant afford the power, how is that remotely close to being friendly to mother nature.

We can and do look at ways to reduce our impact but our electric bill alone tells us when it comes to being green, datacenters have a long way to go. Some ways we try to reduce our impact are recycling hot water from coolers to use as heating for offices, using raised flooring and channels to remove heat and apply cooling better, reducing old ineffecient servers by using more virtualization and newer more efficient processors. The main drive for this happens to be profit margins though, not just being green.

Don’t let corporate spin masters make you think giant datacenters are helping mother nature. The fact is its good for business and thats why its being done. Consider that one cabinet of 25 servers in the sub $200 market, drawing 30amps of power 24/7 is now replacable by one monster vps node. Granted our monster vps nodes pack a lot of power under the hood and easily consume the power of 3 of those servers alone. 25 to 3 is a pretty significant power and cost savings.

So buy more vps hosting , mother nature will thank you for it. Ok probably not but we will, and it really does make a difference compared to the old standard of dedicated servers. Quite frankly the need for dedicated servers under $200 mo is dimenishing quickly thanks to virtualization technologies like Virtuozzo, openvz, xen, Vscontrol.

Why? Well, despite the fact that I work at the greatest web hosting company in the world, it’s because I am now an iPhone user.

I’ve held off for years jumping on the cell phone gadget bandwagon. The closest I’ve ever been to having anything that was “latest and greatest” in the cell phone world is picking up a new Motorola Razr two years after the first Razr came out (or getting my iPod as a gift several years after MP3 players became all the rave). Even then, I didn’t have a text message plan. I saw no need to text people when I could just call them.

That all changed last month when our oldest went and moved two states away after graduation. My husband made the case that it would be easier to communicate with her if we had some sort of texting plan. OK Fine. We started out with a little $5.00 – 200-texts-a-month plan. EXCEPT: I soon discovered they would use that up in the first week! I quickly changed it to an unlimited plan. Once the family got word we had the much coveted Unlimited Texting ability, miraculously one of my kids sent and received 150 texts the FIRST DAY we had the plan. I didn’t even know that was possible.

It took me a bit longer to catch on to the texting bug. I found it difficult to tap out texts to my kids or husband on my little Razr. Then I got my hands on my friend’s iPhone. He bought one last year when they first came out and I’ve always been intrigued by it. I found out texting on it is a breeze. The more I messed around with my friend’s iPhone, the more I wanted one.

On July 11, 2008, the day of the iPhone G3 launch, I became an iPhone user. And I’m loving every minute of it. I’ve become almost as bad as my children finding reasons to text family members and friends, and if I could talk my boss into getting some sort of text plan, I’d probably find reasons to text him too! (*cough hint hint *cough)

My favorite features so far:

• The built-in GPS. This is going to prove exceptionally useful for my forever navigationally challenged husband.
• The iPod. I no longer have to carry around my iPod and my phone. I now have both in one little gadget.
• It’s super easy to text with the qwerty keyboard.
• The ease of downloading and installing apps from the App store.. For example, Twitter; I love my twitter and now I can get updates super easy on my phone. I even downloaded an application that allows me to control iTunes on my computer from my phone.
• Internet and eMail access on the go from anywhere I have a signal, which so far has been everywhere.

Do you have an iPhone? If not, why? If so, what are your favorite features?

Offering businesses virtual private servers as a comparable option to dedicated hosting looks to drive down cost and reduce power consumption of hosting datacenters

HOUSTON, TX. July 16, 2008 – WowVPS! web hosting, providers of virtual private server (VPS) hosting services and a subsidiary of Landis Holdings Inc., today announced a new promotion of 25% off all “Xen” hosting plans starting from only $10.45 per month. Besides reducing ongoing operating costs for companies during tough economic times, shifting usage from dedicated servers to virtual private servers can reduce overall required power consumption.

“Socially responsible web hosting involves making choices that meet a company’s hosting needs while minimizing the impact on the environment,” says Greg Landis, president of WowVPS!. “While the focus has been mainly on new technologies to reduce power consumption, sometimes the simplest answer is selecting the right hosting plan. Our VPS hosting plans offers businesses an attractive option of improved flexibility of dedicated hosting at prices much lower than full dedicated packages.”

WowVPS! utilizes the latest version of VSControl virtualization software from Devpond, another subsidiary of Landis Holdings. VSControl software was developed in-house and eliminates the software cost which often leads to increased VPS hosting prices. WowVPS! offers plans with higher specs than any other VPS provider while maintaining 100% uptime.

WowVPS! starts with the “Xen Awakening” entry level plan, regularly priced at $13.95 per month but on special for only $10.45 per month, and includes:

• 12 GB disk space
• 200 GB bandwidth
• 192 MB or RAM
• Unlimited domains
• Free 3 VPS IP addresses

All WowVPS! “Xen” hosting plans include:

• Full VPS root access
• RAID 10 disk storage
• Guaranteed RAM
• Premium bandwidth
• Multi-core, multi-processor CPUs
• VSControl software
• No oversold resources
• Choice of Linux OS
• No contract obligation; cancel any time
• Online server and service restarts

The new WowVPS! web site includes a community forum, a blog, user-friendly control panel and the NixCore client management software.

To learn more about the 25% off special, visit www.wowvps.com/xenvpshosting.php.

About WowVPS!

WowVPS!, based in Houston Texas, provides high-quality Internet hosting solutions to small and medium-sized businesses, government agencies, prominent individuals and non-profit organizations worldwide. WowVPS’s core portfolio comprises information technology and business hosting services, as well as programming services.

Remember my post about Phishing Awareness? Recently Gmail announced they are teaming up with eBay and Paypal to help protect Gmail users from phishing scams.

Now any email that claims to come from “paypal.com” or “ebay.com” (and their international versions) is authenticated by Gmail and—here comes the important part—rejected if it fails to verify as actually coming from PayPal or eBay. That’s right: you won’t even see the phishing message in your spam folder. Gmail just won’t accept it at all.

As a Gmail user, as well as a PayPal and eBay user, this is good news.