Best Web Hosting 2006

Domain Register Joker.com came under attack by a DDOS (denial of service) attack today and it is believed that most of the 550,000 + domain names registered with Joker suffered some form of downtime due to the attack although it is believed there was no security breach in the attack. Joker.com announced the security measures they were implementing after the attack including adding more name severs and acquiring more bandwidth.

The Identity and Turst assurance solution provider Comodo announced plans today to purchase an England Security software maker  Indicii Salu. The details of the deal are undisclosed at this time.

Dedicated Server company ServePath announced the launch and spinoff of it’s content streaming solutions company UpStreamingNetworks.com which will leverage ServePath’s network services. The content network will target small to midsized businesses and allow their web sites to be filled with the new company’s content.

There was a fair bit of news today.

Cira, which is the Canadian version of ICANN pulled out of the internet governing body which ICANN is a member. What we know from this move now is that Cira has established that they would be the sole body for checking Canadian citizenship, and apply their 6.5% tax to all .ca domain names.

The online game Warcraft experienced downtime recently due to over use of the systems that support the online game.

JumpStart web hosting services got hit with a $900,000 civil penalty for allowing some of their clients to send emails regarding a Free Flix Tix promotion whch the FTC says violated the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act. This is supposed to be the largest penalty yet for illegal spam. Result? We dont see much of JumpStart these days.

Sorry there was no new news on this date as it was a sunday, more news to be reported tomorrow.

This was a Saturday and no new news was reported for this day.

On this day in 2006 UK hosting provider EasySpace announced that they were launching a new business package for small to mid sized businesses. The package included a free domain name, a 3 page template for building a web site, 10 email accounts antivirus software and email filters for the email accounts internet security software and a blog. Looking at this package today it is obvious that this was not a very robust package for small to mid sized businesses. A small business might be able to get by with only 10 email accounts but in this day and age a mid sized business would be left with too few emails. In addition the blog feature has very little value for a small business unless they were going to heavily market themselves on the internet.

More news included the announcement of UnitedHost, also out of the UK announcing that they had surpassed 10,000 Hosted clients. XO communications, telecommunications provider, announced that they hired Rick Scott as senior vp of network services.

1and1 web hosting provider announced today that they had earned the Gold Certified Status from Microsoft through the Microsoft Web hosting partner provider program. The certification came about as a result of 1and1 displaying their competency in Sharepoint & Exchange solutions.

On this date DemoDemo’s founder Vito Ceniti announced that they would offer their flash based web video tutorial service on a monthly subscription basis. DemoDemo has for years been working with the web hosting industry to try to provide easy to walk through video tutorials for web hosting customers for all aspects of the features in cpanel, and plesk. These video tutorials have allowed for enhanced customer service for the do-it-yourself webmaster community who would rather go to a live video tutorial rather than wait on the phone or wait for an email reply to their technical question. In many cases these tutorials have allowed web hosting companies to drastically reduce their phone hold times as novices can use the tutorials to setup their basic features like email & webmail. The subscription was immediately extended to all web hosting providers and the thought is that other online ecommerce startups could use it for their web based services.

On this date HostedToday also announced that they had increased their web hosting plan specs by tenfold. This is one of those stories that shows why 2006 was so tumultuous for the web hosting community as web hosting providers were constantly squeezed to offer “greater” packages in order to compete with the hyper competitive hosting companies whose primary goal was to grow as fast as they could disregarding customer service or support.

Netfirms also on this date announced new advanced features for their customers including the capability of viewing their web hosting control panel in multiple languages and an updated version of wordpress offered to all their customers.