As expected, at least by me, Amazon EC2 is evolving in a more “concrete” platform good for web hosting; in fact, some time ago I received a mail from AWS announcing two new features: Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones (you read for sure the news also on Slashdot: Amazon EC2 Now More Ready for Application Hosting, isn’t it?)
Only a small note to let you know that Amazon is hearing us and added a new feature to EC2: persistent storage.
As a subscriber of AWS services yesterday I received an email in which Amazon announces that we “will be able to create volumes ranging in size from 1 GB to 1 TB, and will be able to attach multiple volumes to a single instance. Volumes are designed for high throughput, low latency access from Amazon EC2, and can be attached to any running EC2 instance where they will show up as a device inside of the instance…”.
The mail ends saying that the new functionality “will be publicly available later this year” and offers a link to request to join the private beta program; I subscribed it and will let you now as soon as I’ll put my hands on it.
Recently I stumbled upon a couple of articles1,2 and, remembering my experience with EC2, I discovered that utility computing was not what I was searching for: I was searching for something that helped me without adding complexity, but I was not happy with simple web hosting offers, I wanted also complete control over my infrastructure to have the technical freedom that I could need and because, when I think about my customers’ data, I trust no one.
Only a small note to let you know that Virtualmin (from version 3.54) can be used for serious work when importing websites from Plesk backups: I tried the previous version with some web sites but it was too buggy, so I decided to help authors in debugging and testing it; I think that now Virtualmin can import the backups in a rather complete way.
BTW, Plesk is a good product, full of features, but I prefer Webmin/Virtualmin because they let me have full control of the server, instead of the way of Plesk that is too automatic in my opinion and offers less choices, impositions that I feel too strong (one for all: Plesk comes and works only with QMail).
Updated with Pidgin 2.4.0. You can find it here.
Note that some time ago Windows in no more my main operating system, so I do not use Pidgin Portable every day: please let me know if you have any problem.
I’ve made a quick but extensive research for a webmail software to put on my server(s) whose the most important feature should have been simplicity of maintenance and use over completeness and number of features.
Ok, maybe it’s a period of change for me, so yesterday I’ve added FeedBurner to my blog feed or, to say it better, I’ve added my feed to FeedBurner. I never did it before because I thought that the feed of “my” blog should be served directly and not passing through some unkown entity to depend on exclusively one day (yes, I’m a little paranoid about freedom of speech.)
As a little divertissement, I’ve added Gravatars or globally recognized avatars to my blog, little images of you that are associated to your comments so… comment more often! 
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I’ve just created a “page” on Facebook for the company of my wife, whose name is Nadia Camandona Editore.
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Updated with Pidgin 2.3.1 + OTR plugin. You can find it here.
The problem with OTR plugin seems to be fixed in this version of Pidgin.