News from the hosting world

Discount web host Go Daddy met allegations of unfair, insider bidding in TDNAM domain name auctions by drafting a corporate policy restricting employees from participating in auctions.

Posted on a NamePros.com message board on June 20, it was originally reported by Domain Name Wire editor Andrew Allemann that Go Daddy employee Adam Dicker had outbid another poster on the domain name spyware.us in what some members considered an unethical business practice.

Go Daddy released a statement this week announcing the company’s new policy. Go Daddy General Counsel Christine Jones said, “To ensure customer confidence and to avoid any possible future questions of impropriety, all GD employees are now and in the future prohibited from participating in TDNAM auctions, purchasing, sales & back orders.”

While measures have been put in place to eliminate the conflict of interest, Go Daddy defends Dicker and his actions. Jones said, “Go Daddy has reviewed the auction and found nothing improper. Adam Dicker’s knowledge on the auction was no different from what any customer coming to our TDNAM site would have had.”

At the time of the controversy surrounding Dicker’s activity, GoDaddy Vice President of public relations Elizabeth Driscoll told Domain Name Wire that there was no policy to forbid employees from engaging in public auctions or registrations, but also noted there are “tools in place to prevent anyone from gaining the opportunity for an unfair advantage in securing a domain name through registration or auction.”

Go Daddy joins competitors SnapNames, Moniker, and NameJet in banning executives from participating in auctions and inflating bid prices.

Domain registrar and web hosting provider Go Daddy announced on Thursday that with the registration of domain name RulesOfSaving.com, the company now has a portfolio of an industry record 30 million domain names.

The milestone demonstrates that despite a struggling US economy, the Internet market is thriving considerably. Forrester Research forecasts online spending in 2008 will increase by 17 percent while Go Daddy anticipates even higher numbers.

The company’s projections, based on recent months, reveal a 72 percent increase this year over last, in terms of revenue generated by customers with websites powered by its e-commerce tool, Quick Shopping Cart.

“These numbers really demonstrate how the Internet is alive and well, even in these rough financial times,” says Bob Parsons, Go Daddy CEO and founder. “We knew from the start, helping make it easy and affordable for people to get online would make a difference. That’s why we developed products our customers wanted, priced them right and then backed them up with personal customer service… and, well the rest is history.”

Go Daddy claims it has a 45 percent market share of active, new domain names and is nearly three times the size of its closest competitor.

Meanwhile, ICAAN announced it will decide this week on whether to offer endless variations on domain addresses, as only 17 percent of the original four billion domain addresses are still available.

To meet the demands of this rapid growth, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based Go Daddy says it has expanded its workforce to four offices in Arizona, plus one each in Colorado, Iowa and Washington, D.C.

The company says it employs more than 2,000 people, which has increased by approximately 33 percent in less than three years.

When “badware” researcher Stopbadware.org released a report on Tuesday identifying the top countries and networks responsible for hosting what it describes as “badware,” it identified Google as the largest source outside of China.

The report, which describes “badware” as “spyware, malware, and deceptive adware,” identified Google as the fifth largest host, and the top US host, with 4,261 infected sites. Other US hosts identified included SoftLayer and The Planet, with 3,507 and 3,166 infected sites, respectively.

The rate of infection at SoftLayer and The Planet, both major providers of unmanaged dedicated servers, is likely the result of the large reseller presence at both companies.

“SoftLayer and ThePlanet.com offer data center services and/or dedicated, self-managed hosting,” says the report, “indicating that they do not control the content of many systems operating on their networks. Both companies, however, have acceptable use policies for their customers and have expressed an interest in investigating potential violations of these policies.”

Google, which was not present in the organization’s findings in 2007, has become more of a source as online criminals have turned to its Blogger service to host their malicious content. According to Stopbadware.org, Blogger has become more popular because the service is free and enables users to include malicious links or in some cases malicious code.

Stopbadware.org, which is sponsored in part by Google, and which uses raw data collected by Google to produce its reports, includes a bit of a Google apologist note at the end of the report, saying Google “tells StopBadware.org that when a Blogger site is identified as badware by their Safe Browsing initiative, the site is immediately reported to Google’s Blogger group and the site is disabled.”

But critics of Google say the infection problem runs deeper. A PCWorld report says security experts note the security problems at Google have been known for several years, and the company has yet to take a significant step toward solving them.

The article quotes Robert Hansen of security consultancy SecTheory.org as saying Google could make changes to Blogger that would cut down on malicious applications, but hasn’t because those steps might limit the functionality the service offers to honest users. Hansen offers MySpace as an example of an extremely popular free service that doesn’t have nearly the security problems of Blogger.

The bulk of the report discusses the distribution of badware by country, with 52 percent of the Internet’s badware originating in China, 21 percent in the US and no other country hosting more than 4 percent of the sites.

A chart from the report showing the geographic distribution of sites infected with badware.

Of the top 10 hosts list, six are located in China, including the top four. Stopbadware.org says that while it is a significant contributor, the US’s rate of infection is proportionally average.

The report doesn’t identify a reason for China’s disproportionate contribution, although it hypothesizes that “part of the reason for this could be the lack of economic incentives for Chinese hosting providers and site owners to inform their users of infected sites and/or to take action to clean or remove these sites.”

Utility hosting services provider Layered Technologies announced on Wednesday that it has collaborated with Microsoft to become what it calls the “first hosting provider to launch Hyper-V product.”

The announcement was made Wednesday at the second annual LT PACT 2008 conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, which will close with a keynote address by Tier 1 Research founder Andy Schroepfer.

Launched in a beta release last December, Hyper-V is a hypervisor-based vitualization platform that is a vital feature of Windows Server 2008. In March, Microsoft updated Hyper-V with a feature-complete release that offers “updated, near-final code.”

The technology enables the virtualization of multiple operating systems all on the same server, offering a scalable and highly available platform.

“We are excited to be a part of Microsoft’s ongoing effort to provide customers and partners with the best operating system platform for virtualization,” says Jack Finlayson, CEO of Layered Technologies. “We worked closely with Microsoft to be the first hosting providers to rapidly deploy this technology. In bringing virtualization to the market, we are looking to help businesses consolidate resources, reduce support costs, and decrease operations expenses.”

Layered Technologies will provide Microsoft Hyper-V GoLive Beta Program and Microsoft Developer Network members with dedicated servers in an on-demand, hosted environment.

As a member of the MSDN community or a GoLive Partner, customers will receive an exclusive monthly discount on the Microsoft Hyper-V-enabled hosting plans.

Layered Technology will also offer managed services on the Hyper-V product once it is officially released out of beta, which is currently set for September.

This dedicated management services offering, entitled DEFCON Managed Services, will include around the clock monitoring, technical support, security updates and expert system administration of virtualization server engineers.

The company recently brought over the DEFCON Managed Services from Fastservers to a select group of current customers, following Layered Technologies’ April acquisition of Fastservers.

Layered Technologies says it also plans to offer Hyper-V-based virtual private servers within the next couple weeks.

Web host and domain registrar Go Daddy is urging the US Congress to accept legislation to stop online pharmacies from selling controlled drugs without a valid prescription.

Congress representatives Lamar Smith, Bart Stupak and Mary Bono Mack introduced legislation Tuesday “to stop rogue internet pharmacies and protect the safety of consumers who fill legitimate prescriptions online,” according to a Go Daddy press release.

Having considerable clout as the world’s largest registrar, Go Daddy sent general counsel Christine Jones to Washington, D.C. where she testified to Members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security that the scope of illegal online drug businesses is worsening and the US needs to deal with it by passing enforceable laws.

“This isn’t just about people trying to save money on prescription drugs by unknowingly buying counterfeit brand name pills,” Jones said in the press release. “This is about young kids who use their parents’ credit card, tell them they are buying music or video games and instead stock the weekly party with enough ecstasy for them and all their friends. This is very, very serious.”

A 2007 report by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Colombia University found 84 percent of Web sites selling prescription medications do not require a doctor’s prescription.

Outspoken CEO and founder Bob Parsons has been known to hold strong opinions in his blog. He has used his money and influence to help flood victims earlier this month, but made waves back in June 2005 when he said the interrogation methods the US military is using at Guantanamo “are incredibly mild. All of the prisoners receive regular medical attention. In contrast, Americans who are captured in the Middle East have their heads hacked off.” He has since apologized for the statement, but has not stopped using his position to make his opinions known.

The issue of internet pharmacies may be doubly important for Go Daddy, which has costly, round-the-clock monitoring of their hosted web pages to monitor illegal activity. The company’s abuse department suspended more than 1,300 web sites last year that sold drugs “mostly without a prescription and almost always without any age verification or parental oversight required,” according to the press release.

Domain registrar and web hosting provider Register.com announced on Wednesday it has launched an affordable shared hosting service for small businesses that offers large space allocations, as well as layered unique features and functionality.

Register.com’s web hosting service offers three plans - Essential, Professional and Premium - depending on the number and size of websites the customer is hosting. All plans include a 100 percent uptime guarantee and an innovative control panel.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the new service is the site restore feature, which enables one-click restoration of previous website versions.

The feature assures small businesses that they no longer need to concern themselves about losing data or having to redesign the site to revert to a previous version.

The site restore feature is included with every hosting plan that automatically saves up to 13 copies of each site, which breaks down to one per day for eight consecutive days and an additional one copy per week for five weeks.

A dedicated IP address is also included with every plan to improve the website’s search engine rankings and security. Register.com says it uses virtualization technology to enable hosting resources to expand automatically as the site grows.

“Register.com’s new hosting service is a great example of how we are helping our small business customers be successful online,” says Larry Kutscher, CEO at Register.com. “Our customers told us about the kind of features they wish they could find in a hosting provider - we listened and we created the hosting service they dreamed of and more - at a price they could afford.”

After promising an event for weeks, hosting provider LiquidWeb said Monday that the ground breaking for its new data center and headquarters would take place Tuesday, on site in Lansing Michigan.

In an unusually hands-on undertaking for a hosting provider, the event will introduce the press to the company’s third data center, an $80 million facility and new headquarters for the Michigan-based hosting provider.

The in-person nature of the event would seem to indicate that the company is courting the attention of the local business press, rather than the internet “IT business” press. The company is a fairly significant local business, employing roughly 135 people at its two existing facilities, both located in Lansing.

Late in May, the company issued reports that it was planning the on-site press event to coincide with the beginning of construction on the new facility, which will include 90,000 square feet of usable data center space, enough for 25,000 servers and several hundred new employees.

Located at 2703 Ena Drive in Lansing, Michigan, the project involves the renovation of an existing building. In a phone conversation with theWHIR, Liquid Web director of marketing Travis Stoliker says the company expects to begin racking servers in January or February or 2009.

The schedule for Tuesday’s event includes a video presentation, as well as a presentation by Liquid Web CEO Matthew Hill. The company will also display 3D conceptual models of the completed facility.

The LiquidWeb website includes a page with information on the “Data Center 3″ facility, including 3D renderings of the entire building and the office area specifically, as well as illustrations of the interior and what appears to be a photograph of the current building’s exterior.

While we have never been enthusiastic about treating a new promotion like its news, there were so many seasonal deals announced this week that it amounted to a marketing trend that we could look at worth noting.

Not unlike Open-Xchange’s recent offering, strategically-timed, presumably, to come out right around the highly-anticipated release of the newest version of the iPhone, web hosting provider Hostway announced a similarly well-timed offer on Wednesday, in light of Apple’s latest iPhone release on July 11, to offer customers a chance to “experience all the benefits of Microsoft Exchange on the most cutting-edge wireless device to date.”

Hostway says it will be holding three drawings for the new 16GB Apple iPhone 3G with winners to be announced on July 25, August 25 and September 25. Purchase is not necessary to be included in the draw and customers who order five or more hosted Exchange accounts between June 17 and September 17 will automatically be entered into the drawing, says the company.

On Thursday, web hosting provider Dotster, perhaps best known for its “Dotster Dots” spokesmodel search campaign in 2006, announced it will be offering a “Happy Hour” promotion on June 24, during which the company will give away 50 free domain names every hour from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. PDT. Dotster says its will award a total of 400 visitors a coupon redeemable for one free .com, .net or .org domain name.

Also on Thursday, UK domain registrar 123-reg announced it is “kicking off the mid-summer sales” with a new 20 percent price slash on its shared hosting, e-commerce and InstantSite products.

And on Friday, web hosting provider Host Department reported that it is celebrating the Fourth of July with a “blast of discounts” for all its nolimit and reseller web hosting plans.

Customers that sign up from now until July 4, using the coupon code “FOURTH” will receive a 10 percent discount off the regular price, says the company. Customers using their credit cards are eligible for 20 percent discounts. And any sign up with a 12-month or more billing period comes with two free domains, including a “special Independence Day” .us extension, says Host Department.

Customer feedback and reputation management solution developer RatePoint announced on Tuesday that web hosting provider Lunarpages has joined the RatePoint partner program.

Lunarpages, which offers shared, dedicated, reseller and VPS hosting plans, will integrate RatePoint’s reputation management platform into its overall customer offering.

The patent-pending platform enables businesses to manage their online reputation by easily capturing, managing and publishing consumer reviews and feedback directly from their websites.

RatePoint offers quality-assurance certification and customer feedback platform for businesses, using the latest in Web 2.0 trends, web content authentication and consumer ratings systems.

The customer feedback solution verifies actual consumer ratings for authenticity, where businesses can respond to any negative feedback before it?s posted online.

The platform includes email marketing services and survey tools, as well as a web-based management interface that enables businesses to connect with customers, increase sales and improve consumer confidence.

“Putting yourself out there on the web is never easy for a business, especially small- to mid-size businesses,” says Amy Armitage, director of business development at Lunarpages. “We try to alleviate anxiety for our customers, and RatePoint is an invaluable offering to help them gain a competitive edge. RatePoint provides our customers with a simple solution to help them boost their visibility online, while at the same time strengthening customer relationships and their bottom line.”

Web hosting provider Doster said this week it has launched a contest that will furnish the winners with the means to set up their businesses online.

Through the “eBiz in a Box” promotion, the company will give away one “eBiz in a Box” package per week for each of the next eight weeks, beginning earlier this week on Tuesday, June 10.

The prize, according to Dotster, has a retail value of more than $100, and includes a domain name, the means to build a website using Dotster’s SiteBuilder tool, free email and Standard Linux web hosting for a year.

According to Dotster, customers who enter the sweepstakes but do not win will be given a coupon worth a 20 percent discount on a hosting package from the company.

The contest can be entered from the front page of the company’s website, which includes an animated “box” that becomes a very uncomplicated entry form, complete with a “did I win?” button.

Dotster’s “eBiz in a Box” promotion is a fairly ordinary marketing tactic in comparison to some of the company’s previous efforts. In 2006, the company conducted a nationwide search for a group of on-staff models charged with promoting the company’s services. The models were referred to as the “Dotster Dots” and they appeared at, among other events, the 2007 CES tradeshow.