“Demand for pre-built Web sites is surging as small businesses and professional Web site designers seek to create superior business Web sites with less effort,” says Paul D. Engels, Hostopia’s chief marketing officer. “Hosting providers can fill this demand, but only if they source a reliable supply of compelling templates with attractive licensing terms. Hostopia meets this need.”

The Web site templates licensed by Hostopia are based on industry standard protocols to be fully compatible with development tools such as Namo WebEditor 2006 Suite, Adobe Photoshop 6+, Macromedia Flash MX+, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004, FrontPage 2003+, or any other HTML editor. File formats supported include PSD, HTML, SWF and FLA as well as non-flash versions.

Hostopia and Hostgator say that over 2,500 templates are included under a fully-paid license with an option to add additional site templates plus OS commerce designs. Meanwhile, Hostgator CEO Brent Oxley says that the company’s marketing plans for the templates are currently being developed and clients can expect to see them within 90 days.

Under the headline, “Love Your Kids? Fear For Their Future? Kill All Muslim Kids,” the Web site”s owner, who lives in the Tampa area, wrote, “Makes sense to me. After all, if Muslims are raising their little crumb-snatching, curtain climbing, ankle biting rug rats to strap on bombs in order to kill us, it is logically correct to assume that in order to stop that from happening we need to kill all Muslim kids. Starting now.”

Other entries on the site contain obscene and hate-filled attacks on Islam and Muslims, as well as support for violent actions.

“While we respect an individual’s right to freedom of speech, we oppose hate-filled speech that calls for violence against innocent people,” says Ahmed Bedier, executive director of CAIR-Tampa. “It’s clear that (the Web site is) in violation of your company’s terms of service agreement which states, ‘any material that, in our judgment, is obscene or threatening is prohibited and will be removed from our servers with or without notice.’ The agreement also clearly defines hate sites under ‘examples of unacceptable material.’”

Bedier also noted that since November, CAIR had raised concerns about the anti-Mulsim site at local forum on hate crimes and has asked Hostgator to stop hosting the site.

The VML hole and other similar zero-day vulnerabilities, enable criminals to install spyware and other malware onto machines. The criminals behind the cPanel attack deployed this tactic, using a previously unknown vulnerability in cPanel to gain access to hundreds or thousands of servers that supply Web pages.

Dave Koston, an operations manager at cPanel, says the company patched the hole within an hour of it being brought to its attention. An update has since been passed along to the majority of servers that use cPanel. Koston also adds that the attackers would have needed a working account with each Web host in order to exploit the vulnerability.

HostGator owner Brent Oxley says some 200 HostGator servers were accessed, but he was unable to estimate how many of the sites were affected. He says the hackers used the cPanel vulnerability to access HostGator servers more than a month ago, and then kept a low profile before striking last week.

The iframe script redirected visitors using Internet Explorer, the only browser vulnerable to the VML flaw, while visitors using other browsers went unaffected. An estimated 20,000 sites are attempting to exploit the vulnerability, says Eric Sites, vice president of Sunbelt Software, the company that first discovered the flaw.

“We get so many requests from our customers for PHP 5 and MySQL 5 that we felt compelled to make it available to them for no extra charge,” says Brent Oxley, president and founder of HostGator. ?Providing power, ping and pipe and 24-hour support is not enough. At HostGator, we feel it is necessary to support all our customer’s specific needs and to make it available to them at the lowest price point possible.”

HostGator’s shared hosting plans are priced at $6.95, $9.95 and $14.95 per month, with a semi-dedicated virtual hosting plan priced at $74.95 per month.

PHP is a server-side scripting language used to create dynamic content that facilitates interactivity with databases. MySQL is a popular open course relational database.

All Hostgator resellers will be offered five special templates integrated with affiliate shops of Template Monster. Using these templates, Hostgator resellers can resell hosting services from Hostgator as well as Web templates from Template Monster. The partnership will enable Hostgator affiliates to offer their clients Web site templates from Template Monster’s collection using their own brand names.

“We are glad to introduce our affiliate program to Hostgator resellers,” says Gary Nichols head of marketing department at Template Monster. “We have many successful affiliates among hosting companies and hope that Hostgator resellers will also like our products and our affiliate program.”

The templates are available to any of the Hostgator resellers. They can be downloaded by registering with the Template Monster affiliate program. The registration process is free and takes only a few minutes to complete.