A screen shot of Greenpeace`s Dirty Energy report page (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) –- Environmental organization Greenpeace ( www.greenpeace.org ) announced on Thursday it has released a new study that highlights the rapidly growing environmental footprint of the online world and evaluates both good and bad energy choices made by top IT companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and Yahoo!. Titled “How Dirty is Your Data?,” the report details the large amount of electricity required to power cloud offerings

Reddit An outage at Amazon’s popular Web hosting service has led to Web-wide outages at such popular sites as Quora, Foursquare and Reddit.

A screenshot from the error page of HootSuite, one of the downed social media sites.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter Amazon’s EC2 web-hosting service is currently experiencing technical difficulties, knocking many of the web’s popular social sites offline in the process. Foursquare , Quora , Hootsuite and Reddit have all experienced down-time, though the latter now seems to be accessible once again

A screenshot from VMware’s website shows its cloud solutions (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) – Virtualization and cloud computing software developer VMware ( www.vmware.com ) recently announced that it has appointed Dr. Chawapol Jariyawiroj as country manager for Thailand. In this position, Jariyawiroj will run VMware’s business operations in Thailand including sales, marketing, services and channels.

An illustration, from the Rackspace website, of Cloud Load Balancers in operation (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Managed and cloud hosting provider Rackspace ( www.rackspace.com ) announced on Tuesday that it has introduced its Cloud Load Balancers offering, a software-based, utility-priced load balancing product designed for use with its cloud hosting products, as well as its dedicated and managed server offerings. In private beta since Novmeber of 2010, and public beta since February of this year, Cloud Load Balancers, says Rackspace, is designed to alleviate the barriers to entry and architectural complexity associated with using third-party open source software load balancers. Based on that lengthy beta period, says Jerry Schwartz, enterprise services product manager at Rackspace, in an interview with the WHIR, the company incorporated a great deal of customer feedback into the development of its Cloud Load Balancers

Web Hosting – PALO ALTO, CA — VMware, Inc.

A screen shot of Amazon Cloud Drive interface (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) –- Amazon announced earlier this week it has launched its new Amazon Cloud Drive ( www.amazon.com/clouddrive ) service, which allows users to stream their music collection on any computer or mobile device via the Internet. The move confirms what many industry analysts have been predicting about the next-generation of music services, moving music into the cloud. It certainly makes it easier for consumers to acces music among multiple computers and devices, eliminating the timely and often complicated process of uploading music to a computer and manually transferring them between devices.

A screen shot of Amazon Cloud Drive interface (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) –- Amazon announced earlier this week it has launched its new Amazon Cloud Drive ( www.amazon.com/clouddrive ) service, which allows users to stream their music collection on any computer or mobile device via the Internet. The move confirms what many industry analysts have been predicting about the next-generation of music services, moving music into the cloud

A screen shot of Symplified’s front page (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) –- Cloud security provider Symplified ( www.symplified.com ) announced last week it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance ( www.cloudsecurityalliance.org ), a non-profit organization formed to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing. The move comes a couple weeks after Symplified’s partnership with open source cloud computing provider Cloud.com , which combines Symplified and Cloud.com CloudStack to enable users to deliver identity and access management security and integration capabilities. The organization provides education on the uses of cloud computing to help secure all other forms of computing