Kristof Rennen’s Blog

Two weeks ago I visited the Pre-Conference of the Microsoft TechDays 2009 in Antwerp.

The last session of the day I visited was given by Miha Kralj, one of the only senior Architects at Microsoft.
Hi talk was about “How IT will change in the next decade”. The presentation was great, covering various topics which have changed over time in IT.
Certainly when he started talking about the evolution in hardware and servers I was really impressed.

He talked about the evolution of servers and also the size of servers.
We at our company recently upgraded all our servers, from standard pcs to rack servers, but we seem already outdated :-(.

19" Rack Server

When he showed the latest “Container Servers” Microsoft was using, I was really impressed.
The image he showed was from an Hp POD (Performance Optimized Data Center), which can serve 3500 compute nodes and 12000 hard drives.

The outside:

Hp POD: Outside

The inside:

Hp POD: Inside

The servers:

Hp POD: Servers

The really cool thing is, that this server only has 3 cables to be connected:

• Power cable
• Network cable
• Water cooling cable

The support model for those kind of servers is also easy.
They allow 10% of the cpu units to die before anyone even thinks on opening the box

His final statement was that Microsoft almost has 500.000 servers available, which are managed by only !35! people.
So far the future of system administrators, happy I’m not one of them.

On youtube you can find a video with a Tour of the inside and outside of the POD.

Kristof Rennen Hardware Hardware, Hosting, Microsoft, Review, TechDays

Since 2005 I’m one of the many happy Dreamhost users.
I bought the hosting with the idea to host several sites, run some spikes, tryout some stuff, …

But after almost 4 years, I made the balance and except for my mail, a few subversion repositories, one ruby on rails site, an ftp site to dump some stuff, and a not used blog, my hosting was wasted.

The reason why I chose Dreamhost, was its price and feature set:

• Almost unlimited storage
• Almost unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited MySQL databases
• Subversion repositories with web-based access
• Unlimited domains, sub-domain, email addresses, …
• PHP, Ruby On Rails support
• Many more …

At the time of signup, I also had a look at various windows hosts, which were too expensive at that time with a really small set of features.

Since I’m working allday with windows and microsoft technologies as my job, it was finally time to have a look at what windows hosting had to offer these days.
After having investigated a few different hosts, I found Mochahost

The features of Mochahost were certainly worth considering:

• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited MySQL databases + Unlimited size
• Unlimited MsSQL databases + Unlimited size
• Unlimited domains, sub-domains, email address, …
• PHP support
• .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 support
• ASP.NET support
• AJAX and LINQ support
• Windows Communication Foundation support
• Full Trust!!
• Many, many more…

Another great benefit of switching to Mochahost was the price. For my Dreamhost plan, I had to pay 120$ each year, where for my Mochahost plan (business plan for 3 years), I only pay 150$.

After I talked to a few support people using there nice 24/24 and 7/7 online chat, asking many and many questions, I finally decided to signup for a business plan.

After the signup was completed, it took me almost a week to transfer all my mails from Dreamhost to Mochahost, since I had to transfer them using my mail client with an Imap connection and the mails were about 1GB is size.

The blog you are currently reading, is my first real application running on Mochahost under IIS. Installation and setup where easy, the blog is fast and everything seems to be working fine.

If you are in search for great windows hosting, Mochahost is really worth considering.

Kristof Rennen Hosting .NET, Dreamhost, Hosting, Mochahost, Review

A few weeks ago, I decided to subscribe to windows hosting and I started transferring everything from Dreamhost to Mochahost.

Since my previous blog wasn’t a real success, with only 2 or 3 posts, its time for a new and fresh one.

Kristof Rennen Blogging Blogging, Dreamhost, Hosting, Mochahost