Jan 24, 2003 : The webhost industry: week review

📅 January 24, 2003 - There seemed to be more than usual going on in the Web hosting industry this week, with a sizeable array of announcements concerning legal decision-making, research reports, new products and services, but most common, and probably most significant, were a number of announcements concerning acquisitions by companies operating in, or close to, the hosting business.
While news of mergers was most common, the news with the broadest implications came with a judge's ruling, mid-week, in a case involving Verizon and the Recording Industry Association of America.
It was reported on Thursday that a federal judge had ruled this week that Internet service providers must agree to requests by the music industry that they identify users who illegally download music. The judge upheld powers granted by the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which was created to help copyright holders protect their rights online. It allows record companies to force ISPs to turn over the name of a suspected pirate using a subpoena from a US District Court clerk's office, without a judge's order.
In addition to the legal decisions, however, were the many announcements of acquisitions made by companies operating in and around the Web hosting business.
On Monday, Web hosting company Inflow Inc. announced that it had acquired certain customers of managed infrastructure provider Interliant, which is currently engaged in reorganization under Chapter 11. Interliant recently announced that it would close its data center facility in Atlanta, Georgia, as part of its restructuring efforts. Inflow said it made sense to acquire the customer base in a the city, where Inflow already operates a data center facility.
On Tuesday, digital broadcasting company VitalStream announced that it had completed the acquisition of key assets of Epoch Networks Inc. and Epoch Hosting Inc., including a telco-grade data center, related networking equipment and agreements with over 1,000 customers. VitalStream says it will integrate the 14,000 square foot Los Angeles data center into its content delivery network, and will enhance the facility with its advanced broadcasting capabilities.
On Wednesday, ISP Everyone's Internet announced that it had made arrangements to buy the assets of industry trade publication Hosting Tech magazine, which only a week before had announced that it would shut down its operations. In April of 2002 Everyone's Internet purchased Web hosting community forum WebHostingTalk.com, which had over 12,000 registered members at the time.
And on Thursday, e-commerce outsourcing provider Digital River announced that it had acquired certain assets and liabilities of the electronic software distribution business belonging to Metatec International Inc. Digital River says it plans to use the platform to expand the software distribution and entitlement management capabilities of its e-commerce system. The company says the acquisition could open up new opportunities for Digital River among large enterprise software vendors, and provides an enhanced service to its existing customers.
Finally, in addition to legal matters and acquisitions, there was a substantial collection of Web hosting industry-related research released this week, including studies conducted by research organizations and others performed by the businesses themselves.
Early in the week, Internet research organization Netcraft released the results of its Netcraft Web Server Survey for January 2003, identifying some interesting trends in the Windows Web server space. For the first time in the survey's history, a Windows site was included in the list of the 50 sites operating longest without a reboot. Netcraft also reported some interesting results from its monitoring of Intel.com, which is currently running both IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.0 servers. Preliminary results seemed to indicate a consistently longer response time overall from the 6.0 servers compared to the 5.0 machines.
And on Wednesday, Microsoft Web server module developer Port80 Software announced the results of its own Web server survey, which focused on the Web sites of Fortune 1000 organizations. Port 80 says its results showed Microsoft with a solid lead in market share for that sector, an important footnote to the information provided by the Netcraft survey, which tends to indicate Apache as the Internet's leading Web server.
While much of this week's activity in the Web hosting industry was interesting, not much of it carried a significant impact for the industry at large. The impact of the Judge's ruling in the Verizon case, however, could result in a major increase in legal action against service providers by copyright holders in the coming months.