Sep 10, 2004 : The webhost industry: week review

📅 September 10, 2004 - While there was plenty of interesting Web hosting news, even in this shortened week, the most prominent trend did not come from the Web hosting business itself, but from the market of products and services that surrounds Web hosting, as this week saw developments in the markets for domain registration, SSL security and hosting related software and hardware.
SSL security certificate specialist FreeSSL said on Tuesday that it would sell its 128-bit StarterSSL certificates for a promotional price of $19, making it the lowest-priced certificate on the market. The company said StarterSSL would be available for $19 per year, $33 for two years, $48 for three years, $62 for four years and $76 for five years.
Web hosting provider EV1Servers had earlier announced that it would begin offering a limited promotion of the same StarterSSL certificates for EV1 customers. The company said it would offer the certificates to EV1 customers for $9.95 per year, a 75 percent discount off the retail price (prior to FreeSSL's pricing change).
The cost-cutting and expansion of the SSL market is reminiscent of the evolution of another Web hosting ancillary product, domain name registration. And that market also saw some notable development this week.
On Thursday, domain registry operator VeriSign announced that it had officially implemented a "rapid updates" enhancement to its .com and .net domain name systems, speeding up the update process, and allowing users to change the addresses their domain names point to in near real time. The company says rapid updates will help domain registrants launch Web sites more quickly and experience greater continuity in service when switching hosting providers or modifying registrations. VeriSign's previous system updated DNS servers twice daily, and changes would often take hours or days to propagate.
Also on Thursday, domain registrars Dotster and NameSecure both announced that they would give away 25 .info domain registrations to each of their customers. The companies both said they would guarantee customers up to 25 free one-year .info domain registrations. Dotster says its promotion will run until September 15th, while NameSecure has not set a definite end for its promotion. NameSecure is also offering Web hosting and its WHOIS NamePrivacy service to customers.
While new strategies and policies emerged in the SSL and domain registration markets this week, several of the companies that offer software and hardware directly related to Web hosting announced new products this week.
On Tuesday, it was reported that Sun Microsystems is preparing to release an upgrade to its enterprise-level application server, with the Sun Java System Application Server Enterprise Edition 8, set to launch as a preview release in a few weeks. The product's official release date is set for some time in January. The upgrade reportedly includes improvement to management and administration features. Sun says its application server is gaining momentum, though analysts say the product is still behind JBoss and others.
Also on Tuesday, network hardware developer Redline Networks announced that it had released its 3G Cache, a third-generation caching software integrated with version 4.0 of the company's operating system, running on Redline's E|X series of application appliances, designed to maximize performance, flexibility, availability, security and scalability for Web-enabled data center environments.
And on Thursday, Positive Software Corporation announced that it had released version 2.4.1 of H-Sphere, its multi-server control panel for Web hosting automation. The new version includes 50 new features and enhancements, says the company, along with a number of bug fixes. The new features include spam and virus filtering, a SpamAssassin configuration manager, ColdFusion MX DSN support, SiteStudio 1.6 p1, separate queues for ticketing and updated Webmail.
This week's Web hosting news was most interesting for the developments in the businesses that cater to the Web hosting companies themselves. In trying to measure the health of a business, there is often no better measure than the growth and expansion of the services that cater to that business.

Reads: 1752 | Category: General | Source: TheWHIR : Web Host Industry Reviews
URL source: http://www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/wrap091004.cfm
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