April kicked of with Greenhorn Hosting celebrating the opening a letter... and with our stats showing a generous number of people actually put some valuable time into reading that item, it's a bit surprising we didn't get at least one comment or email... It's not true guys... Greenhorn Hosting was an April fools day joke! Honest!
There was plenty going on the rest of the month... Register.com got to grips with U.S. Baby Boomers' Internet habits and Hosted Solutions secured $4,950,000 from private investors - hmmm... what I could do with that sort of money... Concerto Networks announced a UK franchise in April and 'The Planet' decided on Penguin hardware. True to form, with telcoms getting in on our act, AT&T launched a web portal where small businesses can order web hosting alongside other products. April was also a month when MEDSEEK and Qwest offered advanced web hosting to hospitals and ThinkHost offered 'Green' email. On the lighter side, thanks to a web host a US teenager gave a million thanks and SWsoft, Microsoft, Dell and Dotster announced a contest.
April continued what has now become a tradition of packing plans with everything except the kitchen sink. However, it seems that the days of 'unlimited' usage are thankfully long gone!
Gearworx improved its shared hosting, WireNine Hosting added an RVSiteBuilder to its plans, and eBoundHost.com launched blogging. Host Color threw its hat in the ring with multi domain hosting, while ClubHouse offered a sitebuilder and a free domain and Centrica Hosting added blogging and upgraded to PHP5 . In addition, Verio rovided multisite capabilities in Japan, and Intermedia.NET launched free Microsoft Entourage for Mac. Other companies upgrading or offering new items included Host Color and iWeb Technologies .
April is obviously a good month for financials... Web.com held an annual shareholder meeting while Google submitted pretty good first quarter 2006 results, as did DSL.net. There were also a number of awards in the offing - Intermedia.NET got Microsoft gold, the chips were UP for web designer NuBlue, and hostirian won Red Hat hosting partner status. April was also a month of partnerships, with an accommodation services provider selecting Canada Web Hosting and CEC Systems announcing a partnership with CDGcommerce.
In the world of resellers, plenty of activity in April... Host Gator's top resellers averaged 49.5 sites it was announced, and Fasthosts relaunched their reseller program. In addition, ResellerClub reduced its web hosting prices. In the world of Open Source, Gearworx offered Ruby on Rails Hosting while GoDaddy.com announced its support for web sites built with Ruby on Rails. April was also a month of new hosts... Media72 launched a new web hosting arm of their multimedia design and development services, Tear2Hosting launched its own services, and a new web hosting provider emerged to assist churches and religious organizations. Down under Rochen launched hosting services in Australia.
Once again, a number of people were fighting the good fight against spam and malicious threats... SiteGround helped customers protect against internet fraud and AIT strengthened its free spam protection service. In addition, there were a number of imaginative promotions - Singaporean host 8 to Infinity extended its domain offer, and Zen Internet offered a Linux hosting trial for only 1 British pence.
Host activity at conferences in April was solid... CFDynamics sponsored the CFUNITED Conference and HostMySite.com announced its CEO will speak at IPSCON 2006. In addition, Web.com presented at the CIBC World Markets 2006 Media, Internet and Telecom Conference. Good news for webmasters -- a bit of decent affiliate activity in April... Centrica Hosting launched a "60%" affiliate program and Ubiquity Hosting offered a new program.
In the domains world, ResellerClub offered $1.49 ".info" domains, the '.eu' domains land rush turned into a 'fiasco' according to Bob Parsons. At the same time
STRATO offered 100,000 free '.EU' domains. Finally in April there was news of a key acquisition with OrderPro logistics announcing it would acquire a web hosting provider.
All in all another good month for web hosting!!!
