The most pertinent news at this time is that, as of right now, ServeBlast and its services are no longer available for subscription due to previously unforeseen and sudden issues with a third party vendor. Current BlastHoster clients will have their hosting remain online and fully functional through the billing month of May, at which point the service will go dark. We will, of course, assist them in finding a comparable host to switch.

The Automatic Website Backups software is currently going under a thorough code review, and once that is complete and deemed successful, will be released under the AGPL as promised. We apologize to those interested in this code for taking so long, but we need to make sure everything is in order before we can relicense our code.

This does not mean that Squish Software is dead. Squish Software is far from dead — we’re, in fact, previewing two products we have in the pipeline today.

The first is an iPhone application called DataTap. It’s sort of like a central ‘dashboard’ that you can quickly glance at to get an idea of, for example, how many unread emails you have, quickly grab the latest stories on your RSS feeds, check the weather, or get the latest prices on your stocks, all in one app. Since everything loads at once, this significantly reduces the time necessary to keep yourself up to date. We aren’t entirely sure about how we can open source DataTap due to the restrictions Apple places on developers through their NDA and the App Store, but we’re nonetheless looking at our options.

The second is a web service we’re calling Esse. At its core, it’s a nice, easy-to-use, and versatile sales tracking system, but what makes it unique is its pattern detection algorithms that can determine, for example, whether the slow-down of a certain product or category of products is in line with current overall sales growth, or how the price change of a high-volume product has affected its sales, taking into account its past sales history, as well as overall sales change since the price modification. Esse will be available under the AGPL upon release (however we are looking at dual-licensing for enterprises interested in fully integrating Esse into their current solutions, though this isn’t entirely finalized).

Neither of these products are available yet — DataTap will probably be available in a couple of weeks, while Esse won’t be available for many months, so we’ve setup on both products’ landing pages a place where you can provide us with your email address to which we will email you information about the product when it launches or as it comes closer to launch.

To signup, go to ItsEsse.com or DataTapApp.com. We appreciate all of your support in the past and we look forward to hearing from you in the future.

The website’s own short summary, I think, does the best justice in describing its goals:

The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

We love that idea.

We really believe that, for some time, all future innovation will be directly imposed on the web, or will somehow be web-related. There was this same period just a decade or two ago on the desktop. Unlike what happened with most of the important protocols and formats that came out of the desktop innovation period, I think there’s a really good chance that most of what comes out of this period of innovation will, indeed, be open.

This is why the Open Web Foundation is so important — there needs to be a place accepted by the “major players” in the Internet space (Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace, SourceForge and Six Apart are among the founding members) that is simply there to incubate and further develop these specifications, as well as keep them open and make sure that there are no Intellectual Property issues in using these specifications in your own products, regardless of whether those products are proprietary or open source.

When the website launched, we were quick to jump and apply. I am pleased to say that Squish Software is now a contributing member of the Open Web Foundation. We hope to contribute wherever we can with whatever we can, as well as make sure that all applicable open web standards are used in our products.

We look forward to what comes out of the Open Web Foundation. The future could be very, very exciting (and very, very open).

There are a number of critical issues you could point at as to why you’d choose us over S3, but perhaps the most critical is proven uptime. Since we began internally monitoring our services a few months ago, we have seen no downtime of production servers.

We built our infrastructure from the ground up to be scalable to an infinite number of nodes in any data center anywhere in the world, and we stand by it vigorously. Similarly, we built our infrastructure around the goal of storing lots and lots of data (in the form of .tar.gzs) and distributing lots and lots of data (as new backups are uploaded and downloaded).

Beginning earlier this afternoon, Amazon S3 went down, and brought with it not only the data behind many startups (as S3 is very commonly used to store user uploaded images and videos for various web services), but the location and core system behind many people’s website and personal computer backups. Amazon S3 also went down back in mid-February.

Of course, the odds that during this exact time you’ll desparately need a backup taken or need to be able to access backups are fairly low, but we don’t take such an important necessity lightly.

What if you did need to download a backup, or if you were depending on the fact that a backup was supposed to be taken?

While some may see a price benefit to working with S3, for many things (backups included), downtime isn’t an option — regardless of who your provider is.

On a side note, we’re very careful about when we make changes to our infrastructure, regardless of the cause (optimizations, new features, etc.). We have an internal window from approximately 25 after the hour to 55 after the hour to make any changes necessary, so we don’t interrupt any ongoing backups.