Every modern website relies on stable and well written databases. It is impossible to find a large-scale website not implementing one or more database systems.

This month, we’ve detected a high increase in response time for one of the sites we monitor. It is not a particularly large site; however it is one that relies on fast navigation. On average, the website used to load in about 3 seconds. One morning it went up to 10 seconds only for the site to begin to load. This is a good time to say that it is always advisable to test out new designs and functionality.

It seems that Skype have done it again. Yes, that’s right, they’re down. Just a couple of minutes ago their site stopped working and their services have been shaky all day.

This is what their site looked like several minutes ago.

There are two great WordPress plugins that everyone should know about. The first one is called Dropbox CDN. “Dropbox” as in “Dropbox - the personal file backup service, helping me work on my files from my PC and Mobile Phone”.

Dropbox CDN (Content Delivery Network) enables you to host your WordPress theme CSS, JS and images on Dropbox. This is huge! Setting up additional hosting space involves extra costs, time to manage, backups. A lot of hassle! With this plug in you enjoy all this for free. The reason why this is so great is that common bloggers can now have their blog load faster and be viewed by more people at once. Using CDN is listed as a great practice by Yslow, no matter the scale of you online presence. It is worth it to get a Dropbox account only for the sake of using this plugin. If you are not too happy with your hosting provider, or you are using a free service, this is a good moment to try out the plugin to increase your website’s performance.

Every now and then a government website or server gets it. I wonder what the Italian politicians did this time. In February www.governo.it had a really hard weekend of DDoS attacks.

Bizarre acts take place on the Internet. Recently a server storing patient data got hacked for the sole purpose of hosting a multiplayer game. Did I mention 230,000 medical records got exposed? Supposedly the hackers weren’t after the records. The facts say that their only interest was the bandwidth of the server.

So far investigators were able to track the origin of the attack to the Scandinavians. It is not clear why and how the conclusion was made. It seems like after that infamous torrent tracker appeared, Scandinavians became notorious for their computer enterprises.