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As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll
Brad Stone, New York Time
… The causes of these problems range widely: it might be system upgrades with unintended consequences, human error (oops, wrong button) or even just old-fashioned electrical failures. Last month, an electrical explosion in a Houston data center of the Planet, a Web hosting company, knocked thousands of Web businesses off the Internet for up to five days.
“It was prolonged torture,” said Grant Burhans, a Web entrepreneur from Florida whose telecommunications- and real-estate-related Web sites were down for four days, costing him thousands of dollars in lost business.
Web addicts who find themselves shut out of their favorite Web sites tend to fill blogs and online bulletin boards with angry invective about broken promises and interrupted routines.
(6 July 2008)
Alas, an experience that is not unfamiliar at Energy Bulletin. -BA
Waiting for the internet meltdown
Mark Harris, UK Times
The world is heading for a digital doomsday as the net fast runs out of numerical addresses
The end of the internet is nigh – and in less than three years, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Can it be true? The problem is that the world is running out of internet addresses. More than 85% of the available addresses have already been allocated and the OECD predicts we will have run out completely by early 2011.
These aren’t the normal web addresses you type into your browser’s window, and which were recently freed up by Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the body responsible for allocating domain names, to allow thousands of new internet domains ending in, for instance, .london or .xxx.
Beneath these commonsense names lie numerical internet protocol (IP) addresses that denote individual devices connected to the internet.
… Just as everyone knows the solution to peak oil (use less of it), the solution to the IP address shortage is equally obvious: upgrade to new addresses that can accommodate our hunger for online connectivity.
… Unfortunately – and again like peak oil – just because we know what’s good for us that doesn’t mean we’ll do it.
(6 July 2008)
Contributor Shane writes:
That’s right… “Peak Net”! Well kinda sorta.
And yes, the article does mention Peak Oil.
