The ongoing effort, flagged for me by Tier1 Research analyst Carl Brooks, is truly super human. “Seventeen flights? These guys don’t just deserve more customers, they deserve a freaking bonus,” Brooks said via email.

The work, which has been ongoing for more than two days now, is led by Mike Mazzei, the company’s head data center manager, and technician Scott Debernardo. They did their due diligence last week as the storm bore down. They arranged for food and water to be brought in and for fuel delivery. All that worked as planned. But, as in any disaster, there were wild cards.

For example, there’s a connection for the fuel trucks to fill the basement tanks, but there is not one to pump diesel up 17 flights of stairs to Peer 1′s other generator. That meant brute force had to be applied. A 55 gallon barrel was set up at the entry point, and another was left at the top of the stairs. The five local Peer 1 staffers, along with friends and customers, schlepped the fuel up by hand in buckets. The generators burn through 40 gallons every hour.

On Monday, there were anywhere from 10 to 15 people working at any given time and this morning there were 35, said Ryan Murphey, VP of data center operations who spoke to me from Peer 1′s San Antonio office.

Anthony Casalena, founder and CEO of Squarespace, a Peer 1 customer, went to the site to ensure a clean shutdown, found the bucket brigade, and ended up helping, as he writes here. As of SquareSpace’s latest update at 10:38 a.m. EDT Tuesday:

“Bucket brigade going strong. We’ve gone through half of our morning fuel delivery and are expecting a truck with 5,000 gallons coming at noon. Potential issues are lack of bucket brigade manpower into the night, and our fuel pumps burning out.”

Update (Nov. 1 at 9:29 a.m. EDT): Fogcreek Software, another customer, is also heavily involved with the diesel brigade effort as outined in its status page. According to Fogcreek fuel pumps are on their way as of Thursday morning but are stuck in gas lines in New Jersey.

also As Tier1′s Brooks pointed out, people who worry about moving workloads to the cloud or third-party provider should take this story to heart. “You should call this story ‘why your data actually is safer in the cloud — cuz your data center people ain’t doing this s**t,’ or ‘Yes, Virginia, you can trust your data center operator.’”

Here’s the other thing. As much as we virtualize and automate and build redundancy, computing — whether it’s “in the cloud” or in your server closet — still depends on such lower-tech things such as a power supply and, just as importantly, human ingenuity.

75 Broad Street photo courtesy of Google Street View.

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The usual suspects. By simply searching for the term “Top 10 Web Hosting,” you will find several lists, all vying for the honor of the definitive top 10 list of web hosts. I’ll save you a lot of trouble, and point you to hostmonster.com, justhost.com, fatcow.com, bluehost.com and hostgator.com, all of which appear ranked highly in most of these lists. Be sure the package you select supports hosting domain names on the account, and be aware of page limits and bandwidth caps on entry-level accounts. You should be able to find decent virtual accommodations for personal use for less than $5/mo.

Domain registrar. Apple doesn’t provide a domain service of their own. You can point your registered domain to your MobileMe account, but Apple is not a registrar themselves. Many, if not all, domain registrars also offer web hosting solutions, too. I happen to use GoDaddy as my domain registrar, and have been looking at what they have to offer.  I was able to find a plan that suited my needs for less than $10/mo.

Squarespace. This is where things start to get interesting. Squarespace has lots of nice features to offer its customers. It is featured on many of the podcasts I listen to and watch. Squarespace’s strength lies in its easy-to-use, prefab template-based site development that is highly customizable supports multiple authors. But if you’re handling your web design and development elsewhere, this may be more than you need, and in order to avoid a ten page limit you have to start looking at plans that costs as much as $20/mo.

Apple may be getting out of the web game in favor of moving to the cloud, but it’s a feature that’s well-represented by many providers already, so it really isn’t a great loss. Nor is the demise of iWeb, which, truth be told, wasn’t a stellar web page creation tool to begin with. If anything, this may be the shot in the arm needed to get users to make some timely improvements to their personal websites.

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Plugins are available to embed Vanilla Forums in WordPress (please see disclosure at the end of this post), Blogger, Tumblr, Drupal, and Squarespace sites. The WordPress plugin can automatically log WP users into Vanilla without having to sign in again, or to create a separate account. Vanilla also has tools available to import forum content from phpBB and vBulletin.

The cost of the hosted version of Vanilla Forums ranges from a free, advertising-supported plan, to a “premium” plan with unlimited users and 15 GB of storage, costing $199 per month. If you wish to host a forum on your own server, an open-source version is available, for which there are a large number of add-ons available to customize the forum.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Updated: Squarespace, a hosted content service that competes with companies such as WordPress (see disclosure below) has closed a $38-million financing round from two leading technology VCs — Accel Partners and Index Ventures — that will give the seven-year-old company a significant warchest and some substantial backing in the battle for digital-publishing market share. Representatives from both venture funds will join Squarespace’s newly created board of directors, along with Jonathan Klein, the founder and CEO of Getty Images.

This is the first financing round for Squarespace, which has mostly flown under the radar compared with some of its more high-profile competitors. The company was started in 2003 by Anthony Casalena, who was 21 at the time (blog software seems to attract youth: WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg was 19 when he started the company) and has been self-funded until now.

One reason Squarespace doesn’t get as much attention as some of the other blog-hosting and content services could be that it doesn’t offer a free version — the company’s publishing packages, which include hosting and a variety of themes and other services, start at $8 a month and go as high as $50 — and because its user base is made up primarily of companies (including communications firm Porter Novelli and ABC News) and professional entities rather than individual bloggers.

Over the past four or five years, blogging — once the purview of the so-called “pyjama-clad” rogue writer — has become undeniably mainstream. Blog networks compete with traditional newspapers and magazines in a number of content areas including technology, and some — including Sugar Inc., Gawker Media and AOL’s Weblogs Inc — have become major publishing entities in their own right.

Perhaps the best example is the rise of The Huffington Post, which has brought attention not just to blogging but to the idea that a major media entity can be published using the same tools that bloggers use (the site is based on Moveable Type from Six Apart), and that blog software can be a competitor for the expensive and time-consuming content-management systems that are used by many traditional media outlets — some of which use WordPress and other tools to publish their blogs, but few of which have moved to using such tools for their entire websites.

The size of the investment that Squarespace has managed to attract from Accel and Index indicates that these investors see the potential to take the company’s software and services beyond simple blogging and into the broader world of content-management systems. Although some media companies have been experimenting with open-source software such as Drupal and Joomla for web publishing, both of these are fairly complex to manage, and a hosted solution could appeal to publishers such as the Telegraph Group, which is already using a number of cloud-based services.

In addition to WordPress — which raised $29.5 million in 2008 from a range of investors including the New York Times — one of the other big players in the online content-management market is Six Apart, which along with Blogger (founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams and later acquired by Google) was one of the early companies into the blogging race. Six Apart has several platforms such as Moveable Type, TypePad and Vox, and is focused primarily on appealing to corporate clients such as the Major League Baseball Association (the Washington Post and The Economist also use the company’s software).

Update: WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg responded to Squarespace’s funding news on his personal blog, saying the company “has come after our VIP program before, when they made a screencast showing how they could recreate Scoble’s blog in 15 minutes using their design tool.” Mullenweg added that the financing was “quite a chunk of change, so it will be interesting to see what they apply it to.”

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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