Yes, that was a terrible pun in the title. My apologies. After a certain amount of working on the title of one's blog post, one begins to suspect that one is wasting one's time, if you see what I mean.

Anyhow, I suspect that as the editor of a technology position, I'm in more of a position than most to witness the wealth of communication that precedes "Cyber Monday," but I'm not quite certain how widely observed the occasion is.

I understand that "Black Friday" is an event. It's in the calendar. Perhaps not literally, but it's a widely accepted cultural and media (and shopping) event. The ceremonial kick-off to the "holiday shopping season." Not always the classiest of occasions, as I'm sure you've heard.

Cyber Monday, we're told, is the day when we all search for online bargains at the office instead of working. There seems to be some debate as to the truth of that. I'm not exactly "skeptical," but let's call me "curious."

The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro acknowledges the skeptics in this "Cyber Monday" post. And the comment section seems to have attracted more spammers interested in the event than shoppers.

My suspicion is that Cyber Monday is more of a semi-realized marketing idea than the full-blown cultural event Black Friday. But online retailers can try, and shoppers seem to respond.

From a hosting standpoint, the question (asked in a thousand emailed story pitches) is "how equipped are online retailers to weather the spike in online shopping that will accompany the holiday season?"

Application performance monitoring company Gomez sent out a press release today saying it had monitored the performance of some of the top online retailers during the period from 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. Easthen time on Cyber Monday, and pointed out that some of them experienced downtime.

According to the release "Gomez measures the duration (response time) and success rate (availability) of a typical online shopping experience, from home page to product search to shopping cart and checkout."

The company reported trouble with the sites of three retailers: Victoria's Secret, Williams Sonoma and Dell.

- Victoria's Secret home page is running well but shoppers trying to place items in the shopping cart receive a site unavailable page and are unable to proceed. The issue started at 10am ET and is still continuing.

- Williams-Sonoma's website experienced slowdowns at the shopping cart/view payment pages with a typical transaction slowing from 26 seconds at 6am ET to almost 50 seconds between 7- 9am ET. The site returned to a steady 24-second response time at 10am ET.

- Dell's website returned an error to returning shoppers between 9.40am-10.15am. Shoppers were unable to retrieve pre-populated account information, meaning they had to start-over filling out forms when checking out. The issue was quickly resolved.

I guess that amounts to a tangible impact. I'd love to know if any hosting providers are seeing that work its way into their business.

Have your customers selling online increased their capacity in the last week?

Forgive me for being a few days late with this, but I was on vacation last week and didn't really have a chance to put together a blog entry about this.

As you may or may not be aware, November 23 was the Grey Cup, the Canadian Football League's equivalent of the Super Bowl.

I don't imagine it gets all kinds of play south of the border (for Canadians, that means America, not Mexico), but the Grey Cup is definitely an important sporting and cultural event up here. In the interest of undermining my own point, I should probably admit here that I only turned on the game right at the end.

Anyhow, somebody pointed out to me that there had been at least one Go Daddy ad run during the game, a situation that recalled for me the company's well-known experience with the Super Bowl.

In terms of audience numbers, the Grey Cup doesn't compare to the Super Bowl (last I checked, nothing does). But as I said, it's big-event TV. And I was curious about Go Daddy's approach to the game - whether it fit into the regular scope of the company's TV advertising and whether the company was focusing any marketing effort on Canada specifically, given its recent foray into the market for the .ca domain.

I got a few comments via email from Go Daddy's VP of marketing Teri Dhooge. She says Go Daddy is moving "full speed ahead" with international expansion efforts.

"As part of this strategy, a Go Daddy-produced commercial was broadcast in the first quarter of Canada's popular Grey Cup," she says. "The spot is called "White Light" and features Candice Michelle, the original Go Daddy Girl."

According to Dhooge, Go Daddy's marketing team sees the Grey Cup as a prime opportunity to reach a Canadian audience, and Go Daddy spots broadcast in the country specifically include a mention of the .ca domain offering.

"We started advertising in Canada," she says, "around the time NASCAR's Ron Fellows won the NASCAR Nationwide Series race (NAPA Auto Parts 200) at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, Canada, driving the GoDaddy.com No. 5 Car, which was designed by Dale Earnhardt, Jr."

By the way, regardless of how you feel about the CFL in comparison to the NFL, you've got to admit, it does have a way better trophy.

I noticed the other day that we'd been receiving announcements of hosts launching "semi-dedicated" hosting services over the last little while (let's say two months) with increasing regularity.

This week saw a few at once. It was mentioned, in passing, in the announcement from Frontpages about DoD compliance. And SSA Host launched a semi-dedicated offering. In the latter case, the emerging service distinction lent a little extra spice to an otherwise somewhat less compelling "small web host adds a new hosting package" story.

The point is that the repetition caught my attention, and got me to wondering about just how new and just how significant the emergence of "semi-dedicated hosting" is.

So according to the obvious "Google test," my ignorance might be something to be embarrassed about. My search for "semi-dedicated" hosting turned up about 135,000 entries. A search for "dedicated hosting," by way of comparison, turns up 2,280,000 entries. But still, 135,000 is a lot of mentions for me to have missed.

I should point out here that I wasn't completely clueless. But my information was pretty limited to that which related directly to the few stories we had done.

In the case of this week's SSA Host story, for instance, the company was using the term "semi-dedicated" to refer to a step between VPS hosting and dedicated hosting. Specifically, one that places a limit on the number of virtual servers per physical server, and guarantees access to a certain amount of system resources.

I sent an email to Dan Garon, whose Press Advance service was responsible for at least three of the recent "company adds semi-dedicated hosting" announcements and half-jokingly asked if "semi-dedicated" was purely a semantic distinction.

He said the exact definition depends on the company; that, for example, another one of his clients had a different technology on the back-end of its semi-dedicated offering than that supporting its VPS hosting.

It seems that semi-dedicated, like "managed hosting" or "green" or many of the other distinctions in the hosting business, is pretty nebulous. It means a lot of different things, depending on whom you ask.

I dug through a few old Web Hosting Talk threads, and it seems like the cynical answer is that semi-dedicated is "glorified shared hosting." If there was a semi-dedicated offering before virtualization became a big part of hosting, then it was probably an effort to answer some of the needs addressed by VPS hosting (or some of the shared hosting shortcomings).

It seems like the spread of VPS hosting is changing the meaning of semi-dedicated somewhat. Now that just about everyone offering dedicated hosting has a VPS offering, maybe "semi-dedicated" is evolving into an effort to address some of the shortcomings of VPS hosting.

I'd love to hear some feedback on this one too. Anyone offer a "semi-dedicated" hosting package? What is it that makes it what it is? What kind of customer is it aimed at?

That's an awfully long title, isn't it? I'll try to make things clear as quickly as possible, but it's mostly the result of a confluence of news and ideas.

I noticed a story this week about MLB.com, which as you may know is one of the most elaborate and most fully realized (and most excellent, for that matter) online broadcasting projects. It's pretty impressive just in terms of the volume of content being delivered - 30 teams means 2,430 regular season games, according to my rough (and possibly inaccurate) calculations.

Needless to say, it's a lot. And all of it delivered live. It's an online project that is worth examining simply for its size and significance. And, according to this cNet story from Monday, that project will be switching from Silverlight to Flash for the delivery of its video starting next season.

A couple of stats from that story to supplement my earlier point (and confirm of my reluctant calculatons):

"MLB.com has signed up more than 1.5 million subscribers since 2003 and streams more than 2,500 regular and postseason games annually. Moreover, MLBAM [that's MLB Advanced Media] has been a technological leader and is influential among Web video services."

The story (through no fault of the reporting) is a little sketchy on the why of the switch, but the idea seems to be that Flash media is installed on basically every web browser in operation out there. It doesn't give a specific number for Siverlight, but it's safe to say it's not as much.

This MLB.com story came up while I was working on the feature I posted earlier this week about Wowza, which just announced a subscription pricing model to help make its Flash streaming server more attractive to service providers, including Web hosts.

Wowza, according to Wowza, is the streaming server for Flash. And they're only beginning to build up their relationship with the hosting community. During the interview, the Wowza folks asked for my opinion on why hosting providers have been slow to offer Flash streaming services, though many of them offer Windows Media streaming services (which is not exactly the same as Silverlight, I realize, but it represents the same Microsoft/Adobe gap).

I probably embarrassed myself a bit by not having a good answer for that. Ultimately, I settled on what I believe is the notion Wowza is working with (and banking on, to an extent), which is that there isn't a really obvious pricing model for Flash servers, to the extent that there is with Windows Media.

It's an interesting question though. In terms of the volume of video delivered on the web, Flash plays a huge role in that, with YouTube, in particular, providing the big chunk of that. And flash seems to be the media of choice with most of the sites in the "we'll host your videos for free" business. And yet, it's nowhere near as popular in the hosting space, though I realize there are hosts providing Flash support.

In the press release announcing Wowza's new licensing model includes a couple of customer testimonials, including this one from Troy Leaver, systems administrator at hosting provider Mediaserve:

"Having served our customers with Windows Media streaming services for several years, as Flash streaming grew ever more popular, we knew we were going to have to look into providing Flash streaming. We chose Wowza Media Server Pro based on features and reputation, but it was Wowza's approachable subscription licensing that made it possible for us to roll out Flash streaming services."

Obviously that's a little written-for-PR, but the point seems clear enough. It was the pricing model that was in the way.

I'd love to put this one to WHIR readers, though. Perhaps we can get some really useful insight in the comment section.

You're a hosting provider. You provide streaming with Windows Media. But not with Flash. Or not yet with Flash. Why not?

Supposing you were the sort of person who would consider shaking a stick at offerings of "educational" information on green IT, you might find, right now, that there is a bit more work than you can handle.

It seems like everybody's doing an informational webcast on green IT at the moment - and more often than not they're sponsored by one of the big technology companies with a vested interest in the decision-making of the people looking for information on "green IT," like HP, Sun or IBM.

The notice I got today from Internet.com was on an upcoming webcast called "Governing IT in a Green World." And it's sponsored by IBM. The upside of the sponsorship being the "FREE" price tag for attendance (to "qualified attendees.")

As far as I can tell, that "qualified attendees" bit refers to registered Internet.com users, a status that is not difficult to achieve. I signed up just a moment ago at the registration page that came up when I tried to follow the link to the webinar signup page.

The session is scheduled for December 2, 2008 and will be presented by George Spafford, principal consultant at Pepperweed Consulting.

According to the registration page, the key points of focus for the webinar will include

- Understanding the risks facing IT, such as skyrocketing energy costs, Global warming and the potential for new regulations

- Developing and implementing "green" strategies in IT, including how IT can help the organization and what approaches are relevant to IT

I get the feeling from the material I've seen that the presentation might include a rehashing of some of the more regularly-repeated "green IT" mantras. Particularly in the "understanding the risks facing IT, such as skyrocketing energy costs etc." portion of the show. But I doubt at this point that a webinar would be targeting the imaginary demographic of "IT people who have no understanding at all of the energy-related issues facing businesses today."

Besides, the presentation is "45-60 minutes" and it's very possible that there will be something worth seeing during the "developing and implementing 'green' strategies in IT" part.

IBM makes a lot of offers and announcements related to "green" data centers and IT. By now, we've all seen plenty.

But more often than not, they're worth looking into. In general, I've found that, as information issued by companies in the interest of self-promotion goes, most of the "green IT" info that has been issued in the last few months has been quite interesting.

Last week, as part of its sponsorship of ITWorldCanada's excellent "Green IT Playbook," IBM offered up a consultation on data center energy efficiency.

With a sort of cute little interface navigated by dragging a cartoon bee (because they're from the environment, I suppose?) and presented by a smooth-talking cartoon owl (from the environment and wise, I'd imagine) IBM invites visitors to submit their information by filling out a form promising "an IBM representative will be in touch."

Be forewarned: if you ask to be contacted, you're asking to "learn how IBM systems, software and services for a greener world can help." That is, don't be surprised when the IBM representative who gets in touch comes carrying a very IBM-centered sales pitch.

As I said earlier, however, I'm of the opinion that some of the most interesting information on green IT has come from vendors' efforts to promote their services.

It can't hurt to listen, right?

These posts usually come a little further before the issue is distributed, but the October 08 issue of WHIR magazine is sitting on my desk, so I'm a little behind on this one. The good news is, your print copy is in the mail, and the digital edition is online and readable right here.

As you've likely noticed, we tend to focus on a "theme" with a given issue of the magazine, and as I've pointed out in several other things I've written about this issue, we didn't intend, originally, to do that with this one. However, one kind of developed as we worked on the issue.

The first thing we wanted to address was this issue of outside investment in the hosting industry - the growing interest of big-money backers in this industry, and the kind of influence that interest has had, and is having, on policy in web hosting.

There are a few things. There's the obvious influence of newly-installed executives at companies acquired by the big firms - say, Doug Erwin at The Planet, or Art Zeile at HostMySite. And the less obvious, but implicit influence of those acquiring or investing companies in the businesses in which they've invested. And beyond that, the potential for outside investment is having an influence on a lot of smaller hosting providers who may be operating their businesses with an eye specifically toward being acquired - a motivation that has its opportunities and pitfalls. Dennis McCafferty covered this in our cover story.

That was the main idea. But as we watched Rackspace's IPO approach, and saw the attention being given around the hosting business to the big event, we became particularly interested in the process for Rackspace, particularly as the role of the company shifted somewhat. Rackspace had always been considered a sort of example by other companies in the hosting business, and as it went through the IPO process, and the reporting that followed, it began to notably become, almost by default, a sort of representative for the hosting business to the investment community. I wrote a feature myself about this process.

Those were two big ideas that had a lot in common - in particular they highlight the fact that the hosting business seems to be in an evolutionary stage that is stripping away some of that entrepreneurial flavor the business has had for so long. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily.

I won't go on forever here, because frankly, there's a lot to read in the magazine. These are the big features. And there are a few other pretty excellent features in there. Wayne Epperson attempts to clear up some of the confusing and conflicting discussion around "cloud computing." Esther M. Bauer offers a look into reseller opportunities for resellers in the CDN market. David Hamilton looks at the emerging role of "hosting evangelists." We interviewed NaviSite as the company prepared to break into the dedicated hosting market, and Fasthosts as it moves into the US.

And more, of course. It's a good read. And the price (free) is right.

Oh, and one more thing: while you're here, check out this blog post about accessing the digital edition from your iPhone.

I don't have a Second Life account. I've never been completely clear on the merits of the program, though I wouldn't argue necessarily that they don't exist. For me, it wasn't so much a question of whether it was a good virtual world as it was a question of whether I needed to experience a virtual world at all. I don't, I think. Not just now, anyway.

So when IBM announced earlier this year that it was launching a virtual green data center in Second Life, it made for an interesting story, but didn't immediately strike me as something to check out. As I said, I don't have a Second Life account.

And I'll admit that, not having the perspective of a user, the concept of a data center in Second Life puzzles me somewhat - it's sort of the opposite of a data center in the sense that it actually takes up space in one.

Of course, I understand the demonstration aspect of the thing. And the fact that it's showing off the company's green technologies is cool. I just wasn't going to go visit it.

Fortunately, somebody else did.

On the Enterprise IT Planet blog, Pedro Hernandez, apparently more intrepid than I, ventured into Second Life, and posted a travelogue of his visit to IBM's green data center, complete with screencaps.

Rather than repeat too much of the review, I'm just going to recommend that you go read it.

Some of the highlights of the tour: hot and cold air design demos, data center case studies, an actual server room (which I imagine would be particularly interesting to someone who hadn't been in a server room), the NOC and a variety of multi-media presentations.

All told, it looks like a pretty interesting means of presenting these ideas, and I'm sure it would be even more exciting if I had a relationship with Second Life. If using the program to build demonstrations like this becomes more of a common project, I suppose I'll have to acquaint myself with it.

Hey. This probably shouldn't come as a surprise either, but while doing a bit of poking around in Google for notes on IBM's virtual data center, I came across a couple of YouTube clips.

This one even has a fairly informative "Project Big Green" voiceover:

I've offered this explanation before, but it's been quite a while, so I'll reiterate it here quickly.

Every so often, in the course of interviewing a source for a website feature, I end up with far more information than could possibly fit into the feature, and often with things I'd love to discuss on the site. Rather than run two features on the same company in the space of a couple days, the best way to deal with that extra information seems to be a supplemental blog post.

This week, I wrote a feature on Mailtrust, and the company's outlook given its not-so-long-ago acquisition by Rackspace. I spoke to president Patrick Matthews and senior manager of products Kirk Averett, both of whom were good enough to talk for quite some time and provide me with quite a bit of insight into their business - much more than made it into the article.

In particular, we discussed the company's relationship with resellers (and that of the larger overall Rackspace organization) at length, though I didn't have room for that material in the story. I had a chance to mention that a bit in a news story we ran yesterday about a new Mailtrust reseller offering. But I wanted to give it a little additional space here in the blog.

Resellers don't typically spring to mind when you think about Rackspace. But resellers were a big part of Mailtrust's business in its pre-acquisition life as Webmail.us. This was the spark for the reseller discussion - basically, I wanted to know how the reseller business fits into the Mailtrust model now that it's under the Rackspace umbrella.

It's still a big part of the company's business, is the short answer.

But there's more. Matthews and Averett had a lot to say about the company's reseller relationships and the role of resellers at Rackspace.

According to Averett, the reseller side of the company's business is still strong - the company has has about 500 resellers, which contribute a significant percentage of the company's total mailbox count.

Of the company's evolving reseller vision, he says:

"We're perhaps more committed to the reseller side of our business now than before, because now we have an even greater appreciation of the value it adds to other people businesses. Obviously, there are hosting providers for server hosting. But what about CRM? There are a thousand other things that people either associate with email or could associate with email."

I think for an awful lot of reseller customers, we've actually gotten better since we were acquired by Rackspace.

What's more, the company is still pursuing reseller relationships actively, to the extent that the Mailtrust website conveniently includes a nicely organized list of the benefits of being a reseller of its services.

The reseller effort at Rackspace, though somewhat less evolved, or a smaller part of the overall business, than the one at Mailtrust, is nevertheless based on the same very basic principle. Averett phrases the basic reseller reality like so:

"They have a relationship with the customer for some other reason. And there's a chance that customer was never going to be our customer without that reseller being there and having its own relationship. So we're happy to gain customers through that kind of wholesale marketplace."

Matthews extends that thought to the Rackspace partner program, which by the sounds of it is somewhat more of a referral-based program, whereas Mailtrust's reseller offerings are more white-label fare. They both, however, "believe in partners."

According to Matthews:

"The [Rackspace] solution partner program is extremely strong. We sort of look at it as the most basic kind of reselling: someone has a customer relationship where you don't, and they bring the business and profit from it. It's the simplest definition of kind of what a reseller is.

"If you were to look at the Mosso division of Rackspace, you'd see multiple layers to the reseller program. It's not just the Mailtrust division that's engaged at this higher level of reseller program."

Averett expands on the Mosso connection to resellers:

"They offer a platform where you bring your programming on top, and of course, the programming can just be an HTML website, or PHP, MySQL and so on. There are an awful lot of small web hosters who are maybe mostly a design business but also do some hosting. They are a great fit to work with someone like Mosso. They don't have to think about servers or scaling.

"To go to somebody like Mosso and say 'I have 500 customer websites and I'm having a hard time keeping them running' - in the end, that design shop is now reselling Mosso's services to help their customers run their websites."

Of course there are reseller synergies between divisions. For instance, that hypothetical design business that turns to Mosso for hosting could also quite easily reach out to Mailtrust to help it provide email accounts to those same customers.

Rackspace certainly isn't going to turn away business from resellers, even if the model isn't core to its server hosting business. But according to Averett, that basic-level reseller reseller relationship does have a place at Rackspace, and did before Mailtrust ever existed.

"In that simpler level of reseller relationship, there's this huge network that Rackspace has established to help customers connect with each other and to bring customers on to Rackspace servers who otherwise didn't really know about Rackspace."

We received a very long press release this week from TrendPoint Systems, a company that produces a "turn-key data center energy management solution."

It's not a company we're especially familiar with at the WHIR, but with TrendPoint's fairly singular focus on data center energy efficiency and carbon monitoring, it's an organization that ought to be thoroughly on the radar of the hosting business.

Along with its TrendOne, EnerSure and EnviroCube products, which are generally hardware offerings designed to monitor environmental conditions and energy efficiency in enterprise data centers, the company appears to be actively publishing white papers on the general subject of data center efficiency, which makes it especially relevant to just about anyone operating a data center.

I know at the WHIR, we've got a pretty heavy appetite for published "green data center" information at the moment.

The TrendPoint data sheet can be downloaded in PDF form from the company's website, so I won't go into exacting detail about the plan itself.

In introducing the four-point plan, the press releases on several of the more important widely held truths regarding data center efficiency. Namely, that data centers are well on their way to becoming one of the world's largest consumers of energy (and subsequently producers of carbon emissions), and that as a result of that, we're not far from seeing some tough regulatory attention to carbon emissions worldwide.

The release includes a quote from TrendPoint CEO Bob Hunter, who offers an in-a-nutshell view of the current energy near-crisis facing data center operators.

"Data centers will soon be hit with a 'perfect storm' in terms of coal and natural gas driven utility cost increases coupled with the new carbon caps. These sites already have energy densities that are ten times greater than that of commercial office buildings, and their energy use is doubling every four years. The combination of rising energy usage coupled with significant electricity price increases and carbon caps creates a very troubling picture for data centers."

Before we get too far along, here, I'll warn you that there most likely isn't going to be a "eureka!" moment for any of you in reading the four-point plan. It's a pretty straightforward list of common-sense tactics responsible data center operators (especially in the service provider business) will most likely already have investigated, if they're not already implementing them to some significant degree.

Unsurprisingly, and understandably, the four-point plan is liberally populated with TrendPoint sales pitches. This ought not stun anyone who has ever read any white paper ever produced by any company.

Set an energy budget

Companies, says TrendPoint, should have an energy and carbon budget that can be broken down among users, departments and sites. "Colocation facilities, in particular, need to be able to provide each customer with the ability to manage their own energy and carbon usage and to provide a system to bill back customers appropriately."

Virtualize servers

The oft-repeated point - consolidating your physical resources and trimming away unused capacity is a data center energy saving tactic of the "do it right now" variety. TrendPoint's interesting add-on: "TrendPoint has seen that virtualized servers generate significantly more heat visa-vis the under-utilized machines and, therefore, need careful attention with their cooling management. Without proper cooling, virtualized servers, like all highly utilized systems, can develop 'server thermal inversions' within a data cabinet"

Equalize heat and cooling balance

TrendPoint says matching cooling resources to the needs of each individual cabinet can save 25 percent or more on their cooling energy use. And you can conserve more by balancing heat loads through grouping servers into zones within cabinets and working toward equalized heat loads.

Manage to the metrics

One of the more overt TrendPoint pitches in this section, but an interesting point - as data center equipment changes, managers need to continually monitor and manage heat and cooling. The company makes solutions that manage energy use according to The Green Grid's PUE standard.

In the press release, TrendPoint describes how a couple of its customers are seeing fast ROI from using the company's products.

The PDF is worth going through. It includes a lot of study-supplied supplemental information. And the great thing about energy efficiency is it has that potential to impact the bottom line of your data center operations. If the ideas (or even the products) discussed in the document have the potential to do that for your data center, you can definitely afford the 15-or-so minutes it will take to read.

One more note - there's a link at the end of the press release to a site with more information about some of the proposed energy regulations.