30
2008
IBM has big green push in India
IBM last week announced a major initiative to push their Project Big Green in India. The project which is already underway in their phase 1 stage is now going to be upgraded slightly and relaunched with even more emphasis toward targeting large customers in India and introducing new products and services which will have a deep focus on their energy effectiveness.
the new announcement comes over a year after IBM first launched this initiative in India in May 2007. So far the estimated costs of the initiative are roughly $1B which are meant to allow customers to increase their energy efficiency in their data centers.
Some of the products and services that IBM launched in their Project Big Green initiative include scalable modular data centers in India and the new initiative is meant to make the projects more green and Eco friendly. Broadgroup Consulting published a report in June 2008 which revealed the expansive growth of the data center market in India. Their estimates indicate that the growth will reach a $1.5 B industry in India by 2010.
So far it is estimated that IBM has built and managed over 300,000 sq feet of data center space in India and they believe that their Project Big Green initiative will allow them to continue to expand their market presence in India for data centers and managed hosting solutions.
29
2008
Layered Tech hires new CIO
Earlier last week IT infrastructure company Layered Technologies (Layered Tech) appointed to it’s board a new chief Information Officer (CIO); Terrence Bush. Layered Tech acquired FastServers.net back in April of this year. Terrence formerly held the CIO position at Fastservers.net, one of the world’s largest dedicated and managed web hosting service providers. Layered tech CEO Jack Finlayson released this statement regarding the addition of Bush to their management staff: “his technology expertise and leadership experience, combined with the other new additions to our management team,”
Bush started with Fastservers.net back in 2000 where he had several management positions before becoming CIO of Fastservers in 2003. Bush has also held management positions with companies such as AT&T, and Stockpoint which is now a division of CBS Marketwatch. From those positions Bush accumulated his knowledge of system administration and engineering management.
Said Bush about the appointment: “I am thrilled to lead the research and development team at Layered Tech, It’s an exciting time at the company, as we put our energies into managed hosting and virtualization services, as well as concentrate on servicing the enterprise market.”
27
2008
Georgia’s President’s site attacked
Last week it was reported that the web site of the President of Georgia went offline due to a denial of service attack. The attack lasted most of last weekend during which time the web site was completely unaccessible. The attack was carried out by a Botnet which is a series of network of computers which all send large amounts of requests to a particular web site on a particular server. In this case the server for the web site of the President of Georgia resides in the United States so the attack was against a co-location facility in the United States and not one in Georgia.
This is particular troubling for those countries who used to have close ties to the former Soviet Union and who have since formed their own countries. More and more denial of service attacks are coming out of the formerly communist Soviet Union and an alarming amount of them are directed at these former soviet states.
Shadow Server is an organization that monitors online security breaches. They are the group which reported on how the web site was taken out by a denial of service effort through a flood of traffic to the site. Georgia recently upset their former allay Russia by deciding to join NATO which favors western policies which today Russia is trying to stem, it is unknown if the attacks on the President of Georgia’s web site was due to this decision. Lithuania earlier this month experienced about 300 web site defacements which means they were hacked and had their content replaced, after a decision by the Lithuanian government to ban Soviet e4ar symbols and Soviet music.
24
2008
Fake site part of hostage rescue
Earlier this month a rescue mission in Columbia rescued former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, plus three American contractors and 11 Columbian police officers and soldiers. The hostages had been held by the notorious FARC rebels which call themselves Columbia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces.
It was discovered recently that the hostages were rescued by using a good bit of trickery against the FARC which included the creation of a phony humanitarian organization, supposedly out of Spain called the Mision Humanitaria Internacional. This group it was believed by FARC that they were from a leftist non government group.
Part of the rouse included a web site setup to indicate the legitimacy of this phony humanitarian group in an effort to gain the trust of the rebels so that they rescue mission could take place. The trick worked and the phony leftist humanitarian group along with their web site pulled off a coup and allowed the hostages to be released to the group where they safely got them away.
23
2008
Yahoo writes to shareholders re acquisition
Last week the board of Yahoo wrote to their shareholders regarding the upcoming proxy fight at their shareholders meeting in early August. Since january 2008 Microsoft has been positioning itself to try to purchase the internet giant Yahoo for it’s online advertising capability which will allow Yahoo to better match up against rival Google. Microsoft has propositioned Yahoo several times this year including offere in March and April to try to purchase all or even part of Yahoo.
Yahoo executives headed by CEO Jerry Yang flatly refused Microsoft’s bid claiming that the offer was too low. Jerry Yang came back as the CEO of Yahoo in late 2007 as the company was struggling against rivals Google and Microsoft.
Since the rejection of the Yahoo bid Microsoft has appealed to some of Yahoo’s largest shareholders indicating that they would create a proxy fight against Yahoo and try to oust the board including Jerry Yang. Some of those large investors include Carl Icahn who was in favor of the Microsoft deal saying earlier this year that it made sense and he is believed to be fully supportive of Microsoft’s efforts to take over Yahoo.
Last week Yahoo sent emails to all of their shareholders indicating that there would be no proxy fight and again indicating why it continued to reject the Microsoft bids. They also stated in their letter why Icahn’s approach would be unfavorable to Yahoo investors. In the email they write: “We believe the Icahn slate and agenda present significant risk to your investment in Yahoo!. We believe you cannot count on Microsoft to bail out Mr. Icahn’s misguided agenda…”
Yahoo goes on to further explain how they could divest themselves from some of their less profitable sources including their Asian division in an effort to pay back investors and to step the proxy battle. What ever happens it is going to be a very interesting and well publicized meeting for the Yahoo shareholders coming this early August.
22
2008
Foundry - Brocade deal for $3BB
It was announced on Tuesday that data center networking giant Brocade would purchase routing and traffic management provider the Foundry Networks for approximately $3 Billion. The deal as many are speculating is in an effort to help them compete with rivals like Cisco Systems.
The Foundry Networks was established in 1996, now with offices around the world an an approximate 1100 employees. Brocade in recent press releases claimed that the acquisition would combine: “two financially strong companies in complementary technology sectors and enable the combined entity to better address customer needs, as well as the evolution toward converged networks.”
Both The Foundry and Brocade compete against Cisco systems which is one of the largest providers of hardware and equipment for routing, networking and switches which enables the foundation and the growth of the internet today.
21
2008
SingleHop launches new web based interface
As many of us in the web hosting industry know SingleHop has become one of the new leaders in the managed and dedicated server industry. Based in Chicago Illinois , the company is the brain child of Zak Boca and Dan Ushman who were formerly the co-founders of Midphase and ANHosting, which was purchased last year by the United Kindom web hosting provider B24Hosting.
We recently took a tour of the web based interface with Dan who gave us a real good view of all the inns and outs of this new system and we were wowed. The entire web based system is built to support a reseller hosting organization so that large and small internet service providers and web hosting companies would be able to sell dedicated server, where they used to not be able to do so and the system would then allow them to have the server to automatically be setup in real time and allows those companies to manage their servers in real time. The web based interface is called LEAP, which runs along the lines of the SingleHop mascot which is a frog.
The system was developed by Luke Tworek and as he explained in an interview: “We designed LEAP to allow clients to manage servers through our interface, just as they can manipulate icons and windows on their desktop, which represents a drastic change from our competitor’s portals,”…”The most noticeable improvement between LEAP and competing systems is its Webtop, which brings a more modern look and feel to web-based server administration,” Ushman said. “For example, a user could visually choose a server from their virtual cabinet, view its bandwidth usage and status, or jump directly into an SSH session to work on it and then with the click of a button reboot the machine — never leaving a browser, never refreshing a page or waiting for the page to load and never having to download anything, such as a remote desktop client, or SSH.”
19
2008
Hosting Con 2008 is coming up
Wow are we excited to visit Hosting Con 2008, the web hosting industry’s leading web hosting conference. Hosting con made headlines again last week in their acquisition by iNet interactive.
Some of the sponsors of this year’s hosting con include the Tech Pad agency, an interactive marketing agency based in Phoenix AZ and whom used to own the web site properties websitehostdirectory.com as well as the cheaphostingdirectory.com, both of those properties had been acquired 2 years ago by iNet Interactive as well. The Tech Pad agency still retains thehostingnews.com which is one of the leading online news resources for news and information on the web hosting industry.
Other premier partners include Microsoft, LayeredTech which is an IT infrastructure company, basically a managed and dedicated server company with co-location facilities. Layered Tech is based in Plano Texas, Texas is considered one of the safest places in the Northern United States for Data centers.
Another of the more prominent web hosting news organizations who will be in attendance will be Ping Zine magazine, which was the first print magazine about the web hosting community in existence. Ping Zine is founded by Keith Duncan and is based in New Orleans Louisiana.
18
2008
SEO Hazards
One thing most people who own web sites want to do is see that their web site moves up in the rankings for the keywords that they want people to find their sites under. Many times especially e-commerce type sites or5 sites that make money from their web site traffic go to great extremes to try to get listed high in the natural traffic. There are many positive things that you can do to your web site to make it more search engine friendly and there are some obvious and not so obvious things you can do to your site to make the site not search engine friendly.
First as most of us know adding content is a great way to build a “trustworthy site” and the more content you add the deeper Google, MSN and Yahoo, plus the other major and minor search engines think of your site. But we issue a word of caution here as well because Google spiders are very good at sniffing out duplicate content so one thing you never want to do is to steal or copy content and then just paste it on to your web site as your own legitimate content, this is something that Google will not tolerate and they will penalize your site for doing this.
Another thing you want to make sure that you do not do is have alot of graphical images in the headers or alot of flash images in the headers of your web sites. The spiders used by Google and all of the other search engines do not do well navigating through images and if your headers are too full of images that the spiders get slowed down by this process they may not make it to all of the important relevant information on your web site. A good rule of thumb if you are going to add flash to your web site is that you do so from a link from your home page or from an interior page which will not slow down the spiders as they hit your pages.
Some important resources for learning more about what Google and most of the other search engines do and do not like in terms of how to build your web site can be found in the Google webmaster guidelines section of Google. From there they have great guidelines on what you want to do to really make your site SEO friendly.
17
2008
Fatcow Hosting
Fatcow hosting used to be one of the more popular web hosting companies in the internet around the end of the 1990’s. They emerged on the web hosting scene in 1998 and had a very strong brand for the time. Fatcow made it through the internet bubble days and has had fairly strong showing in terms of their web hosting client numbers for some time although they are not one of the more recognizable brands on the internet today.
Today Fatcow does not have any central location. Their main offices are in Los Angeles and their support personnel are in Arizona while their servers are in Boston, which is highly unusual for a company to be based on the west coast primarily to have their servers in Boston across the United states which begs the case to see if their company had been acquired at one point or if they started out as a reseller web hosting company
Today we tested their chat and phone support services. Their phones were answered in a relatively short time compared with most hosting companies and a little slower than a handful of really good support companies. The chat services were terrible, we first had to give our name and email as well as our ticket ID (if we had one) and our user name for our account which we did not provide. Then we selected the sales option and hit send. We received a long notice confirming someone would be with us shortly but it opened in the support department window, which was strange since we dialed in for sales. Long story short on the chat is that no one answered the chat within 2 minutes time but we were able to get on the phone with a woman in the Arizona location quickly which lead us to believe that they may have another outside office, possibly even a location outside North America who handle the chats.
