Seeing as I’m still holding onto the notion that it’s 2007, I figure now would be a good time to write one of those retrospective, year-end posts. I have a monstrous pile of New Year’s resolutions that I don’t feel like tackling, so I made sure to find a topic that allows me to fight off the arrival of 2008 (for at least a few more days). Lucky for you, it’s also pretty interesting.

Here is Pingdom’s take on the biggest internet blunders of 2007. The post highlights 13 incidents and links to a slew of related articles for each one. There were a few that I was aware of, like the NaviSite fiasco that I posted about in November (my very first post!), and the Black Friday service issues that several big-name internet retailers experienced.

Other notable blunders that were featured on the list include: Twitter’s six days of downtime throughout the year; the Skype outage that occurred in August; the 365 Main data center outage that affected sites like Craigslist, Technorati, TypePad, Second Life, and Yelp; and the RackSpace incident when a truck rammed into a power transformer, cutting off power to its Dallas data center.

What do these incidents teach us? That no website or service is infallible; that very few outages go unnoticed these days; and that you shouldn’t rely on a server, a hosting company, or an internet service without some type of backup plan, especially if an outage will cost you a sizeable chunk of revenue. Even though technology is constantly being improved upon, outages will never cease to exist. And that, my friends, is why tech staffs exist (and why they probably make more money than you do).

With the savory flavors of turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie still lingering in our minds and mouths, it’s hard to believe that another annual holiday is already upon us. Yes, that’s right, to the joy (and dismay) of many, the holiday shopping season has officially launched. And while I’m sure there are plenty of stories circulating about Black Friday escapades and toy store showdowns, I’m more interested in what happened on Cyber Monday.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the relatively new term (circa 2005), Cyber Monday refers to the Monday following Black Friday when online retailers experience a spike in sales. It’s explained away like this: when shoppers return to work after the Thanksgiving holiday, they begin purchasing items over the internet that they couldn’t find in stores. Whether or not this term is valid is up for debate. Many critics and media experts argue that Cyber Monday is simply a marketing ploy. Either way, online retailers have been beefing up their advertising, sales, and promotions on that day in recent years, and shoppers have been receptive.

As predicted, this year’s Cyber Monday sales set some records. Similar to the in-store shopping trends from Black Friday, websites drew in more shoppers this year, but their spending habits trended down. Despite our seemingly tighter budgets, comScore reports that internet retailers raked in $733 million on Monday, which is a 21 percent increase over last year’s spending and the first time that daily online retail sales have topped $700 million. comScore also predicts that daily online sales totals will surpass $800 million a few times over the next month.

The retail sites with the most visitors on Cyber Monday were: Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, Dell, Best Buy, Yahoo, Apple, Overstock.com, Circuit City, and MSN Shopping.

In other news, Yahoo experienced a NaviSite-like blooper on Monday, as thousands of sites powered by Yahoo Merchant Solutions reported technical difficulties for the better part of the shopping day. While these problems didn’t last for a week, and the sites weren’t completely out of commission, the technical difficulties did fall on the busiest online shopping day of the year. And, oh yeah, the glitches affected the checkout process, so shoppers received error messages right before they were about to (virtually) hand wads of cash over to these sites. The issues began at 6 a.m. on Monday morning and weren’t resolved until around 6 p.m. that night. Uh oh. The incident has Yahoo merchants threatening to go Google.

Other sites experiencing slowdowns because of heavy traffic on Black Friday and Cyber Monday include Buy.com, Eddie Bauer, J. Crew, Toys R Us, Costco, and Lowe’s.

In closing, I’d like to make a comment to whoever coined the term Cyber Monday. I don’t like it. Black Friday, I get. You rip yourself from a turkey-induced slumber at 4 a.m., travel off into the dark of night, and find yourself face to face with droves of vicious shoppers (with no souls) when you reach the mall. Um, scary. Compared with that, Cyber Monday just sounds lame…or kinky, I don’t know which’s worse.

Being that this is the first post for DNSO.net, I won’t spend too much time explaining the purpose behind the site. I understand how blogs work, and after this post drifts off the site’s homepage, I doubt that many visitors will be traveling to the absolute bottom of the archives to read it.

In summary, DNSO.net is all about posting interesting, relevant, and straightforward tech news. It’s all right if your knowledge of technology is mediocre, because these posts won’t include the complicated explanations and lingo seen all too often on other tech blogs. I possess about as much tech knowledge as the next person, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to know about current events in the industry, and my guess is that you do too.

So in the spirit of my forthcoming posts, and the fact that I may make a mistake or two in my reporting of recent tech news (which I encourage any readers to correct), I decided to launch this blog with a story about someone else’s mistake. And lucky for me, it’s a big one.

During what many would consider a routine data center migration gone disastrously bad, the internet hosting company NaviSite, Inc. knocked 165,000 websites offline for several days last week. The service issues began on Nov. 3 when NaviSite attempted to transfer information between hundreds of servers it acquired from Alabanza, Corp. (another hosting vendor in Baltimore) to its home-based servers in Andover, Massachusetts. Ironically, NaviSite wanted to move the data between the two locations to improve the performance of the sites its serves.

NaviSite originally informed customers that their sites would be down for less than a day because of the data transfer. The company even scheduled the migration on a Saturday to lessen the impact. NaviSite’s initial plan was to move 200 of the 850 servers involved in the transfer by truck (from Baltimore to Andover). The company intended to move the data from the remaining servers virtually. Now I can’t fully explain the issues that ensued, but from what I gather, they had something to do with synchronization glitches.

When the virtual migration between the two locations began to take too long, NaviSite decided to unplug more of its servers and transport them to Andover in trucks as well. Maybe this is just me, but doesn’t this back-up plan seem a little, oh, I don’t know…short sighted? As I graciously mentioned above, I don’t know that much about technology, but unplugging a bunch of computers that weren’t working properly in the first place and driving them across a few state lines in hopes that they’ll work there doesn’t sound like the IT solution of the century. Even if physically moving more servers helped transfer some of the data, it wouldn’t help with the rest of the information that needed to be moved virtually.

In the end, many of the sites that were depending on NaviSite’s services were down for almost a week. In the days of the internet, electronic commerce, and instant gratification, that’s an eternity. It’s impossible to calculate how much revenue was lost because of the outage, and many customers are furious with the lack of response that they received from NaviSite and its customer service department during the botched migration. NaviSite has publicly apologized for the incident, but my guess is that this apology won’t help them much at this point. It’s common knowledge that thousands of disgruntled customers make for a least a few nasty lawsuits…