Location has a huge effect on load times on any website. For example, the Tech Cores VPS is hosted in Germany at a powerful datacenter. For our readers in Germany, Tech Cores should be very fast for you, but for our viewers in California, not so much. Nowadays, we have a wonderful invention called fiber optics, but even that doesn’t make our websites load in a blink of an eye everywhere we are.

In order to fix these speed issues related to location, you need to get the user accessing a nearby server. If you’re a larger company like AOL, you can obviously afford a hundred dedicated (and rather beastly) servers throughout the world, but what about us smaller guys? We need to use a system like MaxCDN to get that done for us without hurting our pocketbook.

What MaxCDN can do for you

Because of MaxCDN’s powerful network, you can be certain that you’ll be getting a quick and reliable service. MaxCDN has partnered up with upstream provider Mzima to provide their fast internet service.

It’s not only that MaxCDN are already on a powerful network, it’s also for the fact that they have ten edge connections and nine peer locations! If you’re near an edge location, you know your content will be delivered very quickly. If you’re near an peer network, it won’t be delivered as quickly as a edge connection would be, but it might be reassuring that MaxCDN’s network latency in the US is less than 10ms from most US locations!

Ohh yeah, it might be helpful if we said that not only can MaxCDN make your website faster, it can also make your Google search rankings higher! It has been a proven fact that Google does rank your website upon its speed and if your website is fast, you have an advantage right there!

It might even be beneficial to tell you that MaxCDN can serve practically everything you put to to it. MaxCDN can server CSS files, JavaScript, images, larger files like PDFs and e-books, video and audio streaming, and lastly, live video and audio!

Pricing

There’s nothing that can prevent you from going with MaxCDN as your CDN provider. As of right now, MaxCDN has an offer going on for 1TB of bandwidth for only $39.95! If it’s not just me, but that’s 25GB for every dollar spent! Call that a deal that’s hard not to get.

After that, bandwidth doesn’t cost much at all; it’s in fact, as low as 3.9 cents per GB.

As for the bandwidth/data pricing of the live streaming and storage for the VOD/Push zones (which are for video/audio), please take a look at the chart above.

Speed and Benefits

MaxCDN is simply fast. If you haven’t noticed, Tech Cores is extremely fast now with MaxCDN’s service. There’s not much to say about the speed but that it sped up the website a lot!

On the other hand, the benefits of MaxCDN have easily been taking effect during the last month. Our bandwidth has been significantly lower than last months and our hits went down by almost 4x! I think it would be more than accurate to say that MaxCDN is saving us 4x the amount of resources that we used to use!

There is one benefit of MaxCDN that some people don’t think of. Because MaxCDN is basically offloading the content on the website for you, you’re less prone for large (D)DoS attacks that’ll bring down your server(s). If there’s not much content to (D)DoS on your server because it’s being driven by MaxCDN, that’s another major benefactor for you.

Even our average server load has been much lower now that most of the content is coming from MaxCDN and not our server.

The Set Up

The set up of MaxCDN could not be any simpler. You may think MaxCDN is only for images on the web, but MaxCDN also allows you to set up a pull zone (used for images, JavaScript files, etc), a push zone (which are used for larger static files like installers or PDFs), a VOD zone (used for streaming audio/video content), and lastly, a live zone which would be used for streaming audio/video content.

Integrating MaxCDN into your current website couldn’t be any easier. If you’re using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress to run your site, the third-party plugins that are available will take care of the setting up task for you. On the other hand, if you’re running a completely custom site, it’ll still be extremely easy to set up; you just need to make sure you link your content to the CDN instead of to the server itself.

I’ve only used a pull zone so far, so I cannot speak for all of the others. For the pull zone, it offers extreme customizability to even give you a fancy-looking URL to your CDN — which in our case, is cdn.techcores.com. If you’re not sure on how to set that up, MaxCDN will help you with that if you need to. For you server gurus, it’s just a simple CNAME declaration in the Bind (or whatever DNS server you use) configuration.

When I was setting up Tech Cores for MaxCDN, it took less than five minutes and we were up immediately. It was such a painless process, that I’m sure MaxCDN will attract even the simplest of web-savvy users who’re wanting to speed up their own site.

If you’re a bit wary if MaxCDN will work for you, check out their integrations page at the below link to see if it’ll work with your current CMS programs:

http://www.maxcdn.com/integrations.php

Collecting Data

The next part of this review is mainly focused on data collection. If you’re using a CDN like MaxCDN, you’ll loose some of the statistical data that you once had coming from your server. Because of this exact reason, you’ll need statistical data collection on MaxCDN.

It’s without a doubt that MaxCDN does an amazing job at collecting all of this data. With its amazing statistical information and its rather elegant looking graphs, you’ll be a pro at reading this statistical information.

MaxCDN offers many statistical options for you: you have access to view the total amount transfer (of most simply, bandwidth), percent of cache hits, most popular files, nodes hit (which is just the stats for how often every node, or server location, is accessed), daily unique IP visits (you can see this graph under the “Speed and Benefits” section of the review, and the live zone stats.

There’s really nothing else I can talk about other than to just say take a look at the thumbnails above! The graphics being generated are extremely useful and they can really tell you how your website is doing.

Reliability & Limitations

It’s certain that MaxCDN is an amazing service, but the reliability is a major factor that should be considered. MaxCDN itself is extremely reliable and has never been down for me, but what has, unfortunately, been down would be their login center (or their front-end to their entire service).

Of course, nothing is perfect and managing a custom login system can be difficult, but it would be nice to see these issues sorted out. It’s not something that’ll bring your site down, of course, but it’s not like you need to access their login center all of the time. I understand the occasional downtime, but if they know it’s there, it would be nice to find the source of it and stop it from happening.

Other than that tiny issue, MaxCDN is as stable as any other service I’ve ever used. I’ve never seen MaxCDN fail to deliver my content and in fact, it’s always extremely fast.

You’re probably thinking with such an amazing service, are there any limitations to what you can or cannot do. To basically say this in one sentence, you can make MaxCDN do what ever you please.

If you’re wanting to create a VOD/push zone or even a live zone, you’ll need to pay some additional costs for storage and et cetera. In one way, you shouldn’t think of this as a limitation in the first place. You should think of this as to keep the costs for MaxCDN low enough so anyone can afford it. So in the long run, it’s no limitation at all and it’s in fact helping you save money if you don’t need these features offered by MaxCDN.

The last limitation I have to point out is that there’s no easy way to manage your MaxCDN account from a mobile device — you have to open up the web browser. It may be nice if there was a mobile-based app for on-the-go management and stats.

Summary

MaxCDN has a great service here that’s filled with a huge potential to not only speed up your website but also increase it in its rankings. If you’re looking for a reliable content delivery service to speed up your website while still cutting costs and not paying as much, MaxCDN is a perfect solution for you.

Overall, I have to give my thumbs up to the guys over at MaxCDN for creating such an amazing and rather custom service. It’s custom enough so that I can set it up how I want it and also tweak the settings along with it.

If you want to read more about MaxCDN, please check out their website below:

http://www.maxcdn.com/

But wait, there’s more!

I’m not trying to get this to sound like an infomercial, I promise on that one, but one thing I should point out that MaxCDN is powered by a company called NetDNA, who offers a dedicated CDN system. If you’re a larger business needing some powerful CDN solutions take a look at NetDNA for more information. It’s basically MaxCDN, but it’s meant for larger websites who need a dedicated CDN solution.

Even more!

Now this will be the last little section of the review, but if you’re looking for a powerful, high performance high definition distribution network used for video, take a look at HDDN. HDDN can be used to make your life easier to set up video streaming to third-party applications like Flowplayer.

MaxCDN is a content delivery network (CDN), which in other words, is a network of many servers throughout the world that work upon one goal… serving your content in the fastest means possible. Basically how CDNs work are basically they download the content on your site, cache the data across their network of servers, and when you may visit a website taking advantage of a service like MaxCDN, it directs you to the closest MaxCDN data center, which in the long run, means faster download speeds. For a blog that just ever so happens to be heavy on images, CDN services help more than you can ever think of!

One other benefit that MaxCDN, or any other CDN service for that matter, is that because Google, and possibly some other search engines out there, rank your website upon its speed. In fact, that’s the easiest way to have your listings in Google become higher in rank. No more of dealing with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), just make your website faster and you’ll get higher in rank that easily!

MaxCDN helped us so much, that now the only thing that our server needs to serve out to our viewers would simply be the code and the text! MaxCDN has really sped up our blog so much, that now Tech Cores is loading faster than it ever did before!

Now we’ll cover this in our full in-depth review of MaxCDN, but it was so easy to set up, anyone (were you really expecting “a caveman” there? You know people copyright those things, ey?) can do it!

As for now, enjoy the new speed of Tech Cores and a full review of MaxCDN’s awesome service will come soon!

Even if upgrade failed big time, which it went very well to be honest, I have disk images backed up so I can easily restore. The thing is, I only really only use this computer for my server needs (MySQL, PHP, etc) and when I need another computer nearby.

I’ve used Ubuntu betas in the past, and I have to say, they are actually very stable. I was one of the lucky ones to never have an Ubuntu beta crash on you.

I’ve read about all of the changes online (which are below), and from what I’ve read, it’s faster, more reliable, cleaner bootup screen (which is very simplified), and a brand new theme. It always seems to be that Ubuntu always has a different theme when they release a new version!

Below this post are thirty-four images before and after I installed the update. Please feel free to click on any of the images and read my little comments below the images. And if you would like to, comment on the images to talk about that specific thing I took a picture of!

From the e-mail Steve Langasek sent out to all of the people who are subscribed to the Ubuntu Announcements Newsletter, he really did mention lots of changes.

He stated the following (which is a lot of the changes and is quite long):

Desktop features—————-

Social from the start: We now feature built-in integration with Twitter,

identi.ca, Facebook, and other social networks with the MeMenu in the panel.

New Design: Cleaner and faster boot, new notification area, new themes, new

icons, and new wallpaper bring a dramatically updated look and feel to

Ubuntu.

Ubuntu One: Choose any folder in your home directory to sync, choose from

millions of songs for purchase in the Ubuntu One Music store.

Please see http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/beta1 for details.

Server features—————

Cloud computing: The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud installer has been vastly

improved in order to support alternative installation topologies. UEC

components are now automatically discovered and registered, even with

complex topologies. Finally, UEC is now powered by Eucalyptus 1.6.2

codebase.

UEC and EC2: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS continues the tradition of official Ubuntu

Server image releases for UEC and for Amazon’s EC2, giving you everything

you need for rapid deployment of Ubuntu instances in a cloud computing

environment. UEC images, and information on running Ubuntu 10.04 on EC2, are

available at:

http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04/beta1

Stability and security: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS brings many improvements over

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to keep your servers safe and secure for the next five

years, including AppArmor profiles for many key services, kernel hardening,

and an easy-to-configure firewall.

Ubuntu Netbook features———————–

Ubuntu Netbook Edition is optimised to run on Intel atom based netbooks. It

includes a new consumer-friendly interface that allows users to quickly and

easily get on-line and use their favourite applications. This interface is

optimised for a retail sales environment.

It includes the same faster boot times and improved boot experience as

Ubuntu desktop.

Kubuntu features—————-

Kubuntu 10.04 LTS will be the first LTS to feature KDE 4 Platform and

Applications. KDE 4 has come a long way since its early releases and is now

suitable for the high demands of LTS users. Being an LTS we have focused on

bug fixing and stability for this release, but we did find time to add

features such as touchpad configuration, Firefox KDE integration, Kubuntu

notification improvements, and cross-desktop systray menu standardisation.

Kubuntu features the Plasma Desktop while Kubuntu Netbook Remix comes out of

preview status with the Plasma Netbook workspace.

See https://wiki.kubuntu.org/LucidLynx/Beta1/Kubuntu for more details.

Edubuntu features—————–

Edubuntu in Lucid features a more complete live environment containing more

software from universe and all existing language packs as well as our usual

educational software in their current version. For Lucid the text installer

has been removed and so is LTSP for the time being. We expect to have LTSP

back on the DVD for the next beta. The DVD is then much smaller than it used

to be but will still provide a complete education environment based on

Ubuntu Lucid.

Also included on the Edubuntu DVD is a small repository containing the

required packages to transform the regular Edubuntu desktop into a LTSP

server or install the Netbook edition interface.

Mythbuntu features——————

Mythbuntu 10.04 introduces MythTV 0.23. This new version is significantly

faster and should feel more responsive and stable than older versions. It

also integrates better into the OS with better support for things like

ConsoleKit and Upstart.

Please see http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Release_Notes_-_0.23 for more details

about changes introduced in 0.23.

See http://mythbuntu.org/10.04/beta for information about the Mythbuntu

beta release.

Other—–

* On the Desktop: GNOME 2.30, KDE SC 4.4, XFCE 4.6.1, OpenOffice.org 3.2.0,

X.Org server 1.7.5

* On the Server: Apache 2.2, PostgreSQL 8.4, PHP 5.3.1, LTSP 5.2

* “Under the hood”: GCC 4.4.3, eglibc 2.11, Linux 2.6.32.9, Python 2.6.5

The full release notes can be found at

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/karmic/beta1

The thing you’ve been waiting for! All of those photos! They are in order from left-right in the order that I took them in. And if you click on one, you’ll be able to comment on that specific photo and view my little footnote.

On a recent Microsoft Office 210 blog post, Microsoft has given the new users of Microsoft Office 2007 a chance to upgrade to the new Office 2010, just the the Windows 7 upgrade program.

If you purchased a new computer with Office 2007 or Office 2007 in a retail store, you’ll be able to qualify for this program only if you bought it from March 5, 2010 to September 30, 2010. You also have to have some other things like a Windows Live ID, and you have to redeem your tech gurantee by October 31, 2010 at http://www.office.com/techg.

Unlike Windows 7 upgrade, where you had to pay a bit for the shipping, this is downloadable online, so not fees at all.

Microsoft has also noted in this article that the RTM versions, release to manufacturing, will be released next month!

Along with that, they have also stated that on May 12, 2010, every business will be able to get their hands on a copy.

And the part you’ve been waiting for, consumers will be able to purchase Microsoft Office 2010 on the shelfs this June! This is some great news and I cannot wait to see how this launch will go.

If you’re too eager to wait, you can of course pick up the beta at the link below:

http://www.office.com/beta

I really hope that Microsoft will improve on Office 2010 and really make it faster and more efficient. Microsoft has the tendency to slow their final releases down a bit compared to the beta which run very fast. Hopefully, that will not happen this time.

And just as a side note, remember those other things I pointed out in the quote in the previous Office 2010 blog post? One of the things, having it on a web browser, is happening!

http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2010/01/25/accessing-office-documents-using-your-phone.aspx

And like always, thanks for this blog post that reveals all these dates, Microsoft!

http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2010/03/04/get-office-today-or-tomorrow.aspx

But if you can also recall our blog post on the new alleged Windows Phone 7 Series, which is going to be very familiar in looks to the Microsoft Zune.

It was rumored for quite a while that the HD2 will be receiving the upgrade to Windows Phone 7 series. But as of right now, that has changed.

The head of consumer marketing for Windows Phone UK, Oded Ran, informed Pocket-lint about the following:

We are proud of the Windows Phone experience we introduced with Windows Mobile 6.5 and we will continue to partner closely with mobile networks and phone manufacturers to support and invest in the platform.

Which was said in an exclusive interview with them.

But also, Ran said to them:

We’ve received many questions about the upgradability of HTC HD2 and we currently do not have plans to update the HTC HD2 to Windows Phone 7 Series.

I’m sure there will be ways to great around that, but hopefully, they”ll reconsider that decision. To kick all these HD2 users out, who have payed a lot of money for this device, is just such a shame.

I can understand where they are coming from in the terms of support, but you have to think about it, the HD2 will not be the only device not supported this new phone operating system.

Of course it would be nice if they would allow everyone to upgrade, but of course like Microsoft always does, they want you to buy new hardware, or in this case, a brand new phone.

One of the only issues with this is that if you’re planning on using 64-bit Windows 7, only a certain number of computers will be supported.

You’re probably wondering if you’re already running WIndows 7, how do you update to these newer drives?  All you need to do is simply run the Apple Software Update utility when in Windows. It should find all your drivers and update them accordingly.

Now if your already running Vista, and you want to upgrade, make sure you download the Boot Camp Utility for Windows 7 Upgrade Installation Utility. This utility…

safely unmounts the read-only Macintosh volume on Microsoft Vista

So this is excellant new for the people who want to run Windows on their Mac. For me, this Mac (yes, I am typing this on a MacBook) will never see Windows “natively”.

Now you know that you can run Windows 7 with having your Mac OS X partition still boot up, have aero work, and have a very stable operating system running on your Mac.

And yes, we’re very “link happy” in this post!

Source: MacRumors

I’ve been using Windows 7 since the early days. Once Microsoft released the release candidate (RC) version, it really opened up a lot of new features to Windows. I personally think Windows 7 is one of the best Windows operating systems ever created. Windows 7 comes with a new taskbar, faster and easier way of managing your “windows” (hence why Microsoft called it Windows in the first place), and just a variety of features that make Windows more elegant and easier to use. Here’s a video discussing why I like Windows 7.