ReadWriteWeb

Ever wonder what other companies are choosing for hosting, Email, DNS, etc.? As it happens, there's an app for that (so to speak) and someone put the Y Combinator companies under the microscope. With 248 companies examined, you get some pretty interesting results. If Y Combinator companies are the future, Google is looking really good for email hosting, and Amazon is doing really well for Web Hosting.

As Egyptians took to the streets and overthrew former President Hosni Mubarak, millions of people throughout the world turned to Al Jazeera for coverage. The global interest in events in the Middle East drove record levels of visitors to the news agency's Web servers. Traffic to Al Jazeera's site increased by 1,000% and that to its Drupal-based live blog increased by 2,000% during the crisis in Egypt, according to a blog post by Dreis Buytaert, Drupal creator and the founder of Acquia, which is now providing its elastic service for the international news organization.

This week New Relic announced that its Bronze accounts are available to all Rackspace Cloud customers at no additional cost. New Relic offers a software-as-a-service for managing, monitoring and troubleshooting cloud-hosted applications. We covered the service previously here.

New Relic Bronze accounts normally sell for $75 a month. The Bronze accounts feature unlimited users, online support and one week of data retention. Higher level accounts offer more data retention and more analysis, monitoring and alerting tools.

The hosting business is going through a shift that could make many providers obsolete or conversely give the smart ones the keys to the kingdom.

It's very clear why this is the case. Cloud computing is serving as a catalyst for innovation that is just beginning to be felt in all parts of the world. That movement will push deeper as more small businesses see ways to make their work more focused by using services that remove the IT burden from their work.

We're live blogging this morning from the Parallels Summit, where hosting providers are learning about how to turn their infrastructures into multi-tenant environments so they may serve this emerging market.

A cold snap in Texas may cause problems for the cloud. Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the operator of about 75% of the state's power grid, is ordering rolling blackouts to reduce power demand. This could cause disruptions for data centers based within ERCOT's region. According to The Associated Press this includes cities such as Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, and Abilene.

Several notable hosting companies, including Rackspace and Host Gator, are based in Texas. We haven't seen reports of outages from these or any other hosts, but WordPress warned users of its WordPress.com service that service may be interrupted.

Update: ERCOT has ended the rolling blackouts for today.

Yesterday Amazon Web Services sent out a promotional email titled "Amazon Web Services Year in Review." Understandably, the email didn't mention one of the biggest AWS stories of the year: the company's decision to remove the WikiLeaks website from its servers.

Dave Winer noticed something else of note in the email: a paragraph about how the U.S. Federal Government is one of AWS's customers, with over 20 federal agencies taking advantage of the company's services. And, according to the announcement, that number is growing. Winer suggests this is the reason that Amazon.com closed WikiLeaks' account. "It makes perfect sense that the US government is a big customer of Amazon's web services. It also makes perfect sense that Amazon wouldn't want to do anything to jeopardize that business," Winer wrote. "There might not have even been a phone call, it might not have been necessary."

As 2010 draws to a close we're taking a look at a few cloud startups that show promise and that we haven't covered on ReadWriteCloud.

ClearDB is a cloud-hosted MySQL database service competing with Salesforce.com's Database.com. It's a fully ACID compliant relational database and is accessible from any platform and any programming language. It delivers query results over a REST API.

Yesterday we all thought Delicious was about to go the way of Ma.gnolia. For those that don't remember, Ma.gnolia was a Delicious competitor that suffered a massive data loss and eventually shut down entirely. It now looks like Delicious will live on, but it remains uncertain where or in what form.

The uncertainty about Delicious's future has lead to many looking for alternatives, and several blogs have posted lists of various hosted alternatives like Diigo and Pinboard. But there's another alternative: host your own Web-based bookmarking service. Here are three open source projects that you can install on your own server or cloud provider. Keep local backups, and you don't have ever have to worry about a service being shutdown again. Please feel free to list other self-hosted alternatives in the comments.

"The big open source news in 2010 is that open source became essentially invisible," writes outgoing Canonical COO Matt Asay in his 2010 year in review column for The Register. It's not that the media stopped reporting on open source Asay explains. In fact, according to Google News, the number of stories mentioning the phrase "open source" roughly doubled. What's happening is that open source is moving behind the scenes, thanks in large part to cloud computing.

CouchOne and Nodejitsu have formed a partnership to offer CouchOne's CouchDB hosting service through the Nodejitsu platform. Nodejitsu is a node.js hosting platform running on Rackspace's servers. Adding CouchDB support makes a lot of sense, considering the overlapping developer interest in CouchDB and node.js. According to the announcement from the two companies, many Nodejitsu customers are already using CouchOne's service in conjunction with Nodejitsu.