After readers informed the Register about the problem, the website contacted 1&1 and received an email response apologizing for and explaining the disruption.

According to the statement, the problem arose when 1&1 was updating Microsoft Outlook Web Access software. “Following preparations for an update to new software for Microsoft Exchange 2007 Front-end, one server serving the Outlook front-end has partly been inaccessible as a result of a change in its IP address,” the statement read. “The IP address of this server was apparently made available too late for some DNS servers for some ISPs, resulting in some hundred customers using these DNS servers not being able to access their mailbox via Outlook Web Access.”

While 1&1 reported that a large majority of DNS servers already incorporated the change, due to different DNS server configurations, some users experienced slow performance. They noted that customers with such an issue should attempt to refresh their DNS cache with the command “IPCONFIG/flushdns.” They also suggested that another way to cope with the problem would be to use a different mail-client than OWA until the DNS-server has been fully updated.

According to 1&1, no customers using Linux mail servers or MailExchange customers have been affected.

Located at About.NetworkSolutions.Com, the company says the new website illustrates the company’s philosophy, people and products in a comprehensive and personal way.

“Our goal with the new corporate website is to make it easier to learn more about what Network Solutions does,” says Michele Krisanda, VP corporate communications for Network Solutions. “Whether you are interested in joining our team, in learning about how we can help your business, or in learning more from one of our talented leaders, Network Solutions’ people are here to help.”

The corporate site includes a “Who We Are, What We Do” section and a page outlining career opportunities and the benefits of working with the company. Interestingly, the company says the images on the website are photographs of some of the people currently working as part of the Network Solutions team.

Along with information on careers and personnel, the new corporate site also includes news about recent developments within the company and a section on Network Solutions’ philanthropy and community involvement initiatives.

The corporate site reflects Network Solutions’ behind the scenes identity as “a passionate, customer-focused, friendly, helpful, professional, and knowledgeable organization,” says the company.

This may certainly be the case, but isn’t necessarily how the hosting provider has always been regarded in the public eye, especially considering it has long been criticized for engaging in front-running - the practice where an individual registers a domain name for the purpose of tasting, immediately after someone else has conducted a search for that domain.

In February, the company was named in a federal class action lawsuit regarding this practice.

Drawing on more than 29 years of experience, says the company, Network Solutions is a “leading provider of e-business solutions and the pioneer of the domain name registration service” offering web hosting, web design, e-commerce software, search engine marketing, SSL certificates, email services and domain name registration.

Verio had ranked number nine in June. A long-time technological innovating company, at the end of June, Verio added Wendy Pearson as senior director of marketing and communications to spearhead its marketing initiatives. Hoping to breathe new life into the brand, Pearson explained Verio’s more focused marketing strategy to theWHIR at HostingCon 2008.

In second place, Italy-based Tiscali operates its main site from Apache running on a Linux operating system. Tiscali markets its offerings mostly in Italy, the UK, Germany, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. Tiscali announced Thursday it has partnered with data center operator Equinix, helping to strengthen its presence in the French and German markets.

Their core business is providing internet access, with two million ADSL subscribers in the UK and Italy. Tiscali had the most reliable hosting company site in February this year.

Out of July’s top ten hosting companies, six run Linux on their main sites, including Verio and Tiscali. New York Internet uses FreeBSD and Go Daddy uses Windows Server 2003.

Netcraft’s ranking system is based on the number of failed requests. With performance measurements are made at 15-minute intervals from separate points on the globe, Netcraft measures the response times and averages the results each day. The percentage of failed requests, according to Netcraft, is more important to customers than outages on hosting companies’ own sites because it gives a pointer to reliability of routing.

Go Daddy Domains Canada is offering .ca domain names at competitive prices, around the clock customer support and the opportunity to receive additional products and services at no additional charge, including a blog builder, online photo album and free email.

“Offering .ca lets our Canadian customers have all their domain names in one place,” says Bob Parsons, Go Daddy CEO and founder. “This gives Canadians the benefits of our low prices, unmatched customer service and support for all of their domains.”

As part of the Canada expansion, Go Daddy Domains Canada recently opened its office in Toronto, Ontario. Go Daddy currently has 5.5 million customers in Canada, but the domain registrar says it is hoping to further expand that customer base.

According to Byron Holland, president and CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority of Canada, .ca is showing an enormous growth with more than one million .ca domain name registrations and a 20 percent annual growth rate.

Holland says Go Daddy offering of “.ca services in Canada will benefit the Canadian customers and will foster the Canadian Internet presence.”

The .CA extension is available to Canadian residents and others who meet the Canadian Presence Requirements.

Registered affiliates will now receive a one-time, 100 percent commission on the referred customer’s total monthly recurring order value. The Planet is also shortening the waiting period for affiliate commission-payout, reducing it from three months to 45 days after a referred customer places an order with The Planet.

“Since our January launch, our affiliate program has seen tremendous success,” says James P. Treuting, vice president of sales and operations with The Planet. “Making these improvements to our already competitive commission structure is another way to thank our partners for referring customers to The Planet.”

Launched in January, The Planet’s affiliate program provides commissions for both customers and non-customers who refer new business to the company. Prior to that, The Planet launched a three-tiered reseller program last November that provides Web hosting resellers with multiple options for building their businesses.

In May, The Planet announced it had added Internet products company Directi to its affiliates program. Share-A-Sale is The Planet?s affiliate network partner.

Affiliates can earn money by referring customers to The Planet on a commission basis. The Planet says it has optimized its website for affiliate-related traffic, as well as provides affiliates with marketing materials and promotions.

Affiliates can also track their conversion statistics through a specialized administrative portal.

“The New Jersey facility will help improve the overall access, backup and load time by 97 percent,” Host Department operational and technical manager Ivan Seidenberg said in a statement. “In addition to that, all our future growth is going to be at our New Jersey facility.”

According to Host Department, its third and newest data center is essential for expansion because its facilities at Hurricane Electric and Terremark Worldwide were reaching their limits.

Located near its head office in Union City, New Jersey, the location will enable engineers to be quickly dispatched to handle hardware issues.

The New Jersey facility will house the company’s new range of blade servers and storage area network fabric.

The New Jersey facility will also lighten the load of the other data centers. In conjunction with the technical team’s “Load Lightening” program, all mail servers located in the Hurricane Electric facility will be moved to New Jersey, where there is little risk of cross connection between the architecture. Other servers will not be moved for cross connection concerns.

According to the announcement Monday, the partnership also strengthens RatePoint’s international reach by extending its platform, which includes the latest Web 2.0 trends, web content authentication and consumer ratings systems, to businesses in Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Spain.

“As the world’s largest hosting provider, we are in a unique position to understand the needs of businesses with an online presence,” said 1&1 chief executive officer Oliver Mauss said. “Not only will RatePoint’s platform help our customers stand out on the Web and promote their business quality, it will have a tremendous impact in converting site visitors into loyal customers and improving customer satisfaction.”

RatePoint helps companies manage what is said about them online by providing a mechanism to collect, manage and promote authentic consumer reviews and feedback directly from their websites.

Having made enhancements earlier this year, RatePoint’s platform benefits consumers by giving them an interactive method to provide feedback directly to a business. The business can then use this important data to resolve potential issues.

“1&1 has established its place as a global leader in the Internet marketplace by continually providing progressive services to meet future trends in the marketplace,” RatePoint co-founder and CEO Neal Creighton said. “RatePoint is proud to offer our online reputation management services to help transform business websites into formidable marketing and customer satisfaction tools for 1&1’s international customer base.”

Dotster says Application Vault, which is available at no extra cost with all of its hosting plans, enables customers to install and upgrade over 30 common open source applications from their control panel, like blogging, e-commerce, content management, photo sharing and project management tools.

Some of the specific applications available for download with Application Vault include Wordpress, OSCommerce, Joopla and DotProject.

Besides managing the installation, the Application Vault also manages latest version updates and automatic security patches, says Dotster.

“Dotster’s new and improved Application Vault helps our customers easily install popular applications for both their business and personal sites,” says Clint Page, CEO Dotster. “Many customers don’t realize that they can install and leverage these programs with little effort and have the ability to blog, conduct e-commerce, build intranets and more from their own websites.”

Application Vault marks the third new value-added service Dotster has launched in the last two months. Last week, Dotster announced it is offering EmailBrain, a new tool for creating, managing, sending and tracking newsletters and email campaigns.

The company is offering a free 90 day trial on new orders of Network Backup and EVault Backup for a limited time.

Both solutions are hosted on The Planet’s managed storage infrastructure and are available in 10GB to 80GB, or larger capacities for mission-critical environments.

This is the latest promotion The Planet is offering since it launched its new Planet Alpha Dedicated Servers and Planet Northstar Managed Hosting divisions. Last week, The Planet added the Xeon 3210-SAS servers, which includes 146GB hard drive and 2GB RAM, to its line of Planet Alpha’s Ready To Go Servers.

Planet Alpha Data Protection Servers, which includes continuous data protection software from R1Soft, are discounted up to 29 percent, or a savings of $140 per month. They offer storage capacities of up to 6TB, and feature bare-metal recovery and block-level backup capabilities.

Existing customers can receive up to a 26 percent discount on Planet Alpha firewall solutions. The Check Point X16 firewall is available for $139 per month compared to its regular $189 price tag, while the Check Point XU firewall is now $69 per month, down from $89.

Additionally, Private Rack and Virtual Private Rack customers can order any one of three Cisco ASA solutions at a 15 percent discount.

“With The Planet’s backup and data protection solutions, SMBs can gain the simplest form of business continuity insurance at an affordable monthly rate,” says Rob Walters, GM of storage and data protection at The Planet. “Coupled with firewalls, customers gain peace of mind knowing that critical information is both protected and recoverable.”

Go Daddy says within the first 24 hours of registration, it signed up more than 20,000 .me domain names, making it the most successful new domain launch in the company’s history.

Requests for .me registrations were so high, apparently, that at one point it began delaying Go Daddy’s website. But the company says it immediately began deploying more servers to withstand the spike in traffic and within a couple of hours, the website resumed normal operations.

Nevertheless, because of the delay, some customers ended up registering domain names that were already taken or reserved by the .me registry before the launch, says the company. However, once the site stabilized, Go Daddy began notifying customers of the invalid registrations and started processing refunds.

“In spite of a few early difficulties GoDaddy.com successfully processed a huge, record-setting level of registrations,” says Bob Parsons, founder and CEO of Go Daddy. “To the best of our knowledge, there have never been more registrations handled in one day during the ordinary course of businesses by any registrar in history. It’s important to note, that in addition to the .me onslaught we also successfully processed our normal business which averages one registration every second.”

The .me extension was assigned to Montenegro as a county code after it became an independent nation in June 2006. However, the Montenegro government decided .me would be operated as a generic name after considering the potential worldwide wide appeal for the extension. Go Daddy says .me is suited to “individuals or businesses looking to uniquely express themselves online with a podcast, blog, online photo album or website dedicated to their interests.”

In light of the popularity the ccTLD has garnered thus far, web hosting provider Easyspace also announced on Monday it has begun offering .me domain registrations through its website. Easyspace says it is one of only a handful of UK-based registrars selling .me domain names.