News for Women Entrepreneurs

The Center for Women's Business Research is calling for women business owners to participate in a newly developed online survey research panel.
Center Executive Director Sharon Hadary said the new research vehicle, W-Biz Insight, will enable data to be published in days instead of months.
The center also is hosting a national symposium in May in Washington where it will release a study on business owners who are women of color and the barriers they face to business growth.
"We've learned a lot over the last two years about why owning a business is different for women of color - Asian, African American, Latino, and other ethnicities - compared to their Caucasian peers," said Hadary.
In other women's business news, the Rockville Economic Development Inc's 5th annual Start Right women's business competition is underway. The deadline for women entrepreneurs to enter the contest is Monday, Jan. 28. The contest is open to 51 percent women-owned businesses that operate in Maryland, Virginia or Washington for up to two years. The first prize is $10,000 and will be announced in March.
REDI is offering a seminar on Tuesday, Jan. 22 to help new entrepreneurs write their business plans. It will be held from 9 a.m. to noon at the Rockville Regional Library. More information can be found on the REDI Web site.

Web Host AIT Launches Last Minute Enterprise Server Sale

Customers can save $100 off the monthly price of AIT’s Enterprise Hosting Solution.

December 24, 2007 (TopHosts News Brief) - Fayetteville, North Carolina-based Web hosting services provider AIT has launched a last minute sale for its Enterprise I Hosting Solution.
Customers can save $100 (USD) off the monthly price of the solution. The sale lasts until midnight on December 31. The offer applies to the 12-month prepaid plan for the Enterprise I server. The offer also includes bonus software. AIT is also cutting the price of its Business I and Reseller I hosting plans.
“For anyone that may have been thinking of moving to this solution, there’s no better time than now to act,” Bill Harrison, AIT’s Web Services Products Manager, said in a statement issued to the press. “This is such a deep discount that it cannot be used in conjunction with any other offers.”

The Utility Company releases Connected Office 3.0

The Utility Company, an Ottawa-based single-source provider of technology, communications and business management solutions for small and medium-sized businesses across North America, has announced the latest enhancements to its Connected Office Technology-as-a-Service Program.
Connected Office 3.0 offers a single-source solution that is focused on the five main areas of technology for business: IT (network, desktop, security and storage), business applications, Web/Internet, copier/printer and telecommunications.
"Those are the five major categories that small and medium businesses spend money on and what we do is bring in this technology-as-a-service model for all of those things in a single source provider model through our franchisees in the markets we have across North America," said Mark Scott, president and founder of The Utility Company.
Connected Office 3.0 is available now and is priced on a per-user, per-month fixed fee. New features include the 1-866-My-Utility "Per Minute" usage-based help desk that proactively support users with secure remote access to network and desktops for on-demand service and training.
"A big challenge with engaging the SMB market is 80 to 90 per cent of them don't understand what you are talking about at the basic level or are somewhat disillusioned with technology," said Scott.
Other new features of Connected Office 3.0 include VoIP service monitoring for quality of service of on-premise systems; printer/copier (MFP) service monitoring for service automation of network availability, device print status, toner, meter reads and error codes; and comprehensive security management that is designed to protect SMB's data and infrastructure focusing on the big three exploitation points perimeter, remote access and end-users.
In terms of communications, Connected Office 3.0 added a hosted VoIP service that delivers small businesses with the benefits of VoIP at a fraction of the cost and complexity and web content management that makes it easy to update web presence including design, hosting and maintenance.
New business management features include a web-based fully integrated sales, marketing and customer relationship management solution. Additionally there is also web-based accounting and reporting that is fully integrated with the CRM system.
Connected Office 3.0 also features a virtualization service to determine the lifecycle of current on-premise infrastructure and virtual service options. As well, version 3.0 offers network and security assessment, emergency support, onsite maintenance and end-user training.
Another new feature includes Utility Meter Reading that looks at how companies spend money in what area and how good they leverage technology.
"The result of [the Utility Meter Reading] is that the average business spends $360 per user per month on technology and utilizes a very small fraction of that because of inefficiency and that's because a lot of those different channels out there are offering stove pipes or certain pieces of the pie," said Scott.
He added the new features of Connected Office 3.0 were in response to listening to input from its 40 franchises across North America and from its customers.
"What we hear time and time again from customers is they want to move towards more of a converged or consolidated supply chain and are starting to deal with a single source provider like us to reduce complexity in its customer infrastructure onsite."
In addition, the Connected Office 3.0 menu of services include Classic (à la carte), Managed and Utility service level options along with the following service bundles such as Connected Office SOHO that manages desktop for small office/home office users; Connected Office Network that manages network devices; Connected Office web for web content management; Connected Office VoIP that offers hosted a Voice-over-IP solution; and Connected Office Business, which is a hosted CRM/accounting software service.
In addition to Connected Office 3.0, The Utility Company is also launching Beyond Managed Services 3.0 in early January. Beyond Managed Services 3.0 is a business model that leverages what the company calls "channel franchising" to aggregate the MSP market into the first national single-source technology provider in North America for SMBs. There are three levels to the program: BMS Entrepreneur is for technology sales and service professionals looking for a complete business-in-a-box to enter and prosper in managed services; BMS Affiliate is for value-added resellers (VAR) in IT and vertical channels that want an alternative to do-it-yourself managed service programs; and BMS Select is for managed service providers (MSP) that are looking to become a single-source provider and someday monetize their business.
As well, launching in the end of January is The Utility Company's Powered By Utility program that provides large resellers, telcos and retailers with the ability to re-sell its Connected Office portfolio as SKU-able managed services to their SMB customer base.

ENTREPRENEURS - To Protect and Server

Here’s a story Drew Kaplan tells to show the benefits of keeping a server at a separate, outside location. During his run for governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t keep the computer equipment handling his campaign website at his office because it wouldn’t have been able to handle the traffic. “He would have flooded the connection,” Kaplan said. Being a muscular former actor running for state office isn’t necessary to get the same service at ISWest, the Agoura Hills company Kaplan co-founded and now heads.Started in 1996 as an Internet service provider, the business-to-business co-location service took off for ISWest in recent years as more companies took the cost-effective route of outsourcing its information technology infrastructure. Why have internal IT departments with thousands of dollars of equipment and the accompanying thousands of dollars in electric bills when ISWest is willing to do it instead?The reasons businesses come to ISWest vary, including server and website hosting, and as backup for disaster recovery. Some publicly-traded companies are required by Sarbanes-Oxley (the federal accounting reform act of ’02) to keep their data at a neutral site. Serving its varied customer base resulted in the company being named on fastest growing private companies lists by the Business Journal, Inc. magazine and professional services firm Deloitte. Its own feedback also shows the company is on the right track.A survey done last year of customers asked if they would recommend ISWest to business associated resulted in a 93.6 percent saying they would. “We took that as satisfied customers,” Kaplan said. Toby Scott, a partner at Ventura County Computers, has recommended ISWest to a number of its clients.“We have a mutual customer we introduced to them that has three servers over there,” Scott said. Cabinets, cages, and 200 tons of A/C equipmentSleek black cabinets and cages fill the recently completed data center in Agoura Hills. That wasn’t always the case. The early years of the co-location service was putting hard drives side by side on a shelf bought at a Home Depot. Only later, as the company grew, did the cages and cabinets arrive and lend a professional appearance. With the high tech look and all the security in place, stepping into the ISWest data center is akin to being on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, said Jeff Sherman, the owner and manager of Arcadia Web Service. At his website design and hosting company in Ojai, the server is the biggest asset and Sherman cannot afford to have something go wrong with it. “It makes me feel comfortable that it’s not being stored in someone’s garage,” Sherman said. The new data center is made necessary by the existing center, also in Agoura Hills, filling to capacity. Its design takes advantage of every redundancy possible – two power sources, with two generators and two transformers.A biometric scan is necessary to enter the room, cooled by more than 200 tons of air conditioning equipment and protected by a fire detection system sniffing the air for combustible materials and automatically alerting the fire department when it detects something.While the server hosting drives the growth for ISWest, internet service still accounts for about half the business. Connectivity is provided through DSL lines, T1 lines, and bundled T1 lines that give faster speed without the use of fiber optics. ISWest becomes the conduit between the telecomm provider and the business customer using the service.There is a benefit to being both the ISP and the co-location, Kaplan said, as the connection between the customer and their servers becomes a direct private line that never hits the Internet.Growth through acquisitionA strategy of acquisition grew ISWest’s customer base for much of its existence. Between 1998 and 2004, the company bought out six other ISP in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. That strategy was the quickest way of adding new customers as the purchased companies were not profitable or had no market penetration.“We could benefit from the quick growth and make it profitable right away with the economies of scale,” Kaplan said. Both Sherman and Scott ended up as clients as a result of the buyouts.Sherman, in fact, had some reservations about ISWest taking over his former service provider until a face-to-face meeting with co-founder Robert Johnson calmed those fears. That personal service shown by Johnson continues to this day.“While they have grown bigger and bigger I have never felt like I was just another number to them,” Sherman said. When the switch over to ISWest took place for Scott his server was down for the time it took to drive the equipment from Ventura to Agoura Hills. “They had me up in no time at all,” Scott said.With consolidation reaching its peak, the company now shifts its strategy to using an inside sales force to bring in new customers. Previous tries at using sales people had never worked because the company lacked the right person to lead the sales team, Kaplan said. Several months ago, Joey Cary was hired as the new vice president of sales and marketing to build the sales force. Cary’s experience and track record make him the right person to tackle that job, Kaplan said. Solidifying an internal sales force will help meet Kaplan’s goal of making ISWest into a $50 million company with more data centers serving its customers. Getting there will likely result in more recognition as a fast growing company. The growth the company has already seen, however, has never been unmanageable.Kaplan credits that to the methodology of the business decision process that has the management team staying ahead of the growth.By adding people and equipment ahead of time the future workload can more easily be absorbed. “The worst thing is to have an unhappy customer because we can’t handle what we’ve got,” Kaplan said.

Okay data center

We have a web hosting company in the San Francisco bay area. We used XO communications because their sales person was professional and provided a very good deal at the time. This was nearly 4 years ago.We were treated very nicely. The data center folks were definitely courteous, professional and provided the service as expected. We had initial routing issues when setting up but it was resolved within the same day. We had a committed connection of 10 Mbps with a 42U cabinet with 20 AMP power circuit. Everything ran as expected and we were happy for the last 3.5 years. However, all is well, does not end well. In the last 6 months, we have had to fight XO on nearly everything. XO initially quoted us $$$$ for the colo fees. This contract should not have been open-ended and the prices should have remained the same. However, due to their lack of understanding power consumption, they misquoted us and we were forced to pay $$$ in addition to our colo fees. This happened in July. So, we complied and began to pay the new fees, despite the fact that we had agreed to a lower fee upon contract agreement. I asked them where I signed the dotted line (me being in charge of this) that would allow them to increase the fees without our agreement. They could not answer; in addition, I did not sign anything to that degree. I left that one go...SeptemberWe requested remote hands reboot of a server with the label SERVER-L23. The customer service rep on the phone evidently heard us incorrectly and did not confirm the server hostname. This caused the data center technician to not reboot the server for 2 hours. While we should have been on top of this, we remained oblivious to the fact that they hadn't rebooted the server, thus it remained down for duration of 2 hours. When we confronted the technician and asked her (Monica) to explain why she did not follow-up, she replied with: "I want to let you know that I couldn't find the server with that label, and I'm the only one in the data center right now"Okay, so I can understand why she couldn't find the server hostname despite the fact that: A. ALL servers are labeled clearly with a label maker on the front and backB. That was the ONLY server name that had the letter "L" and number "23"But what I don't understand is why in the world, an entire data center is using one technician, and one that's not very competent...I asked their manager of the data center to explain why this happened. Oh wait, their data center manager in Fremont, ca is actually in Irvine, Ca. Unaware of what really happens in Fremont (200 miles away). I asked her for a credit on the downtime, but that fell on heavy ears.OctoberWe requested a power cycle of a host named SERVER-WVPS10. The customer service rep on the phone recorded SERVER-WETS10 and didn't confirm on the phone. I can understand that mistake. The data center technician took 1 hour to get to the server, and then rebooted the wrong server, named SERVER-W10. Now, I can understand if you're busy and can't get to the server seeing how they only have one person in the entire data center. What I don't understand is that there is no server named SERVER-WETS10 so why in the world would this person reboot SERVER-W10, when it wasn't even the right one to begin with. To that end, he rebooted a database server that caused replication to break, the cluster to break and the database locks to be defunct, all leading to data loss. Again, this is all despite the fact that: A. ALL servers are labeled clearly with a label maker on the front and backB. That was the ONLY server name that had the letter "WVPS"But I guess the number 10 caused the idiot to get confused...When I asked their manager why this happened, she just ignored my emails and calls. I asked for a credit on this incident and nothing happened. NovemberTheir entire data center goes dark for a whole hour. Our servers fail; we lose uptime for an entire hour and not to mention that we had to run a series of diags to fix broken server software, etc. When we asked them for credit, we were told that "the network was down for a minute". Umm... I just spoke to the Seagate admin regarding this and they got a credit for this. So what gives XO?DecemberTheir entire datacenter losses network and all cooling function. This causes the temp to rise close to 100 degrees. We had to shutdown all machine really quickly. A whole 2 hours later and we were back up again. 2 of our core virtual servers were defunct after boot up and it took us nearly 10 hours to recover, answer emails, phone calls and issues refunds for the outage. We also lost close to 10 well paying customers in the duration.They finally admitted to their fault and gave us credit for this one. Suffice to say, we have terminated our contract with them and are in the middle of moving away. They're currently trying to get us to pay $$$$ for the past invoices but we refuse on the counts of incidents above. So, if you want to spare yourself from the headache and agony of dealing with this sort of issue, please don't sign-up with XO.On a final note, when we spoke with our sales person, he mentioned that we were a profitable customer. Yet despite our numerous efforts to get them to realize that they were going to lose a “profitable” customer, they chose to ignore our emails, phone calls and complaints. I guess that’s the XO business model.

Web Host HostICan Upgrades VPS Plans

The Web host's VPS-Rage hosting plan, which runs cPanel/WHM, will expand from 30GB of hard disk space to 45GB.
Meanwhile, the VPS-Extreme plan will increase from 60GB to 90GB, which HostICan says will make it one of the largest VPS plans on the market.
"While shared hosting services have been upgrading their hosting plans, sometimes with extravagant claims that cannot be supported, the VPS market has been quite stagnant in its approach to value," says Denis Motova, affiliate and operations manager for HostICan. "With our upgraded plans, our new customers can enjoy more memory and hard drive storage, while paying less for both."

Hostway powers Verizon web hosting service for SMBs

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Carlyle part of team buying Spanish Web hosting firm

The Carlyle Group and another private equity firm have reached an agreement to acquire Arsys, a Spanish provider of Web hosting and domain registration services, for about $230 million.
D.C.-based Carlyle, a private equity firm with more than $75 billion under management, and Madrid, Spain-based Mercapital will equally invest to buy majority ownership in Logroño, Spain-based Arsys. The founders of Arsys will retain a minority stake in the company.
The transaction is subject to regulatory approval, Carlyle said in a statement.
Arsys has more than 550,000 domains registered, 170,000 clients and 250 employees.
Fernando Chueca, an associate director with Carlyle, said in the firm's statement that Arsys "has huge potential" and is in an "exciting sector."

Web Hosting Q and A: Five Questions With FastNext

TH: What challenges did you face entering the market in 2006 and how successful has FastNext been in overcoming them?
SR: Back in 2006, the Web hosting market was very competitive and competitors came to market almost daily it seemed. But providing quality services is not enough when no one knows your company as yet. So our challenge was to distinguish our services from the hosting giants and other well-known hosts.
We entered the marked as a “true multidomain” hosting provider. We designed MultiManager™ control panel to create full-featured domains. We developed customer-oriented reseller offerings. We implemented new technologies and served clients 25 hours a day. And it works! We’ve got pretty good customer feedback and were recommended as a reliable provider in various forum and chat reviews. Not bad results since 2006.
TH: Tell us about major victories or milestones the company has achieved so far and what accomplishments/goals you have in mind for 2008.
SR: We are about to extend the product portfolio and offer our clients Web design services. Our existing customers often ask for help with design and “Webmastering”. By the way, we started providing dedicated server hosting also by customers’ requests.
As for the goals for 2008, we’ll keep infrastructure development in mind. We’d like to scale up customer services and provide multi-language customer support. We’ll keep on improving business development and services…for this the sky’s the limit!
TH: You’ve spoken about the benefits of clustered hosting. How successful has FastNext been in making customers aware of the value in these services and how is customer adoption so far? Is this a growth area for the company?
SR: You know, Cliff, we always do our best to provide most progressive solutions to our customers. Money and investments dictate our plans at times. But online projects are treated more seriously now than it was in the ’90s. We just offered clustered hosting as an option and it’s getting traction. Our Web pages describe what clustered hosting is and what it’s needed for. If someone needs extra information, our support administrators, customer service and community forums are available round-the-clock.
TH: FastNext’s EasyStart Reseller program was recently introduced. How pleased are you with the market reaction so far? What other programs are in development?
SR: This program was developed to help those people, who would like to start hosting, but don’t know what to begin with. Our EasyStart plan allows one to create and host unlimited domains for only $3.95 a month. It has cPanel and WHM access with Fantastico and RVSkin plus dozens of other awesome features. This package set resellers’ minds free, because they don’t need to stew how to get high-end servers and suitable software. We just make the start easy!
Besides reseller hosting we provide dedicated server hosting as well, as I mentioned previously. So our new programs will address this product group. For instance, our gaming server offerings are coming soon.
TH: FastNext has an excellent backup system in place for its client base. Are customers scrutinizing this service more these days in light of certain natural disasters and security breaches? Would you be considering an online backup service offering in the future based on strong customer response to backups in general?

Web Hosting Provider Infrenion Networks Announces BoonEx-Dolphin 6.0 on Shared and Reseller Servers

December 14, 2007 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Web hosting provider Infrenion Networks(http://www.infrenion.com/) has announced the inclusion of BoonEx-Dolphin 6.0 on its shared and reseller servers, it was reported recently. The company, who specializes in providing FFmpeg (sometimes knows as “YouTube Clone”) services, suggests the Dolphin web community script is a “universal software package that allows one to build any kind of online community”. According to the company, Boonex Dolphin Ver 6.0 provides functionalities similar to YouTube, MySpace, Odeo, Flickr, Match and Facebook. It is fully customizable and as an Open Source solution, it is free, although there is a charge if links to the solution developers’ website are to be removed. Support for PHPmotion, Clipshare, Socialmedia, and Rayzz is also available through the company.Infrenion Networks offers a range of web hosting services including shared web hosting, reseller hosting, domain name registration, SSL certificates, and FFmpeg hosting. The company has servers hosted in the United States and the United Kingdom.

IX Web Hosting Launches New Offerings

December 12, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web hosting provider IX Web Hosting (ixwebhosting.com), a subsidiary of Ecommerce Corp. (ecommerce.com), announced on Wednesday that is has expanded its Marketing Center with some new offers.

After launching $486 worth of free marketing in the form of ad coupons and a SitePal offering in the past, IX Web Hosting is now providing a free ringtone offer from Jamster as well as a free one-year subscription of Practical Ecommerce Magazine. The IX Marketing Center currently hosts several other services including a 250 business card offering from VistaPrint as well as other free website magazine offers.
"Our aim in offering these services is to allow our customers and visitors to have the seamless all-in-one experience for their online needs," says Jack Death, executive vice president of IX Web Hosting. "Whether it's knowledge they seek, or just a fun time, we have them all in our Marketing Center."
Ecommerce Corp. recently licensed the CM4all WebsiteCreator Business Edition to integrate into IX Web Hosting and its other subsequent Web hosting brand, Host Excellence.

Internal Combustion Web Hosting Model

HostedToday recently announced it had acquired TheGreatHostingCompany. I tracked down HostedToday owner Rodney Ringler, or was it the owner of RoundBerry? Or the person who owns HostChart.com? All the same Mr. Ringler. He is an unabashed self promoter, nothing wrong with that.Rodney confirmed one of my hosting theories, the internal combustion model. He has several brands, all competing with each other, all about the same price point, all answered by the same customer service staff. Sounds synergistic.Combined Ringler’s four hosting brands serve about 10,000 accounts, the recent acquisition of TheGreatHosting Company added about 200 accounts. But it was for a friend and it got him a press release.With internal combustion you spread your bets with several brands, if a potential customer does not like brand "A" maybe they will like brand "B". Same type servers, same data center, same staff but different skins. Many web host firms do this.As I have told other hosting firms, he should add some high-octane to the mix. Why have your top price at $24.95 as the RoundBerry shared Corporate… when your new brand “OpiumHost” (I made that up) can have basic corporate “red line” hosting for $49.95 – and expanded shared hosting plans up to $185.00. Many buyers like to pay more, it is obviously better. Same type servers, same data center, same staff but different skin. Yes much higher margins.Not only do you make more money, when you go to sell your conglomerate you have pushed up your average rate. Higher average rates will command a higher price and make your firm easier to sell.

Web Hosting Provider DiscountASP.NET Integrates Microsoft CardSpace with ASP.NET Control Panel

December 8, 2007 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Web hosting provider DiscountASP.NET (http://www.discountasp.net) has integrated Microsoft CardSpace with their ASP.NET control panel, it was announced recently. The beta launch of Microsoft CardSpace integration enables customers with Internet Explorer 7 and CardSpace on their local computer to use personal Information Cards for password-free login to their hosting control panel. The move replaces traditional username and password authentication and helps users better manage their digital identities while shielding them “from various forms of identity attacks, such as phishing or brute force password attacks”. To access the function, DiscountASP.NET’s customers log into their hosting control panel and “bind” their InfoCard to their account using an Information Card Binding feature. “The Control Panel CardSpace integration serves two main purposes. First, especially with the recent introduction of .NET 3.5 hosting, we wanted to demonstrate the use of new .NET 3.x technology,” explained DiscountASP.NET’s VP Marketing, Mr. Takeshi Eto. “Second, we wanted to give our customers the opportunity to provide feedback on CardSpace during this early stage as Microsoft works toward delivering on their vision for an Identity Metasystem.”DiscountASP.NET is a Microsoft Windows-based shared hosting provider offering ASP.NET hosting and SQL database hosting. The company is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, and was one of the first hosts to launch ASP.NET 3.5 hosting, IIS7 beta hosting, and ASP.NET AJAX hosting.
More web hosting news for Saturday, December 08, 2007

Web Hosting Provider LeaseWeb Awarded Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Status

Web Hosting Provider SiteGround Offers Original Christmas Promotion

Web Hosting Provider WebFaction Upgrades Plans and Launches New Website

The Web Host Industry Week in Review

By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
December 7, 2007 -- (WEB HOST IDNUSTRY REVIEW) -- It's not quite that this week's Web hosting news was bereft of real stories. There were quite a few important announcements, in fact. But it is certainly a sign of the times that this week's news was dominated, volume-wise, by hosting providers announcing their holiday specials.

Probably more significantly, however, this week also saw UK Web hosting provider Fasthosts offering some explanation for last week's decision to change login passwords for some of its customers. The decision, a reaction to a previously reported security breach, had some customers puzzled and some upset. In its announcement, the company stood by the decision, saying it had to take care of the problem. Fasthosts also said it intends to reset the email passwords next week of customers who haven't done so.
But the great common thread in this week's was certainly the revealing of holiday offerings, with quite a few Web hosts seeming determined to position their products as possible gifts.
On Monday, Netfirms announced it is offering a holiday promotion for new customers. Through December 27, new customers that sign up for its Business Plan will receive $60 off a yearly subscription. The plan includes 300GB disk space and 3,000GB of bandwidth, 1,000 email accounts, five domain names and the ability to host unlimited websites on one account.
On Wednesday, hosting provider SuperbHosting announced it, too, had launched a holiday promotion. Customers who sign up for a hosting package between December 1 and 21 will be eligible to win a Nintendo Wii game system, which the company says was the must-have gift for 2006 and one of the most sought after gadgets in 2007.
In its own effort to create a holiday offering, SiteGround announced that it would again distribute gift certificates to customers, a promotion the company says was quite successful last year. Each gift certificate is worth a $20 discount on the company's hosting services. While some customers are giving the certificates to friends, says the company, others are giving them away on their Web sites.
On Thursday, HostMySite announced that it would offer a similar holiday promotion, giving customers who purchase an annual hosting plan a gift card from a popular online retailer, ranging in value from $10 to $25, depending on the plan. The company says it also extended its ?Double Your Processing Power? promotion from November.
And on Thursday again, FastNext announced that it is running a holiday promotion for new and existing customers until January 7. The company is giving away six months of free hosting to any customer who signs up for a shared hosting plan and one month free hosting for anyone who signs up for its reseller package. The company is providing existing customers and resellers with new software.
While it's never been 100 percent clear that there exists a strong base of people who consider Web hosting an excellent Christmas gift, it's certainly an acceptable excuse for many hosting companies to run promotions. And the volume of companies that do so would seem to suggest that it's at least somewhat successful.

Web Hosting Providers Let Security Sag

Web hosting providers that can't keep DNS servers clean are exposing low-budget government Web sites to malware.

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Riddle: What do the city of Plainville, Kan., and the Transportation Authority of Marin County, Calif., have in common?
Answer: a Web hosting provider that can't seem to keep its DNS servers clean.
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Both .gov domains in the past few months have seen their sites seeded with redirects to malicious servers in other countries that have pushed pornography, malware, Viagra ads and the like to site visitors.
TAM and Plainville are, in fact, two examples of what security researchers are calling an epidemic of sites being compromised through their hosting providers and injected with malicious Web attacker paths that lead to tool kits such as Icepack, Neosploit and Web Attacker. These malcode tool kits serve up anywhere from five to a dozen or more exploits that latch on to site visitors' machines through their browsers to infest the systems with malware.
Plainville and TAM have more than their victim status in common. On the face of it the two had separate hosting providers—StartLogic and IPowerWeb, respectively—but those two are in fact all but the same company, both headquartered at the same Phoenix address and both sharing the same customer contact listing.
IPowerWeb/StartLogic hadn't provided input by the time this story posted. Their track records paint a colorful portrait, however: The Better Business Bureau has processed 191 complaints about IPowerWeb in the last three years. StartLogic is not only rated as an "unsatisfactory" business at BBB but also has its own hate site, StartLogicSucks.com, which ranks third in a Google search on "StartLogic."
Not all site poisonings can be blamed on ISPs. Security problems arising from collaborative software such as wikis are the customer's fault, as are those associated with poorly written ASP code, sloppy PHP work and SQL hacks.
Read more here about the problems ISP sloppiness has caused for governement sites.
So it's not always the ISP's fault when a site gets seeded with garbage. Then too, there are plenty of ISPs that respond promptly when customers' security staffers report that their sites have been hijacked.
Judging by Morgan Bailey's experience, IPowerWeb is not one of those.

On Nov. 19, Bailey, an information security analyst for the Enterprise Security Office for the state of Kansas, noticed a number of discrepancies in the DNS registrar information for some sites pertaining to the city of Plainville, Kan. If he queried the DNS server to find out what company was hosting the Plainville.ks.gov domain name, it delivered one set of information. If he tweaked the host name to query about Plainville-kansas-gov, he received the correct DNS information. If he queried 7.t.city-of-plainville.ks.gov, he got servers located in Moldavia, or Serbia, or Estonia. The sites were redirecting to pages hosting malware
This was not the customer's fault. In fact, the city of Plainville didn't even have a site. The city had registered a domain name, but it had never gone live with a site and didn't have an IP address for its domain name. Everything that was being served on the pages was residing within IPowerWeb's servers, which had been infiltrated by attackers.
Because IPowerWeb's servers were vulnerable, criminals were able to register false DNS information, including different site names under the city of Plainville's domain name. Bailey's research turned up other sites with the same problem, also being hosted at IPowerWeb, including at least two other government sites: csm.ca.gov and Bridger-mt.gov.
Obviously, IPowerWeb had a problem. Getting it fixed would be an uphill battle, however, given the lack of human contact available.
Bailey found he had to send repeated e-mails to IPowerWeb's abuse e-mail contact—a frustrating exercise, given that the contact information was hidden and could only be retrieved via Google searches for cached information that had been removed from the site. When the ISP finally responded, it initially tried to brush him off by laying the blame back at the customer's feet.
"I sent them several e-mails," Bailey told eWEEK. "They returned [my e-mail] once saying it wasn't their fault, when it clearly was. I could trace everything back to their DNS servers."
Imagine the frustration of squeezing an ISP's site in an effort to find a responsive human to deal with a site that's been seeded with malware, with more and more innocent citizens potentially suffering drive-by malcode downloads as the clock ticks. Imagine that same frustration if the news has gotten out to security researchers, been blogged about, featured in news headlines, and resulted in the GSA pulling the plug on an entire state's domain, as happened in the case of California with TAM in October.

DiscountASP.NET Integrates Microsoft CardSpace with ASP.NET Web Hosting Control Panel

Pasadena, CA (PRWEB) December 4, 2007 -- DiscountASP.NET, a leader in .NET Hosting innovation, announces today the beta launch of Microsoft CardSpace integration into their ASP.NET web hosting control panel. Now, in addition to the traditional username and password login access, customers with Internet Explorer 7 and CardSpace on their local computer can use personal Information Cards for password-free login to their hosting control panel.
Microsoft introduced Windows CardSpace with the .NET Framework 3.0 release. CardSpace replaces the traditional username and password authentication with tools that help users better manage their digital identities while shielding them from various forms of identity attacks, such as phishing or brute force password attacks. Users can maintain a set of personal digital identities in the form of visual Information Cards, which can be self-issued or issued by an identity provider.
"The Control Panel CardSpace integration serves two main purposes. First, especially with the recent introduction of .NET 3.5 hosting, we wanted to demonstrate the use of new .NET 3.x technology," said Takeshi Eto, VP Marketing at DiscountASP.NET. "Second, we wanted to give our customers the opportunity to provide feedback on CardSpace during this early stage as Microsoft works toward delivering on their vision for an Identity Metasystem."
To use the CardSpace login option, users must first log into their hosting control panel and bind their InfoCard to their account using a newly launched Information Card Binding feature. After associating their InfoCard to their account, users can use the CardSpace login.
About DiscountASP.NETDiscountASP.NET is an award-winning, innovative leader in Microsoft Windows-based shared hosting, focused on providing the best value in ASP.NET hosting and SQL database hosting. A Microsoft Gold Certified partner, DiscountASP.NET was one of the first hosts to launch ASP.NET 3.5 hosting, IIS7 beta hosting, and ASP.NET AJAX hosting. Through strong word-of-mouth and their commitment to ASP.NET and SQL technology, DiscountASP.NET has become the choice for affordable, enterprise-class, ASP.NET web hosting. For more information, visit: http://www.DiscountASP.NET