Links: American Express, Google, Dell

The American Express web site home page was offline for more than five hours yesterday, according to Pingdom. The outage occurred during overnight hours for the East Coast, but doesn't appear to have been planned. "If American Express were performing planned website maintenance, a maintenance message should have been shown on the homepage," Pingdom notes.

Dell has launched In The Clouds, a blog dedicated to "condensing ideas on the future of cloud computing." And discussing the merits of hardware options for running those clouds.

Google will use on-site renewable energy at its data center in Goose Creek, South Carolina, according to Paul Froutan, director of Google's hardware operations. Froutan was the keynote speaker Wednesday night at a fundraising dinner for technology education in Columbia, South Carolina - just a few short miles from Blythewood, where Google has purchased a large piece of land for evaluation as a future data center.