Blog Action Day Spam

Two years ago, I participated in the Blog Action Day and wrote a small post about public transporation. Since then, I've decided against it for the following reasons:
  • Blog Action Day Recap: 31,000 Posts!, 16 okt
  • Blog Action Day is AMAZING so far!, 15 okt
  • Blog Action Day TOMORROW!, 15 okt
  • Al Gore and Blog Action Day, 14 okt
  • Ideas for Blog Action Day This Thursday, 13 okt
  • Blog Action Day is Next Week!, 7 okt
  • 2400 Bloggers Want Your Help, 30 sep
  • Announcing Blog Action Day 2009…, 23 sep
  • Big News: Change.org to lead Blog Action Day 2009, 26 aug
That is the amount of mass-mail I have received about it this year, and it has crossed my tolerable threshold and has became annoying. I know Blog Action Day is for a good cause, but sending this much mail in a short period gives me a very bad impression.

How do you aquire a parked domain name?

Dear Internet, how do you acquire a parked domain name?

I'm about to launch my start-up company which will sell software services. I'm deciding on an appropriate domain name to use, but all relevant names have already been taken by domain parked sites filled with ads. It is quite frustrating to see good names being wasted on worthless ad spamming pages. I don't mind paying for a com domain, but the prices these domain parkers ask are steep; 500 to several thousand dollars for uncommon names. Especially since they themselves pay at most 8-15$/year to keep the domain parked. So how should I go about aquiring a domain name? Should I use a broker such as Sedo or try and contact the domain owner directly? How do I ensure that I wont get ripped off?

Comparing EC2

Recently I've been playing around with Amazon EC2. A small project of mine, datalookups.com is currently hosted on it.

Performance wise, it is very good. Low latency when accessing it from Sweden and fairly decent bandwidth. Cost-wise, I'm not so sure. Without an instance reservation, the monthly cost is about $79 excluding bandwidth costs. But that's when paying on-demand so it wouldn't be a fair comparision to dedicated or VPS hosting where you have to subscribe to the service.

If you sign up for a European reserved small instance for a three year period, you get a monthly cost of $19.5: (350 + 0.04 * 24 * 365) / (3 * 12). That's not to bad when you take into account that one ec2 instance is more like a dedicated server than a VPS. But signing up for a three year lease is a very long time. The monthly cost for the one year plan is $48 which is much less cost competetive.

Here are some informative comparisons I've found. GoDaddy vs ec2, ec2 vs other stuff and ec2 vs VPS.

From everything I've read, it seems that Amazon EC2 underperforms when compared to other hosting options. On the other hand, the job market seem to favor ec2 experience so it might be worth going with it just for that reason alone.

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