Mar 4, 2005 : The webhost industry: week review

📅 March 4, 2005 - The most widespread trend in this week's Web hosting industry news had to do with the adding to and expanding of services that took place at quite a few Web hosting companies. However, the week's most notable, if not the most plentiful, news involved several high-profile outages at hosting firms.
Early in the week, it was reported that a fire in Knoxville, Tennessee had severely damaged the operations of Web hosting provider Logic Networks, destroying roughly $500,000 worth of equipment and taking all the company's customers offline. The fire reportedly started on the first floor of the three-story building that housed the company's facility. Logic Networks said it had received offers for temporary space, and expected to have the service restored within 48 hours. The company's site still appeared to be offline Friday morning. Logic Networks hosts approximately 100 Web sites, and employs 13 people.
On Thursday, it was reported that UK-based colocation and Web hosting provider Redbus Interhouse had blamed a power outage for a service disruption that temporarily knocked some of the company's customers offline earlier in the week. Redbus said a problem with a generator test knocked out the power to the eighth and ninth floors of the company's Harbor Exchange facility in London, and caused the fire alarm to go off. Staff was evacuated form the building, while the two floors were shut down. Redbus says the problem was fixed within five minutes and redundant systems were restored within about 9 hours. Web sites were restored over the course of the day.
While the outages were certainly big news, this week's most common reports dealt with the addition of new services or expanding of old services.
On Monday, Web hosting provider The Planet announced that it had become the first Web hosting provider to offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. The company said the new platform would provide customers with better performance and security. Version 4 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was released in mid-February, designed with a focus on Linux kernel 2.6-based stability and maturity, a greater focus on meeting compliance demands and performance and stability for 32- and 64-bit workloads.
On Thursday, C I Host announced that it, too had begun offering the new Red Hat Linux platform to new dedicated server customers, while existing customers would be eligible for upgrades. C I Host said its upgrade was based on the company's desire to provide customers with the best solutions available.
Along with the installation of the new Linux platform, there were several announcements dealing with the launch of new services developed in-house by hosting companies.
On Tuesday, Web hosting provider Globix announced that it had launched its High Density Hosting service, designed to offer cost-effective blade server hosting. Globix says the service is the first of its kind in Europe. According to the company, the high-density blade environment requires an advanced capacity for cooling and power.
And on Wednesday, domain registration and Internet service provider Network Solutions announced that it had introduced three new Web hosting packages designed to provide a complete range of solutions for businesses and individuals. The packages start at $9.96 per month for an annual plan, and extend to advanced and e-commerce packages. The company says the new packages are based on customer requests, and have been more than a year in the making.
While there were plenty of new services launched this week, it was the outages that carried the most urgency. And the outage at Logic Networks may continue to make news, as the company works to bring its services back online.