Nov 28, 2003 : The webhost industry: week review

📅 November 28, 2003 - News from the Web hosting industry slowed to a crawl during the latter half of this week, as business in the US was largely put on hold for thanksgiving. But there was plenty of activity early in the week, as several companies announced significant new appointments, several others released research data and a serious outage caused Internet users consternation in the UK.
Reports from midweek said that a failure in the fiber-optic cable system connecting the US with several European countries caused a disruption to Internet services in the United Kingdom. According to British Telecom, part of the group of carriers responsible for the TAT-14 cable system, said the problem had occurred between France and the Netherlands. According to reports, carriers and Internet exchanges in the UK experienced disruptions in service, likely as a result of the disturbance.
In a considerably less spontaneous occurrence, several companies announced the release of research data designed to shed light on the distribution of market share among some of the products most essential to the hosting business.
On Monday, Microsoft IIS server tools developer Port 80 Software announced the release of the latest data from its Fortune 1000 Web server survey, challenging the business value of data from established source Netcraft. Port 80, a Microsoft business partner, says its results, taken from the corporate Web sites of Fortune 1000 companies, show Microsoft IIS with a 53.8 percent market share, in contrast to Netcraft's more inclusive survey, which gives Apache the lead at 67.41 percent.
And on Wednesday, hardware maker Hewlett Packard said that the results of a recent study by researcher IDC had placed HP as the leader in worldwide server unit shipments, for the sixth consecutive quarter, with 30.6 percent of all servers shipped. The company said the figures showed that HP held the number one revenue share position in Linux, UNIX and Windows servers, increasing its ProLiant blade server shipments 168.3 percent year-over-year.
Though much of this week's news had widespread implications for the hosting business, there were also quite a few announcements regarding internal matters affecting companies involved in the Web hosting business this week, including several announcements regarding new appointments.
On Monday, colocation provider eXchange @ 200 Paul said that it had appointed David Miles as its director of sales, making him responsible for expanding the company's customer base and leading market strategy and product development. Miles previously served in various senior positions with Technology Integration Group, and held senior position at Digex and Verio.
Also on Monday, content delivery firm Mirror Image Internet said that it had appointed Frank Brilliant to the position of vice president of sales. Brilliant's responsibilities will include managing and building the sales team, and driving the overall growth of the company. Before joining Mirror Image, Brilliant was corporate vice president of sales, marketing and product development at Arch Wireless and president of sales at BizRate.com.
And on Tuesday, Web hosting firm Interland announced that it had elected John Patrick Crecine to its board of directors. Crecine is currently chief executive officer of B.P.T. Inc. and chief financial officer of Islandless Network LLC. He also previously served as president of the Georgia Institute of Technology and was senior vice president and provost at Carnegie Mellon University.
With the onset of the holiday season, the fast-paced activity the Web hosting business has seen in recent weeks may slow down. And, while the situation is undoubtedly only a temporary one, the change of pace should provide an altogether different perspective on the issues that impact the industry.