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Web Host Has Trouble Making Rent?

Dec/23 in All Posts, Hosting News, Web Hosting Tutorials

Even web hosts sometimes have a hard time making the rent it seems…

The problem started, when the web host IAS.net was evicted, leaving a number of businesses and non-profit organizations without hosting.  What a Christmas present, your web hosting goes out right for the holidays.  It turns out the web host had problems with late payment of rent, which lead to the owner of the building to cut them off.

A number of other web hosts chipped in and took over some of the the IAS.net clients for free – so it is nice to see some people in the web hosting industry are in the holiday spirit.

The next day, IAS.net fought back by saying they were not making payment to the landowner on purpose, due to poor upkeep of the building.  Reportedly the building had ongoing maintenance and black mold issues, which the property owners neglected to address.

So on one side you have the landlord who didn’t get paid, and on the other side you have the web host who was looking out for his workers.  Personally I can see the positives and negatives for both sides of the argument – however I think there should have been a more adult way to handle the entire situation.  It all comes off a ‘bit childish to me.

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GoDaddy Refuses to Raise the Super Bowl Bar

Dec/10 in All Posts, Hosting News, Web Hosting Tutorials

14324_gallery7 Ah I remember 2005, like it was… a few years ago.  GoDaddy grabbed headlines by doing their first Super Bowl ad with the controversial Candice Michelle.  They made fun of the wardrobe malfunction in the previous year’s Super Bowl and had a hard time getting the final version of the commercial onto the air.

Now let us fast forward, because unfortunately GoDaddy refuses to raise the bar…

  • 2006 = Another Super Bowl Controversial Commercial
  • 2007 = Another Super Bowl Controversial Commercial
  • 2008 = Another Super Bowl Controversial Commercial

Ok, so GoDaddy has kind of run the idea of having a pretty girl in a controversial commercial into the ground.  They shoot a commercial, tell us the Super Bowl commercial gods refused to air it, release that one Online and then give us a “censored” one for the Super Bowl.

So that brings us to today, and myself reading a press release on theWHIR’s web site:

For its fifth consecutive year advertising during the NFL championship, discount hosting provider Go Daddy has shot two racy new ads this week featuring IndyCar driver Danica Patrick, to appear in the Super Bowl, following NBC’s approval.

Oh joy, another couple of racy ads for the Super Bowl.  Let me guess, one is “too hot for TV” and the other one is “just right for the censors”.

“We have two options and they’re both absolutely ‘GoDaddy-esque,’” Go Daddy chief executive officer and founder Bob Parsons said in a statement. “They are fun, edgy and slightly inappropriate; surely network censors will have a sense of humor, people could use a good laugh these days.”

Come on GoDaddy, I was behind you the first year, waited for the encore the second year – but after that I think you have run this idea into the ground.

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Top 5 Holiday Deals from the Web Hosting World

Dec/04 in All Posts, Hosting News, Web Hosting Tutorials

hosting-coupons The holiday season might have just started, but for some web hosts out there – they must really be in the Christmas spirit.  Either that, or they have started to over indulge a little early in the eggnog.  Web hosts passing out bargains like candy can only mean one thing, more web hosting deals for all of us.

  • Lunarpages.com – for $4.95 per month, you can get unlimited space and bandwidth!
  • FastHosts.com – They are offering free unlimited reseller hosting for a year.
  • HostColor.com – Host Color’s “THANKYOU2008″ promotion offers a 25 percent instant rebate on all Web hosting services to its present and prospective customers.
  • GoDaddy.com – They are registering domains for only $1.99 with any new, non-domain purchase.  Regular .com registrations are marked down to $9.99.
  • HostGator.com – You can get 20% off any order, if you use the coupon code “GREEN”.  On the site it says it was good till Oct. 1, however I just tested it and worked for me.

If your a web host with a special deal or offer going on, please let me know and I would love to get it featured on the Web Hosting Show.  We will all be spending plenty on presents and holiday cheer this year, so if we can get a little discount in our hosting – I do not see the harm in that at all.

Bonus! The fine people at aplus.net have also clued me into some of their great deals they have going on right now.  You can check them out here:  http://www.aplus.net/promos/

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HP Performance-Optimized Datacenter

Oct/23 in All Posts, Hosting News, Web Hosting Tutorials

hp-POD Find yourself in the need of a portable data center?  Now I am not talking about a mobile home with a few racks inside of it.  HP’s latest release is a new Performance Optimized Data Center, or otherwise referred to as POD.   Think of it as a shipping container filled with everything you would need for a data center.

This is what Steve Cumings, the director of Infrastructure for HP had to say in an interview with eWeek.com:

“Customers are looking to expand their data center footprint with additional capacity much faster than adding a traditional brick and mortar data center.  It can take 12 to 24 months to build out one of these traditional data centers and in the case of the POD, we can have one ready to ship in just about six weeks.”

So what about the stats?

A complete 8-foot-by-40-foot POD container can hold up to 3,520 servers or 12,000 hard disk drives in total, providing 12TB of data storage. The POD also has a unique cooling system too.  It includes hot and cold aisles for optimized heating and cooling, allowing hot air from one side to be distributed through the ceiling heat exchange, cooled and redistributed as cold air to the other side.  So the POD itself is like one big personal computer in its own right.

HP hopes will compete against similar high-density, mobile container offerings from IBM, Sun Microsystems and others.   With this juggernaut, I think they stand a pretty good chance.

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This Week in Hosting (Cloud Computing Edition)

Aug/15 in All Posts, Hosting News, Web Hosting Tutorials

Time to wrap up the past week in hosting in three headlines or less.  Can I do it?

Domain People want to Make You into a .Pro

DomainPeople, well not all domain people – just the company with the name is accepting reservations for .pro domain names from new registrants through August 31.  For more info on the .pro domain name check out registry.pro.

Verio Hands out Hosting to the Needy

Verio, a web hosting company, has decided to donate a few designs to help out the charities out there in the world.  They have agreed to host 18 Ann Arbor, Michigan charity web sites until January 2010, giving them the opportunity to understand how online presence can help them gain wider support, connect with their members and maintain information more accurately and transparently.

Media Temple does Cloud Spam Filtering

The people hosted over at Media Temple are going to get a little ‘bit better spam protection.  The Cloudmark Authority plug-in for SpamAssassin helps Media Temple to more effectively spot spam, phishing and viruses, increasing its ability by 80 percent, says the company.

If you would like to see your own hosting headlines mentioned here please be sure to drop me an e-mail at mitch@mitchkeeler.com and I’d be happy to get you included on the next edition of the podcast.

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From 100 Popular Web Sites, 60 Percent Support Malware

Aug/08 in All Posts, Hosting News, Web Hosting Tutorials

websense-security-report

I have a quote here that will scare the pants off of you.

60 percent of the top 100 most popular Web sites either hosted malicious content or contained a masked redirect to lure unsuspecting victims from legitimate sites to malicious sites.

That comes from Websense’s latest “State of the Internet Security” report.  They say that their research also shows that 75 percent of malicious sites are from legit, trusted sources with “good” reputation scores.

Also in the report, now more than 76.5 percent of all emails in circulation in the past six months contained links to spam sites and/or malicious Web sites.  That is an increase by 18 percent since December of 2007.

That is only a handful of highlights I saw, but the full report has a lot more interesting information I think we should all read and take in account when browsing the Web.  Download the Full State of Internet Security Report (.pdf)

Here is a video of the Websense Security Labs Manager discussing some of the report’s highlights:

This report covered the first half of 2008, from January 1 to June 30, 2008.  For more information about this recent report be sure to check out Websense.com.

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Two Organizations Wish to Connect the Hosting World

Aug/06 in All Posts, Hosting News, Web Hosting Tutorials

Coming out of HostingCon 2008, it looks like there are two major forces out there looking to become the dominate leader when it comes to being an community organizer for the web hosting industry.  On one side you have the Hosting Industry Organization and on the other side you have the Association of Internet and Hosting Service Providers.

There is a lot of buzz about them both, and a lot of the internal kinks are still being worked out.  Both seem to have a lot to offer to the table when it comes to organizing the web hosting world and the people inside of it.  From my point of view it seems both have very separate main goals.

The Association of Internet and Hosting Service Providers seems to be more focused on bringing people together to achieve certain goals, like you would see more so with an organized  trade association.

The Hosting Industry Organization on the other hand seems to be more focused on the social side of things.  They want to be a place to make connections, hire workers, sell businesses and that side of the hosting business.

Which one are you more excited about? I have passed out an open invitation to both organizations to come do an interview right here on the podcast.  I would like to ask them both the same series of questions so we can all decide which one might be the better choice in the long haul.

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Long Day’s Night in Hosting Headlines

Jul/29 in All Posts, Hosting News, Web Hosting Tutorials

Not a lot going on this week, but there are a few nuggets of goodness as far as web hosting news goes.  Here are just a handful of some of the hottest web hosting stories from the week.

cPanel Staff Working Longer Hours

The control panel gurus at cPanel announced that as of Monday, July 21st customer service hours will be extended from 7am to 7pm EST.  So if you are a customer looking to get your questions about cPanel answered, they will be available to help.

China Has More Web Users than US

19.1 percent of China has web access.  How much is that?  Oh roughly 253-million people.

HostingCon Gets Going

The biggest news story of the week would be that HostingCon is taking place July 28th through the 30th at the Navy Pier in Chicago.  I have skipped out on the festivities yet again, but looks like a great show all around.  HostingCon is the yearly meet up for all the biggest players in the hosting industry.  This year Parallels and Microsoft seem to be keynoting the conference and I am sure we will hear more about it from those who were “on the inside” soon.

Do you have any hosting news to share?

Drop me an e-mail at mitch@mitchkeeler.com and I’ll be more than happy to share it with the rest of the web hosting industry right here, next week on this very podcast.

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.ME a Big Fail So Far?

Jul/23 in All Posts, Hosting News, Web Hosting Tutorials

1216558906_188 You may have caught wind of some of the .me buzz last week, as GoDaddy started taking registrations for them for $20 a year (and you have to sign up for two years, so that should really be $40).  According to Mashable.com several people were claiming to have registered the same domain name, which is going to be a disappointment for some.  If eight people say they registered it, that will leave seven people really unhappy about the whole ordeal.

GoDaddy has also released this response to the claims that there was some wacky stuff going on during the first day of .me domain name registrations:

We knew the .ME Open Registration response would be tremendous, but it went beyond even what we had expected. As a result, we experienced some system issues in our communication with the registry.

As soon as we became aware of the issue we began taking steps to correct it. It is now resolved.  For our customers, if we did not successfully register the domain name requested they will receive a full refund.

Now that the first week’s hype is over, it might be a little easier to search around and see what .me domain names you can register from GoDaddy.  Only problem your left with is, are all the good names taken already?

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Spam, Spam and More Spam

Jul/18 in All Posts, Hosting News, Web Hosting Tutorials

Is it just me, or does it seem like there is a lot of spam talk these days?  Here I have for you two of the hottest spam stories of the moment, and a little talk about hacking and passing the blame to round things up.

King of Spam to be Sentenced

You would think that the king of spam would at least get a crown made of mixed meat or something cool like that, but the only thing Robert Alan Soloway has to look forward to now is a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and fines of more than $500,000.  How did he get the crown?  According to Jeffrey C. Sullivan, a United States Attorney for the Western District of Washington, “Our investigators dubbed him the ‘Spam King’ because he is responsible for millions of spam emails”.

Switzerland Tops World in Spam

The Swiss are usually only known for banks and watches, but now they can add one more title to that list, spam.  According to security vendor MessageLabs, Switzerland has exceeded former front-runner Hong Kong as the most spammed country.

ICANN Blames Register.com for Hack

Last but not least, to give you an amusing story for the web hosting water cooler, it looks like ICANN has tossed Register.com under the bus.  Since ICANN’s web site got hacked a few weeks back, looks like Register.com is becoming their scapegoat.  “The DNS redirect was a result of an attack on ICANN’s registrar’s systems.  A full, confidential, security report from that registrar has since been provided to ICANN with respect to this attack.” Register.com is a good company, and I don’t think it is totally fare that ICANN is looking to pass the buck so quickly with it’s own security problems.

If you have any news you’d like to share, be sure to drop me a line or leave a comment and I’ll be more than happy to spread the word about your latest happenings or interesting web hosting article.

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