ROYAL INFO GRABBER

Back in 1996 the Web was starting to gain some serious momentum, but it was still just a few years old. Now in 2010, looking 14 years back into the past of the Web can be a both nostalgic and entertaining experience.

To give you some perspective, in 1996…

When an Internet-enabled device is the first thing you see when you wake up, is your companion all through the day, and the last thing you see when you go back to bed, it might be time to ask yourself – am I a Web addict yet? Or when will I be?

We took a look at perceptions of the Internet and addiction to put our minds – and yours – to rest on the matter, coming to conclusions more positive than we had hoped.

If you’re not used to thinking in terms of website availability and reliability, I hope that the insights below may help you to a greater understanding of the factors you should keep in mind when selecting a quality hosting company.

• No web hosting company will have 100% uptime in the long run. It simply doesn’t happen. They may have zero downtime (100% uptime) for a few months, but sooner or later something will happen. There are simply too many factors involved (networks, power, equipment failure, software issues, human errors, etc), and not all of them are under the control of the hosting company.

Since it launched in 1998, Google has become one of the true giants of the Internet. These days, Google has data centers all around the world and hundreds of thousands of servers. The sheer size of Google today makes it very interesting to look back at its humble beginnings as a small research project called Backrub at Stanford University.

Back in early 1998, the entire search engine and website ran on this setup:

This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb. It looks like the secret HQ of a James Bond villain.

And it is real. It is a newly opened high-security data center run by one of Sweden’s largest ISPs, located in an old nuclear bunker deep below the bedrock of Stockholm city, sealed off from the world by entrance doors 40 cm thick (almost 16 inches).

(For the curious there is plenty of more information further down.)