However, it stood strong with 15k hitting it in one day. At one point around 5,000 unique IPs hit the server at once. Seeing how well this host withstood this, I wanted to find out more. I asked to interview the man upstairs and got in contact with James Grierson. Decided to ask him some questions for fun, as well as recommend their service!

#1. How long have you been in the business?

- I have personally been working with online media and webhosting since 1998. I have been working with BlueHost since 2007 as the VP of Business Development and Affiliate Management.

#2. What is the difference between Host Monster, Blue Host, Fast Domain?

- The three brands are targeted to different niches within the markets. BlueHost is targeted to small and medium businesses, HostMonster to the enthusiasts like bloggers. FastDomain is our newest plan and is currently focused on more advanced customers who need a little more of everything. Each brand also has different plans and pricing that vary depending on the promotions we are running at any given time.

#3. What kind of setup do you guys use to be able to withstand the digg effect?

- We design the architecture of our own hosting servers rather than deal with the confines of a packaged product. Currently our data centers have twelve 1GB fiber lines going into them. We recently added a large number of solid state drives to the machines in order to help with processing more IO. We run all of our boxes with dual quad core Intel Xeons and 16GB of Ram and only use the fastest HDD’s out there. We have had a number of customers on the front page of Yahoo News, featured on Glenn Beck, found on Digg and other major networks in the past and most of those experiences have worked out just fine. If the customer has the liberty of letting us know ahead of time we can even prep things and make sure they have a little extra just to make sure the experience goes smoothly.

#4. Do you guys have a twitter account? if so what is it?

- Not currently. We actually had a rogue twitter impersonator out there for a while and just recently was able to shut it down for Trademark infringement. Once all is worked out with Twitter we plan to take control of it all.

#5. Do you offer any services for people that want to host on a windows server?

- Sure, we provide over 1000 Linux servers that work! All joking aside, I feel sorry for anyone who has to be on a Windows server. Think of all the headaches, pain, suffering and countless hours admins waste staring at a blue screen. I say skip it and avoid the issue by choosing a better platform to build your web architecture on. So to answer your question, no we do not have any plans to provide Windows solutions in the near future. Maybe if they released a great open source solution we would consider it.

#6. What website´s do you visit the most?

My current list of most visited websites are: www.dailychanges.com, www.slashdot.org, www.slickdeals.net, www.quakelive.com

Thank you James for your time.

How it works

One plugin I have recently found has been a god send, it goes by the name of Ubiquity. It is a lot like quicksilver for the Mac, however being used for the world wide web. A great example of the power this plugin has is it’s translating feature. I’ll be on a website in Spanish, there is a part of the webpage that I really want to read, however I have no idea what it says.

I simply hit my shortcut for Ubiquity, start typing in translate, don’t really have to finish writing it.

Hit enter, and the same section that had the Spanish words, has now been translated and I can go on my way.

Now there are endless things that can be done, like looking up weather by typing weather and the zip code. We can type map and an address to get it mapped out for us, and if in Gmail, we can then paste the image with directions directly into our mail.

I am used to having a lot of tabs open. Lets say I have many twitter profiles open and I want to close them all. Simply hit the Ubiquity shortcut, type in close-related-tabs and twitter. All tabs with Twitter in the title are gone. You can also chose which once you want to close with just close-tab. If you have google calendar, you can add appointments by just typing add-to-calendar I’m meeting Paul tomorrow at 3. It actually understands that and adds it to your calendar.

Click here to check out their tutorial.

Click here to download the plugin.

Check out this video for a better idea how it works:

Plugin the Plugin

What makes it so powerful is that you can actually write your own commands for it. One that I’ve found to be very useful is TinyURL. It converts links that I highlight into a TinyURL that I can the post into Twitter. Another plugin a user has written is a link to twitter. So now when I’m browsing and I need to send a quick tweet. Simply type twitter “and my message”. It’s gone straight to my twitter account.

15 Uniquity commands to enhance your web experience – Here you can get the tiny URL command and Twitter command.

Here is a video that teaches you how to make a command for Ubiquity:

Conculsion

It’s easy to see how massively powerful this plugin is. If you have been using it, please write about your favored addon commands in the comments. If you haven’t, write some ideas for useful commands that I could actually write and share with you guys here on my blog.

Feel free to download these and use them for non commercial use.

1. Heart my Website

INCLUDED:
blinklist, delicious, designbump, designfloat, digg, dzone, facebook, flickr, furl, google, heartmysite, linkedin, mixx, reddit, rss, smashingmagazine, stumble, technorati, twitter, visualizeus, votetime, yahoo
SIZES:
16 x 16px, 32 x 32px and 64 x 64px

Download

2. Circle Social

INCLUDED:
Blinklist, delicious, digg, flickr, furl, magnolia, newsvine, reddit, stumbleupon, technorati
SIZES:
16 x 16px, 32 x 32px, 48 x 48px, 128 x 128px, 256 x 256px and 512 x 512px

Download

3. Made of Wood

INCLUDED:
delicious, designfloat, digg, furl, myspace, reddit, rss, stumbleupon, technorati, yahoo, youtube
SIZES:
16 x 16px

Download

4. Simple Circular

INCLUDED:
blogger, delicious, designfloat, digg, facebook, flickr, google, heart, myspace, reddit, rss, stumbleupon, technorati, twitter, wordpress, yahoo, youtube
SIZES:
32 x 32px, 64 x 64px and 128 x 128px

Download

5. Post Stamp

INCLUDED:
del.icio.us, designbump, designfloat, digg, flickR, gmail, google, paypal, reddit, rss, stumbleUpon, technorati and twitter
SIZES:
32 x 32px, 64 x 64px and 128 x 128px

Download

6. Cheers

INCLUDED:
delicious, designfloat, digg, furl, reddit, rss, smashing magazine, stumbleupon, technorati, twitter, yahoo, youtube
SIZES:
128 x 128px

Download

7. Social Icons

INCLUDED:
delicious, digg, reddit, rss, stumble, twitter
SIZES:
16 x 16px, 32 x 32px, 48 x 48px, 64 x 64px, 128 x 128px, 256 x 256px, 512 x 512px

Download

8. Aquaticus Social

INCLUDED:
Blogger, Delicious, digg, facebook, feed, flickr, friendfeed, friendster, furl, google, lastfm, linked in, live journal, magnolia, mixx, myspace, netvibes, newsvine, picasa, pownce, reddit, stumbleupon, technorati, twitter, vimeo, webshots, wordpress, yahoo, yelp, youtube
SIZES:
64 x 64px

Download

8. Socialize Icons

INCLUDED:
delicious, digg, facebook, flickr, furl, reddit, rss, stumbleupon, technorati, twitter, yahoo, youtube
SIZES:
16 x 16px, 32 x 32px, 48 x 48px, 64 x 64px and 128 x 128px

Download

9. Set of Social Icons

INCLUDED:
Delicious, digg, facebook, flickr, jagg, linkuj, reddit, rss, stumbleupon, technorati, topclanky, topodkazy, twitter, vybralisme

Download

You can opt out to be part of this program if you want. Users will not see ads based on anything personal. Even though Users can opt out of this, I doubt that many will. If you are okay with all the information that google has about you already, this shouldn’t be a big leap at all.

Sure this is not something new to online advertising, however it’s a big step for google, and for it’s users. It will be interesting to see how this develops. Please comment with your views on this, tell me if you want to see Ads based on your browsing habits!

Check out their blog for more.

Please write comments and let me know what you think of it, or if you have another app that does the same job you like better.

*UPDATE* As amazing as this application looks. It is still in beta. I have had it Crash a whole lot on my XP machine. Maybe it runs better on Vista or 7. Please let me know if you have similar problems.

Enter XenoCode! It is an amazing little web application that somehow lets you run IE 8 7 and 6, Safari, Opera, Chrome and more from within your browser. And it mimics it’s own private virtual machine to my best understanding. Check it out on XenoCode’s webpage.

Here you can launch them straight from my page: