WikiLeaks is having a interesting week. Distributed Denial of Service attacks, Amazon terminating their web hosting. Paypal terminating their relationship with the site and now Dynamic Network Services' subsidiary, EveryDNS.net has terminated the WikiLeaks.org domain name because of the repeated DDOS attacks.  Stating on the EveryDNS blog that the attacks against WikiLeaks "have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites,"

Even the Library of Congress has blocked access to the WikiLeaks site. It will be interesting to see if the domain name WikiLeaks.org "disappears" in the coming days. 

WikiLeaks can only blame themselves for the chaos that is besetting the organization. Even the most ardent supporters must question the wisdom and responsibility of a mass release of classified documents.

Although I have seen no polls, I also feel safe in stating that most people generally believe that the secrecy and lack of transparency in governments have created an environment that makes many individuals sympathetic to the cause of WikiLeaks.

Remember the Vietnam War, an oppressive government, Nixon, a "leaked document", and Watergate. Not the brightest days in American history.... or could it have been one of the republic's defining moments...

History will tell.   

EveryDNS.net posted on their site the following:

EveryDNS.net provided domain name system (DNS) services to the wikileaks.org domain name until 10PM EST, December 2, 2010, when such services were terminated. As with other users of the EveryDNS.net network, this service was provided for free. The termination of services was effected pursuant to, and in accordance with, the EveryDNS.net Acceptable Use Policy.

More specifically, the services were terminated for violation of the provision which states that "Member shall not interfere with another Member's use and enjoyment of the Service or another entity's use and enjoyment of similar services." The interference at issues arises from the fact that wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites.

Thus, last night, at approximately 10PM EST, December 1, 2010 a 24 hour termination notification email was sent to the email address associated with the wikileaks.org account. In addition to this email, notices were sent to Wikileaks via Twitter and the chat function available through the wikileaks.org website. Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider.

Web host FatCow has announced the winners of their “Host Smart, Drive Smart” giveaway!  This years winners won a smart fortwo coupe, a Vespa scooter and 4 people won a Schwinn bike.

This year’s “Host Smart, Drive Smart” giveaway was an extension of FatCow’s ongoing commitment to the environment and their Green Initiatives. A company spokeperson says "We love being a fun and quirky web host, but we’re also very conscious of the decisions we make, and how they affect our customers and our environment. What better way to prove that than to give stuff away to our loyal customers – stuff that is not only fun, but also eco-friendly?"

Their grand prize winner was David Campbell of inthecorners.org, a non-profit organization providing free labor for home repair and maintenance, primarily for widows and the elderly. David won a smart fortwo, but opted for the cash stating, “Can you picture us trying to haul a sheet of plywood and some lumber in a smart car?  We choose to take the cash and plan on using the money to further the cause of inthecorners.org.” 

Laura Negrete, was the first place winner of the Vespa, has been a FatCow customer since 2003.  Her website inkstains.org is a literary magazine, publishing poetry, art work and fiction.

Winners of a Schwinn Bike

Russell Johnson of i35marketing.com, an online Marketing company.

Joshua Ziegler of jczdesigns.com, used as on online portfolio.

Claudia Sims, of radiatedjupiter.com, a personal blog.

Shannon Hill, of http://shannonlhill.com, a writer, speaker and blogger who specializes in animal welfare.

Review your experinces with Fatcow! (don't be a sore loser!)

Over the last several years, a number of spam bills have been introduced – and ultimately failed – to bring anti-spam laws to Canada but now the “Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act” (FISA) scheduled for reading and debate, may actually signal an end to the dearth with the passage of Bill C-28 likely before the end of the year.

Most small businesses are not even aware of the existence of a Bill C-28, so when it passes into law, they may find even simple e-mails to prospective customers could cost them in big fines (up to $1 million for individuals and up to $10 million for businesses). Bill C-28 will require consent before commercial e-mail can be sent to an address.

While it certainly isn't my prerogative to dissect or critique this finely crafted piece of legislation, I will point out the significant highlight of Bill c-28:

Section 7 starts with: It is prohibited to send or cause or permit to be sent to an electronic address a commercial electronic message unless... and it goes downhill from there.

As proposed, this bill will ensure that Canada does not continue as one of the few remaining countries in the western hemisphere without a spam law, but will require an opt-in provision that other western countries rejected. At the same time, it will ensure job security in a number of misaligned and antiquated government bureaucracies like the CRTC. Bill C-28 could possibly provide a much needed boost to government coffers in these economically trying times.

The American equivalent “CAN-SPAM Act initially included a “opt in” provision which was modified after debate to the “opt-out” provision. The European model has a similar provision to opt-out of receiving further emails. Lets hope Canadian politicians arrive at this same conclusion.

Opt-out isn't perfect

A business is required to remove your email address from their mail list when requested to do so. While technically this method in principle should work to reduce unwanted email, as an unfortunate consequence of the press received by unethical businesses, many people are just unwilling to respond to an unwanted email with the required opt-out method. People have a legitimate fear of email address harvesting, without starting to confirm to the “spammers” that there is not only a functional email address, but also someone who is actually reading the email.

Alternatively, some email providers eg: gmail, hotmail, now have included mechanism for reporting spam with a touch of a button. Spam reports are then utilized by spam filter providers to exclude mail from even reaching the inbox. As well, the ip address of the sender can be “blacklisted”. While this form of policing does have advantages especially for fine tuning of spam filters , many webhosts have incured innumerable hours working to have an ip addresses removed from “blacklist” after emails that met the requirements under spam laws, were inadvertently (maybe not) reported as spam. There have also been some resourceful companies that have sprung up that maintain “blacklists” of suspected spam sending ip's” that then require a “fee” to have the offending ip removed.

Ten years too late

Prior to the technology catching up to the enterprising entrepreneurs, there was indeed a need for this type of legislation. Canada was known as a haven for many spammers to openly tout their wares. Times have changed as have the methods. Today, spam is much more likely to originate in Asia, India, and Eastern Europe, and to be sent from compromised computers using spambot networks.

Comment spam on websites has also become a much larger issue than email spam, although this also will fade fast as the technology catches up. Bill C-28 will do nothing to alleviate these concerns.

Some could (and would) argue that the legislation looks to protect Canadians from expending valuable resources dealing daily with the cost of email spam. While a valid point, governments have traditionly been regarded as a drain on resources rather than the cure. It will provide valuable tools for law enforcement to perform its job. More disappointment.

Canada Post... delivering junk mail everywhere

What Bill C-28 may actually achieve is Canada Post (a crown corporation), having a monopoly on delivering junk mail. There is no opt in mechanism for the postal service. The advent of paperless billing and Internet payments along with their own ineptness has left many postal services struggling to find relevancy in this modern age.

Staying legal

- Outsource your direct e-mail marketing efforts to a reputable e-mail sending service.

- Clean up your mailing lists.

- Get consent from people now. You won’t have the chance to e-mail people to get consent after the bill becomes law. That will fall under the spam category.

- Stop renting or buying lists.

- Adopt e-mail best practices based on permission-based marketing.

- Update your e-mail header information. It will have to be included in your e-mails.

On this day of guilt free gluttony that kicks off the holiday season, HostJury is surfing around to provide a listing of Black Friday and Cyber Monday web hosting specials.

The list is not in any particular order and should not be considered a recommendation. HostJury would like to remind you, that price is only one consideration when researching a webhost. Cheap web hosting will be little consolation if you can't see your website because it is “down again”

While we do spend the better part of the day surfing the web, it doesn't  necessarily mean we need to handle this task alone. Webhosts and websurfers alike are welcome to either post a Black Friday/Cyber Monday special or webhosting coupons as a comment, or send us the details of the webhosting specials to reply@hostjury.com.

The list will continually be updated as the sales become available. Have a great Turkey Day... because most of the turkeys are not! 

ssshhh... HostJury is also kicking off the holiday season by giving away a electronic gizmo in a draw from all eligable webhost reviews or comments posted between Black Friday and the 20th of December. (we will be announcing this in a post shortly)

FatCow: Black Friday promotional specials to new clients $2.95 per month... seems to be unlimited everything but deal expires Sunday. Check out FatCow reviews.

HostGator: Black Friday promotional specials from 50 percent off to 80 percent off starting after midnight on Thanksgiving day, or at 12:00 a.m. Friday, the 26th of November, 2010. The sale ends 24-hours later at the stroke of midnight Friday. This includes shared hosting, VPS hosting, reseller hosting and dedicated servers.

The pricing on all accounts will be discounted at 50 percent off from 12:00 a.m. until 5:00 a.m. CST. Then, from 5:00 a.m. through until 9:00 a.m. CST there will be an 80 percent discount. Finally, from 9:00 a.m. until 11:59 p.m. the discounts will again be 50 percent off everything. It doesn't appear that you need a HostGator coupon to take advantage of this sale. Check out HostGator reviews.

Hostentic: Black Friday Special - $9.99 for 1 full year of web hosting.  coupon code is "Black Friday"  Share your experiences with Hostentic by adding a review.

SYN Hosting: Black Friday Sale Starts Now. Plans are 50% off with a free domain for life.   If you already have a domain, you can get an extra two months of hosting included. For new clients only. Check out reviews for SYN Hosting

HiVelocity: Black Friday Discounts start tomorrow at 9am with discounts on servers! New clients only, and you must chat with account manager for discount.   Hosting Reviews of HiVelocity 

Snoork Hosting Black Friday special 90% off shared hosting for the first 3 months. Use the promotion code: az9vwmhk7f  HostJury needs some Snoork clients to add a hosting review of their experiences. 

TurnKey Internet Black Friday through Monday 50% off all products. New customers only. Use coupon code 'BlackFriday" at checkout. Turnkey clients can add a review of their experiences. 

Site5  Thanksgiving 2010 Special. Good only on Thanksgiving day and Black Friday for new orders. Shared & Reseller Hosting - 20% off recurring! (any contract!) Cloud & VPS Hosting - 10% off recurring! (1 month contract only) Check out Site5 reviews on HostJury

HostPC  BlackFriday 33% Off ALL VPS's Special - use coupon code "BFSERVER". New orders only. They also have 50% of hosting and domain names. Use "blackfriday" coupon code  Check out HostPC reviews

Driphost  has a Black Friday coupon for 85% off your first payment on any shared hosting packages. There doesn't appear to be any restriction on a new user. Review your experinces with Driphost.

Pacific Host  Black Friday deal is up to 80% off Managed cPanel VPS with Ffmpeg/Red5/NginX and USA Support. Get 25% off recurring for LIFE on ALL HOSTING with the webhosting coupon: "blackfriday25" OR Get 80% off for 1st Billing cycle on ANY Hosting plan up to 1 year payment term. Use the coupon code "blackfriday80" Offer expires November 28. Pacific Host Reviews

Generation-Host Black Friday webhosting deals - 50% off ALL Shared. Also offering a limited time offer for new clients!. ALL clients are assigned a dedicated account manager. 4 GB Disk Space, 8 GB Bandwidth,100 Email Address,200 Databases,No Setup Fee,Only $2.50 A Month!! Use the coupon code BFDAY to claim the discount. First 10 people to order can receive an upgrade to 15 GB Bandwidth, Just ask your account manager!  Review Generation-Host.

That Hosting 75% Off Yearly Plans! Cyber Monday Super Sale! Use promo code cybermonday (case sensitive) 12 month minimum term. Review That Hosting

Limestone Networks Cyber Monday Sale (All Week Long!) – Huge savings + RAM, HDD and 10TB BW upgrades! Get an Intel Core2Quad Q9550 for only $150 and as a bonus Limestone will throw in free double RAM, free double HDD, or 10TB of bandwidth for only $10 more! Limestone Reviews

It is being reported in the Swedish media that WikiLeaks has abandoned the Swedish internet hosting company it had previously used to store many of the confidential documents revealed by the whistleblower website. Mikael Viborg, CEO of Swedish web hosting company PRQ has told the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper that “They left without saying anything to us. They haven’t used our services for awhile”

Viborg estimates they stopped using his facilities about a month ago. He has since turned off the machines. “They should have actually said they didn’t want to use our services any longer. We sent a final bill a few weeks ago which still hasn’t been paid,” he said.

Dagens Nyheter reported that WikiLeaks now relies on machines based in France. But Swedish internet service provider Bahnhof denied the DN report that WikiLeaks had abandoned Sweden altogether.

According to Bahnhof board chair Jon Karlung, WikiLeaks has used servers at his company’s facilities located on Södermalm in southern Stockholm since September. “They are still in Sweden and are now customers with us. They have their homepage and database with us in a nuclear weapon-proof bunker under Vita Bergen,” Karlung told the TT news agency on Sunday, referring to the company's underground facilities housed in a former civil defence communications centre.

“We see that there is traffic going both to the homepage and the database right now, so it’s absolutely in operation.” Karlung explained that the Bahnhof servers now house the database which includes much of the material related to the Iraq war which WikiLeaks released in October.

“WikiLeaks has databases in many parts of the world, like in Paris and Amsterdam, for example, which is natural for what they do. But it’s not true that they’ve left Sweden,” he said.

PRQ revealed in August, just two weeks before the surfacing of rape allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, it had been helping the whistleblower websites since 2008 by hosting its servers at a secret basement location in a Stockholm suburb.

WikiLeaks "contacted us through a third party in Sweden a few years ago and... their traffic goes through us," the 27-year-old Viborg told AFP at the time.

He said the company's server hall housed several hundred servers and was located "somewhere in Solna," some five kilometres (three miles) from Stockholm's centre.

WikiLeaks had purchased a so-called tunnel service, he said, meaning "the material itself is somewhere else but is sent through our machines so for someone downloading the material, it looks like it is coming from us."

He stressed however that "we have no control over what WikiLeaks publishes.

HostJury's trace lead to France also.

Wikipedia states (PRQ isn't exactly operating on main street America), that PeRiQuito AB (PRQ) is a Swedish web hosting company created in 2004 which became famous for hosting the BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay. PRQ has also hosted The Piracy Bureau, Wikileaks, many pedophile forums, and also the Kavkaz Center.

Based in Stockholm, PRQ is said to be owned by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, two founders of The Pirate Bay

Sweden's constitutional protections for confidential sources was cited at the time as one of the reasons behind WikiLeaks' choice of Sweden as a home for its servers.

Rules on source protection are written into the Swedish constitution and effectively block individuals and government agencies from attempting to uncover journalists’ sources. Revealing the identity if sources who wish to remain anonymous is a punishable offence.

However, the law only applied to websites or publications that possess a special publishing licence (utgivningsbevis) granting them constitutional protection, and WikiLeaks has not acquired the requisite paperwork, it was reported at the time.

A week of evolving continued in the hosting industry with a few stories of bigger is better announcements.

Many pregnancies have a shorter duration than the “breaking” news that could only qualify as the worst kept secret in the industry. After months of speculation, and a leaked confidential email giving the whole world advance notice, the world yawned as SoftLayer finally “officially” welcomed The Planet customers into the SoftLayer fold.

The new welcome page on both companies websites appeared to genuinely express excitement about sharing the new opportunities that the merger brings the customers of both companies. Boldly proclaiming “Bigger. Better. Badder.”

Along with a little video clip, the page extolled “Together, our two companies are stronger than ever, with expanded capabilities that will bring you increased opportunities and even more value. There is strength in numbers, and SoftLayer today is the largest private hosting company in the world, positioned to leverage our all-new scale for your benefit, including:

-Ten data centers nationwide

-25,000+ customer accounts in 110+ countries

-76,000+ deployed servers”

Certainly the merger will resolve a number of outstanding issues such as the ongoing litigation between The Planet and SoftLayer. It was only in August that Softlayer announced it had been acquired by GI Partners, a private trans-Atlantic investment firm that oversaw the 2006 merger of EV1 and The Planet. GI Partners appear to have an insatiable appetite for anything host or data center related.

Layered Technologies also announced that it has acquired dedicated and managed Web hosting specialist, GSI Hosting (GSI) to boost it’s growth within the enterprise managed services sector.

No financial terms were provided but Layered Tech did report in February 2010 that it had gained a significant amount of growth equity funding from a group of investors led by private equity investment firm, Accel-KKR.

Layered Tech benefits not only from a solid roster of customers in the consumer goods and financial industry but GSI’s wholly owned 77,000 square-foot data center based in Kansas City, MO. GSI also owns other facilities in Canada and Europe, Layered Tech stated in the release.

ServInt, a provider of managed hosting for enterprises announced it had completed a series of core routing upgrades and network additions resulting in an increase of more than 200 percent in overall capacity.(they tripled their network capacity!) ServInt achieved these upgrades with no customer downtime.

The press release states “This series of extensive network-infrastructure upgrades allows for optimum network stability and performance as ServInt’s customer base continues to expand. The upgrades are in response to recent rapid growth of ServInt’s customer base, as well as in preparation for upcoming projects. The upgrades enable an 8-10x increase in reserve network capacity, which is critical in an environment where clients increasingly require a network that can handle extreme demand spikes without network degradation.”

Each of these acquisitions and capacity upgrades can, and do bring a measure of increased service and stability to the hosting industry. At the same time, the concentration of ownership in the hands of a few Financial Equity companies that strive to return greater profits to their shareholders and investors, will not always be in the best interest of the consumers of these hosting services.

I believe the “new” Softlayer webpage said it best.... “There is strength in numbers”

A historical glance to the past will likely confirm that for the consumer of goods, Bigger and Better is almost always Badder.

A British website briefly removed by webhosting provider JustHost after a request by the Met Police's e-crime unit is now back online.

The site's hosting provider JustHost suspended the account after an email from the Met, but hardly had the plug been pulled than the site sprouted up in hundreds of other places, from Facebook to dozens of blogs and other sites.

Fitwatch.org.uk says that JustHost have not relented so we just moved to another host."

Interestingly, it is being reported that JustHost in a statement claims “that it can not divulge customer information without a subpoena or court order.”

JustHost then continues "However, when we become aware of improper activity by one of our customers using a hosted site, which would be a violation of our Terms of Service (TOS) governing the web sites, we take such situations seriously, we investigate promptly, and we take appropriate action."

I was curious which Term they violated so I checked the JustHost TOS. I am still in the dark! (We have requested comment from JustHost)

The Fitwatch blog's latest post says “We’re back, and we’re stronger than ever.” Thanks the Met Police for all the publicity!

On Monday night we received notification that our site had been suspended due to “attempting to pervert the course of justice” due to our posting offering advice to the Millbank students. Whilst the email requesting the site be closed on the basis it was being used for “criminal activity” came from DI Paul Hoare, from the Police Central e-crime Unit, the authorisation to close was given much closer to home, by acting Detective Inspector Will Hodgeson. Hodgeson, who was involved in the first Fitwatch case, and has sat through many of our trials and appeals, evidently finally had enough and decided to shut us down.

HostJury has requested the name of the new host (not really expecting a reply). Considering Fitwatch is likely getting a healthy traffic flow, it does appear the site is loading quickly when pinged from various global locations.

The Met should read the post

Cease and Desist” Takedown Letters can add buzz

 Update

Sam from JustHost has responded that management will review our information request and respond shortly.

Another Update

Management from JustHost has responded (in a timely fashion no less). While the answer was rather vague and generic in nature and almost begs to have some interpation and spin just to make it applicable to the subject matter at hand... I will refrain and be thankful for a reponse

Response from JustHost 

We understand that you have requested certain customer information or other
confidential information.  Please be advised that such materials are subject to
privacy policies, and are held in confidence in absence of a subpoena or other
legal process. Of course, we would be happy to comply with any legally binding
subpoena, court order or other legal process.

As you may know, we are a web hosting company.  We are not responsible for the
content or links posted by our customers who create and place content on
websites that we host.  We further do not "monitor" the websites that
we host or prescreen the content placed by customers on their sites.  However,
when we become aware of improper activity by one of our customers using a
hosted site, which would be a violation of our Terms of Service (TOS) governing
the web sites, we take such situations seriously, we investigate promptly, and
we take appropriate action.

Should you have further questions, please contact us.  [end]

 If you think your web host has been around forever, think again. Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web!

A prior March 1989 document that he drafted for CERN with the drab title “Information Management: A Proposal” had been met with minimal internal interest. Berners-Lee’s group leader, Mike Sendall, was mildly intrigued and allowed him to keep tinkering on the project, calling it “vague, but exciting.”

As Berners-Lee would later recount in his memoir, “Weaving the Web,” he decided some rebranding was in order, and he ran through a number of potential names for the project. One idea was Mesh, “but it sounded a little too much like mess.” Mine of Information might seem “too egocentric” when treated as an acronym, MOI, French for “me.” The Information Mine could be seen as “even more egocentric” based on its acronym: TIM, Berners-Lee’s first name.

"CERN’s experiments and projects were usually given names of Greek or Egyptian mythological figures, and I specifically did not want that because I wanted something for the future and different. I had looked at Nordic mythology but not found anything suitable.”

Finally, Berners-Lee came up with a three-word name that suitably described the global reach of the system they were envisioning: World Wide Web. Berners-Lee put forward the name “as a temporary measure.” They agreed to use it for their revamped proposal for CERN management, as the proposal could not be delayed any further. “If the proposal was accepted, they would find a better name.” They never did manage to replace that stopgap label, of course

The attached document describes in more detail "A Hypertext project".

HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.

The project has two phases: firstly we make use of existing software and hardware as well as implementing simple browsers for the user's workstations, based on an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments. Secondly, we extend the application area by also allowing the users to add new material.

Phase one should take 3 months with the full manpower complement, phase two a further 3 months, but this phase is more open-ended, and a review of needs and wishes will be incorporated into it.

The manpower required is 4 software engineers and a programmer, (one of which could be a Fellow). Each person works on a specific part (eg. specific platform support).

Each person will require a state-of-the-art workstation , but there must be one of each of the supported types. These will cost from 10 to 20k each, totalling 50k. In addition, we would like to use commercially available software as much as possible, and foresee an expense of 30k during development for one-user licences, visits to existing installations and consultancy.

Read more

Some likely thought he was dreaming. I wonder if anyone really could have imagined the impact 20 years ago of the change about to unfold on the world.

Google Engineer Matt Cutts is offering a cash prize for the best open-source and Linux-based projects built on Microsoft’s Kinect. A contest to produce open-source drivers for the Kinect was already sponsored by Adafruit Industries which was won by a Héctor Martín Cantero within a few days.

Matt Cutts says on his blog that he is starting his own contest with $2000 in prizes. There are two $1000 prizes. The first $1000 prize goes to the person or team that writes the coolest open-source app, demo, or program using the Kinect. The second prize goes to the person or team that does the most to make it easy to write programs that use the Kinect on Linux.

To enter the contest just leave a comment on the blog with a link to your project, along with a very-short description of what your project does or your contribution to Kinect hacking. The contest runs until the end of the year: that’s Dec. 31st, 2010 at midnight Pacific time.

Matt says he may ask for outside input on who should be the winner, but he'll make the final call on the winners. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/open-kinect-contest/

Speaking of hacks, hopefully Microsoft’s sense of humor is better than Sarah Palin. The student convicted of hacking into former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's email account in 2008 was sentenced to a year in state custody today.

David Kernell guessed the answers to Ms Palin's security questions and reset her password, prosecutors said.

Ms Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate, compared the hacking to the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon....

Gee... do I need to repeat that!

Glasgow-based web hosting and domain name company Easyspace presented a cheque for £1,050 to the 3D design division at Glasgow Metropolitan College, after a group of first year students designed and decorated a life-sized model of a baby elephant to highlight the plight of the Asian elephant.

Easyspace asked a group of first year students at Glasgow Met to come up with a design to represent both communication and the campaign’s theme, in response to a campaign organised by charity organisation The Elephant Family to increase awareness of the Asian elephant’s troubles. In the last 100 years its population has declined by 90%, to the extent that if current trends continue the Asian elephant could be extinct within the next thirty years.

The Easyspace elephant – Cosmos – was displayed at the Elephant Parade this summer, a public art exhibition of 250 model elephants around the streets of central London.

Ewelina Kawarska, 27, an NQ interior design student, created Cosmos, which was painted with the planets to illustrate the global nature of modern communication and to emphasise the scale of the Asian elephant population crisis.

Her winning design went on display in front of Bank Station, right in the heart of the City, ensuring it was one of the most visible elephants on show. Famous artists and designers who shared the limelight with Ewelina included Jack Vettriano, Marc Quinn, Diane Von Furstenberg and Lulu Guinness.

Sarah Haran, managing director Easyspace, stated: “We were absolutely blown away by the quality of designs produced by the students and wanted to reward the college for its hard work. It was a tough job picking a winner but Ewelina’s creation really stood out.

“In fact, we were so impressed, and felt so attached to our baby elephant, that we purchased Cosmos at the Elephant Parade Auction and had her transferred from London to our Glasgow headquarters. Shet now takes pride of place in our reception area.”

To put things bluntly: It appears EMC Web Hosting is going out of business as of Friday. On their website they request that all clients backup their content and begin moving to alternate networks in the meantime. I highly recommend considering some of the web hosting providers that offer free transfer assistance such as the ones on our list at Hostjury Reviews. After the myriad fiasco recently, the writing was on the wall but this was entirely unexpected in such short notice. 

Quoted from the EMC website:

PLEASE BE ADVISED:

All EMC Webhosting servers & network equipment will be discontinued this Friday. All customers that are still hosted on the EMC Webhosting networks are advised to remove any and all accounts off network to another hosting environment prior to this:

Friday, November 12, 6pm PST

We highly recommend making backups of your website files, and databases to avoid loss of data.
PLEASE NOTE:

If there are any remaining accounts on the EMC Webhosting networks at that time, they will be deleted. Unfortunately, backups cannot be provided and migration assistance cannot be provided by EMC Webhosting at this time.

EMC Webhosting can no longer support this website, the network & its existing hosting environment following Friday.

Sorry for the late notice. Not our doing, however, we at least wanted to ensure you had some notice prior to the event, so you don’t lose your data.

Update

While it would be simply speculative to know the exact reason for the apparent impending doom awaiting Myraid Network clients on Friday, there are a number of publicly available documents that can provide some insight to the inner workings of EMC Telcom Corporation.

On January 8 2010, JP Morgan Chase Bank filed an action for judgement on an outstanding Promissory Note for ~ 200K against EMC Telcom Corporation, Kenneth McCoy, Andrea McCoy,  Russell J Malero, and Nichole E Malero

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27486047/200k-in-bills-EMC-Telecom-Myriad

On June 16 2010, G. MURRAY SNOW, District Judge handed down his decision in PETERSEN v. EMC TELECOM CORPORATION.    No. CV-09-2552-PHX-GMS.  United States District Court, D. Arizona.

Dallas is hosting this year's Superbowl, has the richest sports franchise in the world (worth an estimated $1.8 billion according to Forbes), and is far enough south that the winters can't get that cold! But Mondays will be Mondays even in Dallas.

After losing their starting quarterback, superstar Tony Romo, any chance of qualifying for this year's SuperBowl, and their head coach in Sunday night's game, the team temporarily lost their website Monday morning. Appears that their technical team fumbled the renewal of the official site's domain name DallasCowboys.com.

The domain name, registered with Network Solutions, was later brought back up, but thanks to DNS caching, many users reported the website still didn't work even a day after.The website is hosted on NeoSpire Managed Hosting.

Network Solutions would send out a number of emails prior to the domain expiring on November 2nd.

While blame and total responsabilty can only fall on the Cowboys, one is left to wonder why someone at Network Solutions or NeoSpire Managed Hosting just never spotted the ten bucks to prevent the domain pull-down!

The contact email were for Jerry Jones Jr., the team's Vice-President and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer.... also the son of the owner. The domain is now reported to be set on auto renew!

Jerry might want to review his hosting solutions on HostJury and check out HostJury Job/Careers section for a new tech team!

XBIZ is reporting that the trustee leading the Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing for defunct web-hosting provider Alpha Red has filed suit against the company's former chief operating officer, alleging he assisted in and benefited from a fraudulent money-transfer scheme according to documents obtained by XBIZ.

It is alleged that former Alpha Red COO Benjamin Pannell helped transfer $2.7 million to former CEO James McCreary's Hong Kong bank account just prior to the company's bankruptcy filing. The trustee also says more than $72,000 of the company's funds went directly to Pannell.

Alpha Red filed Chapter 11 almost two years ago. The bankruptcy filing was later switched to Chapter 7 and subsequently McCreary was arrested by the U.S. Marshal's Service after he failed to appear at bankruptcy proceedings in January. McCreary later was found in contempt.

The initial bankruptcy filing was preceded by an emergency receiver petition by Alpha Red's largest customer, online storage and web hosting provider Megaupload, which said that McCreary had not only abandoned client obligations but also fled the U.S. taking about $875,000 of the company's money and about $1 million of other customers’ money.

The trustee's suit, which seeks recovery of funds Pannell allegedly received, said the former COO had "reasonable cause to believe that the debtor was insolvent" when the wire payments were made, mostly to McCreary's Chase bank account.

It also said that Pannell engaged in "improper self-dealing and conflicts of interest" and that he "clearly made the fraudulent transfers with actual intent to hinder, delay or defraud his creditors."

"Pannell breached his duties in numerous ways by causing or allowing the debtor to pay for unreasonable and/or personal purported 'business expenses,' causing or allowing the debtor to pay him and his wife excessive and unreasonable compensation, and generally looting the debtor," the suit said. "As a result, some or all of such amounts are now not collectible as a practical matter."

The trustee, Douglas Brickley, is seeking a court order awarding damages, plus interest, of the funds Pannell allegedly diverted in the constructive fraud case.

Read the original Story on HostJury... Web hosting provider Alpha Red Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Google announced that it will roll out a new search tool to help users choose a site to visit not only based on the information in each result eg: the title, a snippet of text and the URL, but also an image-based snapshot called “Instant Previews”.

Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine. To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right. From there, hover your cursor over any other result to see a preview. For those of you who’ve recently stopped using your mouse to search, now you can navigate to a result, hit the right arrow key to see the preview, and hit the down arrow key to keep browsing.

Google testing found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. The previews provide new ways to evaluate search results, making you more likely to find what you’re looking for on the pages you visit. Here are some of the things you can do to get the most out of Instant Previews:

• Quickly compare results - A visual comparison of search results helps you pick the one that’s right for you. Quickly flip through previews to see which page looks best.

• Pinpoint relevant content - Text call outs, in orange, will sometimes highlight where your search terms appear on the webpage so you can evaluate if it’s what you're looking for.

• Interact with the results page - Page previews let you see the layout of a webpage before clicking the search result. Looking for a chart, picture, map or list? See if you can spot one in the preview.

Google recently began calculating website page load speeds for ranking purposes and insist that with some websites taking four or five seconds, or even longer to load, search users need a tool to speed the process. With Instant Previews, Google will match your query with an index of the entire web, identify the relevant parts of each web page, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customized to your search usually in under one-tenth of a second. Once you click the magnifying glass, the previews for the other results load in the background so you can flip through them without waiting.

Now if everyone would just use this tool and stop clicking on those finely tuned SEO spam advert sites that plague page one of Google we are all more likely to be satisfied with the results clicked!

Geo Trust fired another volley in the low-cost market for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates, GeoTrust slashed its SSL prices in half and launched an aggressive new campaign aimed at attracting SSL customers of Go Daddy and other competitors. (this one appears targeted to Go-Daddy customers)

The Marketing Hype

"Through a new GeoTrust campaign, Go Daddy customers can trade in their Go Daddy SSL certificates for equivalent GeoTrust SSL certificates at no charge. Customers of other competing certificate vendors can take advantage of GeoTrust’s new, dramatically lower pricing when their SSL certificates are up for renewal. For these customers, GeoTrust slashed the original prices of its SSL certificates in half, with QuickSSL Premium domain validated protection starting at $149 per certificate. Switching to GeoTrust SSL is fast, easy and now inexpensive, with domains validated and most certificates issued in just minutes."

The Sad Reality

Go Daddy's regular priced offering is fifty dollars less for what appears to be a superior product. (Correct me if I am wrong with a comment)

Go Daddy's warranty also appears to be for 250K compared to Geo Trust's 100K. Additionally, Go Daddy offers a  two year special for a dollar more than Geo Trust's one year offering. Icing on the cake is Go Daddy's Exclusive offer for Open Source projects -- get a FREE 1 year Standard SSL Certificate!

So much for the hype

After months of speculation it appears to have been confirmed that the dedicated server and Web hosting services of The Planet and SoftLayer, have merged. The news of the merger appears to be confirmed in a (confidential but obtained by TechCrunch) email that was sent out by The Planet earlier today. In the email, the company says that the news will be made public “soon”.

The email states:

The Planet Is Now Softlayer

Hello,

It’s my pleasure to inform you that the merger of The Planet® and SoftLayer® is complete! There will soon be public announcements about the merger, but I’d like to talk with you firsthand about the new opportunities and capabilities that it brings.

I’ll call you in the next few days to answer any questions you might have there’s been plenty of speculation and I want you to hear about the exciting road ahead directly from me.

We highly value your business and trust, and have worked hard to create a seamless transition. Your The Planet accounts and services remain unchanged. Rest assured, the new SoftLayer is committed to the same world-class support and personal service you received as a customer of The Planet.

SoftLayer is already recognized for its automation and commitment to innovative product development. But now, you’ll receive new capabilities with increased value. You’ll have direct access and control of your solutions through our industry-leading Customer Portal and open API. This will allow you to order, deploy and manage your entire environment on-demand, without the need for human interaction.

Our goal is to provide the best hosting experience in the business and we want you to see it firsthand.

The new SoftLayer provides:

- An expanded product line, with new products and services not available to you before.
- Industry-leading automation, Customer Portal, and Open API, for direct access to more than 150 backend systems and activities.
- Increased geographic diversity and the ability to choose where your servers reside.
- High-speed network and multiple PoPs, providing more than 1,500G of connectivity and direct connections for lower latency.
- Exclusive network architecture that weaves together distinct Public, Private and Data Center-to-Data Center networks.
- Improved Service Level Agreement with 100% uptime and 2-hour or less hardware replacement (failure or upgrade) guaranteed.
- Greater value for your business, including more performance per dollar, a larger international presence and expanded partnerships with industry leaders.

Your existing The Planet services and account are managed and accessed as they were before through Orbit and the Managed Hosting Portal. But beginning next week, you can also access the SoftLayer Customer Portal with your The Planet username and password.

Until this information is made public, please consider it confidential. I’ll send you a note this week to schedule some time for a discussion that’s convenient for you.

SoftLayer’s management team and investment firm GI Partners had acquired all of the equity in SoftLayer last August. GI Partners also happens to own a large stake in The Planet, hence the rumors about the companies merging that have been swirling ever since.

It does appear from the email that the Planet will re-brand to the Softlayer name. We will update this story as it develops!

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/08/the-planet-softlayer/

The UK Government minister responsible for security, Baroness Neville-Jones was in Washington and is reported to have requested the US to order American websites hosting al-Qaeda videos to remove them citing that the sites incite murder and would be banned in the UK.

A student Roshonara Choudhry, 21, was said to have been inspired by a cleric linked to the air cargo bomb plot. She was found guilty of attempting to murder MP Stephen Timms and awaits sentencing.

Choudhry, who was angry over the Iraq war, was said to have watched online sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American Muslim cleric of Yemeni descent. More than 5,000 videos featuring Mr Awlaki are available on YouTube.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Ministers were angry that the US failed to regulate American-based sites that hosted the extremist videos, including YouTube.

More than 5,000 postings featuring Awlaki's videos were available on YouTube. In one sermon, titled 44 Ways to Support Jihad, he tells followers: "Jihad today is obligatory on every capable Muslim."

Baroness Neville-Jones called on President Barack Obama's administration to "take down this hateful material" in cases where servers were based in the US. She said websites that "incite cold-blooded murder" would "categorically not be allowed in the UK".

YouTube says it was looking into the Awlaki videos and would “remove all those which break our rules”.

He said the website had “community guidelines that prohibit dangerous or illegal activities such as bomb-making, hate speech or incitement to commit specific and serious acts of violence”.

The firm removed all videos from accounts “registered by a member of a designated foreign terrorist organisation”.

A Facebook page set up in the name of Awlaki had been taken down.

Update

A search of You Tube for Anwar al-Awlaki now only returns "about 4590 results". This may suggest that some clips have been removed after review by You Tube censors.

I can see that headline now "You Tube Censor Goes Postal" ...   

Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. and vBulletin Solutions Inc have filed a second lawsuit against its former lead developer, who recently launched his own forum platform with the UK-based startup XenForo. With the new suit, vBulletin claims copyright infringement, breach of contract, and misappropriation of trade secrets.

Ex-vBulletin man Kier Darby in a statement on xenForo acknowledged the second suit, but denied the claims in both suits in their entirety, and "expects the claims to be defeated."

It has been reported in the Reg, that some customers have protested at vBulletin's support forums, and various other blogs after vBulletin announced an overhaul of its licensing setup. Vbulletin reacted by banning a number of license holders for what it calls a violation of its terms of service.

Under the company's previous scheme, users paid a one-time fee for an "owned license" to the vBulletin software. This meant they could use the product for as long as they liked, though they would have to pay a small yearly fee in order to receive upgrades, support, and security updates. But under the new scheme, even those with owned licenses would not have access to updates and support unless they paid full price for the new package.

Typically, users paid $160 for a vBulletin owned license, before renewing it each year for an extra $40 to $60. Now, if they want security, updates, and support after the end of their license year, they will have to upgrade to vBulletin 4.0, which is priced at close to $200 plus another $80 for support.

XenForo only costs $140 with an extra $40 for support.

An announcement yesterday on the Steadfast support system announced that after 12 years of service, Steadfast Networks has sold their shared hosting clientele to Fluid Hosting. The announcement was made after a year of researching buyers for the clientele, and should allow Steadfast to concentrate on their core clientele -- dedicated servers and colocation.

Though Fluid Hosting has some quasi-negative reviews here on Hostjury, the company itself seems to run a high quality operation as a whole. As they say 'no news is good news', and there's almost little news regarding Fluid Hosting and there hasn't been in years. The company itself concentrates on H-Sphere -- a particular control panel that Steadfast themselves utilized for a good chunk, if not 100% of their shared hosting clientbase.

The post about the sale is below for you to peruse, what are your thoughts on the sale itself?

I'll get right to the point: Steadfast Networks is selling its entire shared hosting operation to Fluid Hosting (http://fluidhosting.com/) effective immediately. We have been in the shared hosting business for 12 years now, but the direction and core of our business has changed drastically over those 12 years. Our focus has shifted to managed dedicated servers and colocation, while shared hosting now makes up a very small percent of our business. We do not feel that with so few resources dedicated to shared hosting that we can continue to provide the level of service our customers expect. After over a year of researching options, this sale appears to be the best way to help us concentrate on our core business while, at the same time, assure our shared hosting customers are still given the best level of service possible. This decision is not being taken lightly, as most of our shared hosting customers have been with us for many years, some for 5+ years. Our goal in the end is to assure that everyone continues to receive the high levels of service they have come to expect.

A sale would not be possible if it weren’t for a company such as Fluid Hosting, as we were only interested in selling to a company with a similar platform and the same high standards of service. Fluid Hosting uses the same H-Sphere control panel you have become used to, offers true 24/7 ticket based support, has shared hosting at the core of its business, and has a strong track record of nearly 10 years in this industry. In addition, Fluid Hosting provides phone support without requiring you to open a ticket in advance and offers web based chat support from 9AM – Midnight Eastern Time during weekdays. Both are improvements over our current support offerings.

Starting immediately, Fluid Hosting staff will take over all support/billing/sales inquiries and all payments. These inquiries are to be submitted directly through the H-Sphere control panel or by calling Fluid Hosting at (800) 653-1019. We are confident that Fluid Hosting will handle this transition as professionally as possible. Over the next several months the Steadfast Networks staff will continue to provide assistance to assure that the transition goes on smoothly and all customers are getting the best treatment possible.

Over the next couple days Fluid Hosting will be contacting you with more details regarding this transition. It is sad to see you go, but at this time we are certain it is the best for all involved. As your business/site continues to grow, Fluid Hosting will continue to take a good care of you. We wish you well in your future endeavors.

Karl Zimmerman
President
Steadfast Networks/NoZone, Inc.

Just a mere year ago we detailed the problems occurring at Myriad Network as a result of the company being sold to EMC Web hosting.

After going offline during the weekend and remaining offline for well beyond three days, after what appears to be exploitation and some hacks. The story doesn't add up though as many clients are still able to access their data via IP address -- and some users are speculating to what could be going wrong.

There's a rather lengthy thread regarding the outage itself on a forum here where a number of clients discuss emails they receive and things going on behind the scenes:
Webhostingtalk -- Myriad Network problems

One of the more interesting issues is that EMC Web Hosting, the company that owns Myriad Network, business license was revoked in the state of Arizona according to this website. The license revokation appears to have began back in May. Speculation continues regarding the downtime and whether or not an exploit actually occurs -- considering some users are still able to access their data despite being told it's gone leads many to believe that the company has some unpaid bills with bandwidth providers & was forced to move quickly over the weekend (All paid up, it seems) -- wonder.

We'll update this story as it continues.

In an effort to introduce, and attract new customers to Cloud Hosting, Amazon Web Services is introducing a new free usage tier. Beginning November 1, new Amazon Web Services customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer.

Amazon Web Services free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with Amazon's cloud.

**These free tiers are only available to new Amazon Web Services customers and are available for 12 months following your Amazon Web Services sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates.

I could (and probably should), do as most tech media have done and end the story now. Not satisfied with status quo, I decided to get a sense of the value of the offering and the potential liability of cost overages.

Costing

I decided to proceed in the order set out by the Amazon's press release, starting with “Run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year”. Amazon EC2 Micro Instance is listed as .025 per hour from Northern California. (With Linux/ Unix Usage. Windows Usage added 1 cent per hour to cost. An instance running from Virginia was .020 while the EU and Asia priced similar to California).

 I noticed that the Standard Small (Default) plan had a cost of almost ten cents per hour or almost $75 per month, so I felt a need to better understand the package limits for calculating the potential liability of cost overages. (they do require you to have a credit card to sign up!)

Scrolling down on the page, I see various add-on features listing costs per instance-hour (or partial hour) for the EC2. Terms like Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, Data Transfer, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Elastic IP Addresses, Amazon CloudWatch (not to be confused with CloudFront), Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing.

“The best way to understand Amazon EC2 is to work through the Getting Started Guide, part of our Technical Documentation. Within a few minutes, you will be able to log into your own instance and start playing!”

Clicking on the link provided I was taken to the documentation page which listed twenty two documents! (clicked on the first document and was taken to a page that listed six subsequent choices). Someone needs to seriously look at the choice of wording of the “in a few minutes” statement.

 CyberInsecure is reporting that for the past three weeks, internet addresses belonging to Microsoft have been used to route traffic to more than 1,000 fraudulent websites maintained by a notorious group of Russian criminals, publicly accessible internet data indicates.

The 1,025 unique websites push Viagra, Human Growth Hormone, and other pharmaceuticals though the Canadian Health&Care Mall. They use one of two IP addresses belonging to Microsoft to host their official domain name system servers, search results from Microsoft’s own servers show. The authoritative name servers have been hosted on the Microsoft addresses since at least September 22, according to Ronald F. Guilmette, a researcher who first uncovered the hijacking.

By examining results used with an internet lookup tool it was determined that 131.107.202.197 and 131.107.202.198 — which are both registered to Microsoft — are housing dozens of DNS servers that help convert the pharmacy domain names into the numerical IP addresses that host the sites.

The most likely explanation, they say, is that a machine on Microsoft’s campus has been programmed to do so, probably after it became infected with malware.

“The important part seems to be some sort of compromise appears to be in play,” said Randal Vaughn, a professor of information systems at Baylor University. “It could be an NS compromise, an OS compromise, a rogue customer machine, or something else entirely. In order to get the DNS zones entered in there, they must have pwned the box.”

Vaughn also held out the possibility that servers connected to the Microsoft IPs might be part of a honey pot that’s deliberately hosting the name servers so that researchers can secretly monitor the gang’s operations. Another possibility is that the pharmacy operators have subscribed to some sort of managed service offered by Microsoft.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said she was investigating the findings and expected to provide a statement once the investigation was completed.

California-based Guilmette, who said he has uncovered evidence that other large organizations have been similarly hijacked in the past, said he’s convinced the results mean that Microsoft has faced some sort of system compromise.

“I’m a paranoid kind of person,” he said. “There’s no other immediately apparent, reasonably plausible explanation for the facts that I’m looking at.”

Another researcher who goes by the pseudonym Jart Armin said that there may be no Microsoft server compromise at all. Rather, he said, criminals may have figured out a way to cache the zone files on the Microsoft IP addresses and make them appear to be the authoritative results. He didn’t fully explain how this could be done, however, and Guilmette and Vaughn discounted the likelihood of this hypothesis.

Canadian Health&Care Mall is believed to be run by affiliates of a group known alternately as Bulker.biz, Eva Pharmacy, and Yambo Financials, according to Spamtrackers.eu, a site that monitors online scams. The operation, which researchers say also engages in child pornography, identity theft, and rampant spamming, specializes in maintaining websites and name servers that run on infected hosts without the owners’ knowledge, the website says. Members are known to infect Linux and Unix machines with custom-written binaries that act as proxy web hosts.

The benefits of running the website and DNS servers on infected machines are manifold. Not only does doing so drastically reduce the cost of the illegal operation, but the use of IP addresses from organizations with good reputations may make it easier for the scams to fly under the radar of spam filters and search-engine blacklists, Armin said.

Over the past few weeks, Guilmette said, the IP addresses of several other large organizations have also been observed to be hosting name servers for the same criminal outfit. The University of Houston, the government of India, and City University of New York are just three of the names on the list. They have since corrected the problems, so the DNS servers are no longer hitching a free ride on their systems, the researcher said.

In the past year, Microsoft has adopted a more active role in hunting down the very types of criminals Guilmette believes have hijacked Microsoft’s network to help operate the illegal pharmacy. Company researchers were instrumental in founding the Conficker Working Group, which actively infiltrates the massive botnet that was built by the Conficker worm in an attempt to disrupt it or shut it down.

The company recently succeeded in shutting down the Waledac botnet through a combination of technical and legal maneuvers.

The irony that Microsoft IP addresses are playing a crucial role in enabling such scams wasn’t lost on Baylor University’s Vaughn.

“I almost guarantee that there’s somebody up there at Microsoft, probably more than one, that are trying their darnedest to get rid of the Canadian pharmacy group,” he said. “It would be nice if they had that IP information available.” 

Wordpress have announced a new Offsite Redirect upgrade that will make it easier for people to move away from having their site hosted on Wordpress.com. You will now be able to easily create a redirect from yourblogname.wordpress.com (as well as all of your permalinks) to your new domain name on another host.

You can purchase the upgrade from the Wordpress Upgrades screen for $12. Then simply enter the new domain where you want your wordpress.com traffic to be redirected. Type the URL of the destination site into the blank field, and click the blue button that says Redirect to this URL.You can change the destination URL or suspend the forwarding whenever you wish.

Wordpress has enjoyed phenomenal success which does not appear to be abating anytime in the near future. Still with Windows Live Spaces transfering their clientbase to Wordpress in the coming year, this will make it easier for a less satisfied site owner to transfer their hosting to another webhost.

Company blog posts have announced that Aventure Host was acquired by Dediserve Limited.

 Aventure Host says that this merger will also allow them to implement significant infrastructure upgrades, further improve their support response times and provide better overall staff coverage than ever before.

Aventure Host expects that over the next few months they will replace their Shared and Reseller servers and upgraded the Managed Server platform. Aventure Host states that Reseller customers can expect big changes, significant performance increases, additional features such as Fantastico and the latest software and tools to work with. Managed Server customers can also move into our brand new cloud platform, providing on average a 200-300% performance increase alone.

Dediserve is a relative newcomer to the playground even by tech company standard being formed in early 2009. But the company founders are Stephen & Aidan McCarron, formerly a founder and Managing Director of Hosting365.com and General Manager of Register365. respectively. These companies are now part of Sungard and Namesco.

Aventure Media was created by Richard Kennedy, in 2001. The name created for the purpose A-Venture. This self funded, private company was created from a £90 bank balance with a £60/Month Celeron 1.3Ghz, 512MB RAM, 60GB Drive and 10Mbit server from Rackshack in Houston, Texas - which would later become the home of Aventure Mail. Aventure Mail started out as a free webmail provider, offering 5GB of diskspace per mailbox, 3GB more than the largest mailbox diskspace provider at the time, Google Mail.

Aventure Mail saw extensive, dramatic and overpowering growth and media coverage resulting in 35,000 applications per day on average. Weeks went past frantically adding additional storage and servers to try and cope with the demand, and more importantly, trying to keep the servers online which was virtually impossible under the demand.

From here Richard states, Aventure Host was born, a web hosting company focusing on shared, reseller and later Dedicated and Managed Servers. Over the following 2 years Aventure Host continued to grow, and after an extensive period of working at home, the first permanent staff member was hired, and Aventure Host moved into new offices.