Jan 20, 2006 : The webhost industry: week review

📅 January 20, 2006 - The most significant trend in this week's Web hosting industry news was the announcement, by several Web hosting companies of new data center facilities, either by acquisition, construction or other means.


On Tuesday, telecommunications firm Dacom announced that its board members had approved the company's plan to take over the data center and Web hosting operations of subsidiary Korea Internet Data Center. KIDC was spun off from Dacom in April of 2000 and has roughly 1,500 corporate clients, producing an annual operating profit of approximately $20 million. The merger is scheduled to take place in March of 2006.

Also on Tuesday, SAP hosting specialist Freudenberg IT announced that it had opened a SAP-certified data center in Durham, North Carolina. The company says the new facility will operate under the same business and technical processes as its existing facilities. The new data center will enable Freudenberg to complete its objective of providing managed hosting on an international scale. The company currently operates facilities in Weinheim, Germany and Suzhou, China.

And on Wednesday, Web hosting provider Hostway announced plans to build a new data center in downtown Chicago. The facility will be inside the Boeing building, along the west bank of the Chicago River.  The first phase of construction will add 50,000 square feet to the company's footprint, and bring its facilities total to 14. The space Hostway will occupy was intended to support an SBC data center worth $200 million. Hostway will spend $10 million upgrading the facility, including its power and cooling.

Along with the new facilities springing up, Web host and registrar Go Daddy announced plans to open new offices in Washington DC.

Go Daddy said Wednesday that it had opened a new office for government relations, which will focus on addressing identity theft, spyware, ICANN and other technology topics. Martha Johston was named director of the office. The company says it is answering an obligation to "protect customers and represent their interests" by working with federal regulators and operating a source of knowledge in the capital.

Perhaps in an effort to balance out its more noble efforts in Washington, Go Daddy is also hard at work trying to get a racy ad approved for the Super Bowl broadcast by ABC censors. On Tuesday, Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons confirmed in a blog post that the company's 10th submission had been rejected by the network. Parsons says the company is working with ABC's standards and practices board to create an ad that the network will approve. Parsons also said the NFL plans to participate in the approval process.

While quite a few hosting companies were opening new facilities or courting controversy this week, several other hosts went about tinkering with their existing services.

On Tuesday, Web host Apollo Hosting announced it had enhanced its shared and VPS hosting plans, adding storage and transfer without raising prices. The company says it boosted storage and transfer for its Value and Business shared plans and its Standard and Advanced VPS plans by as much as three times.

And on Wednesday, Web host HostMySite announced that it had doubled the disk space and bandwidth provided with its shared Web hosting plans, also without a price increase. The company says it regularly evaluates its offerings to provide customers with the best services and pricing. Shared plans, says HostMySite, regardless of their current disk space and transfer capacity, will be doubled in resources.

While the three new data center facilities were undoubtedly the week's biggest news, the story most likely to invite continued attention over the coming week is Go Daddy's effort to have its ad approved for broadcast during the Super Bowl, as the game is only two weeks away.