Month in Review - April 2005 The month of April started off with Google acquiring Urchin Software Corporation which could indicate Google following Yahoo into the web hosting arena.
"We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users' experience and generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google. "This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products."
The Planet , with more than 502,000 active sites, experienced outages and performance problems early this month with a number of prominent sites hosted at The Planet were offline for 90 minutes or longer.
ICANN held the 22nd international public meeting in Mar del Plata, in Argentina on April 8th. ICANN's agenda for this meeting included DNS security, domain name hijacking, The World Summit on Information Society, Whois policy development and the deployment of internationalised domain names (IDNs).
Domain registrar and web hosting services provider GoDaddy.com took on the government after the National Telecommunications and Information Administration ("NTIA") decided that domain names bearing the .US extension could no longer be made private.
Endurance International Group Inc. purchased FatCow Web Hosting for an undisclosed amount. Endurance International Chief Executive Steve Sydness says his firm was drawn to FatCow because of the company's branding, its customer base and growth.
IBM and Network Appliance Inc. announced a partnership recently where IBM will resell a broad line of Network Appliance storage products in order to compete with EMC Corp. NetApp has agreed to use IBM's Tivoli software for handling storage management and will recommend IBM tape storage systems to their customers as a preferred product.
"Make no mistake, EMC is clearly in our sights," Andy Monshaw, general manager of IBM's storage division, told reporters in a conference call announcing the deal.
In some bizarrely futuristic tech news, PlayStation maker Sony Corp. has been granted a patent for beaming sensory information directly into the brain.
The technique could one day be used to create videogames in which you can smell, taste, and touch, or to help people who are blind or deaf. The U.S. patent, granted to Sony researcher Thomas Dawson, describes a technique for aiming ultrasonic pulses at specific areas of the brain to induce "sensory experiences" such as smells, sounds and images.
Web hosting applications for the new technology simply boggle the mind.
As reported by CNET, Comcast, the largest provider of broadband Internet access with 6.5 million customers, suffered a general outage Thursday evening. While their website initially posted a notice of the outage later it noted that maintenance had been completed.
Internet giant Yahoo today announced a new feature on Yahoo! Local that provides free web hosting for small businesses. Small businesses can quickly and easily establish an online presence and connect with the increasing number of consumers using the Internet to find comprehensive local products and services. The service is available in beta at http://local.yahoo.com/freesite.
"As more and more consumers rely on the Internet for information about their neighborhood --- from finding restaurants to plumbers to dry cleaners --- local businesses are realizing the value of reaching potential customers online," said Paul Levine, general manager, Yahoo! Local. "By providing small businesses with free Web sites, we are not only helping them leverage the Internet, but also adding depth and comprehensiveness to our local product for consumers."
Domain registrar and web hosting provider, GoDaddy.com, announced that it had surpassed Network Solutions in total domain names under management, to become the world's No. 1 ICANN-accredited domain name registrar for the .COM, NET, .ORG, .INFO, .BIZ, and .US domain extensions, according to the April 20 statistics reported by domain industry analyst Name Intelligence, Inc.
In a strange turn-about telecom giant and web hosting provider, MCI, announced it is increasing offerings on its service level agreements (SLAs) for its end-to-end Managed Network Services. While MCI had hosted Send-Safe a virus distributing spammer through a reseller up until recently the company has now decided to take a major step in fighting the kind of Internet abuse it once profited from.
To round out the month, PIPEX Communications acquired award-winning Donhost. Donhost has 92,000 end customers for hosting services and 120,000 domain names, which takes the total number of domain name registrations for the PIPEX group to over 1 million. Pipex (PXC.LN) acquired Donhost for (GBP) 5.9 million.
