Sprint has sold its DellHost unit to Vericenter, DellHost customers were told Monday. DellHost is home to 21K active sites and 34K hostnames, housed on about 1,500 IP addresses.

Vericenter, a Houston-based provider of managed hosting and colocation, had been in discussions with Sprint in recent months about purchasing as many as four of the telecom company's surplus data centers. The company was launched in 2000 and is headed by Roger Ramsey, previously the CEO of Allied Waste Industries and a co-founder of Browning-Ferris Industries. Vericenter expanded into the Dallas market in 2001, and acquired the assets of Solid Systems in mid-2002.

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Sun Microsystems is phasing out Cobalt, the line of Linux-based hosting appliances it purchased for $2 billion at the height of the Internet boom. Sun has set an end-of-life date of Feb. 19 for its last remaining Cobalt product, the RaQ 550 server, but will continue to provide support and security updates for three years. The decision to discontinue Cobalt, announced Sept. 1, presents a challenge for numerous hosting companies that filled their racks with the distinctive blue server appliances.

The number of sites on Cobalt has declined since August 2002, when it reached its peak of 3.1 million hostnames and 942K active sites. Our November hosting survey found Linux-Cobalt serving 871K hostnames and 527K active sites.

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An affiliate of MCHost has trademarked the term "private label reseller plans" and is contacting hosting providers who use the phrase in their marketing.

The application by SeekAmerica Networks, an affiliate of MCHost, was approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office on Dec. 9, and provides SeekAmerica with protection for its use of the words "private label" in connection with reseller hosting plans. The approval is technically for a service mark, which offers trademark protection for a service rather than a product.

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The Planet, one of the fastest-growing hosting providers, said Tuesday that it will offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux to its hosting customers. The Dallas provider expects to deploy about 12,000 Linux-based servers for its customer base in the first year of the agreement, according to chief operating officer Lance Crosby.

The Planet's commitment comes as hosting providers with large Red Hat Linux installations are assessing their options following licensing changes at Red Hat, which will discontinue support and security updates for Red Hat Linux in April 2004. The company hopes to steer business customers to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux product, which requires a $349 a year support subscription fee per licensed copy.

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The web site outages continue at SCO, which was unreachable for much of the weekend and is currently experiencing its fourth incident of extended downtime since it came under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack last Thursday.

A dynamically updating graph is available here.

EV1Servers has raised its prices for domains and SSL certificates, rolling back its cut-rate pricing of third-party offerings in a bid to acquire new hosting customers.

The dedicated server provider raised its domain name prices from $5 to $6.49 per year, and increased the cost of GeoTrust QuickSSL certificates from $25 to 49.95. It also hiked the price on ChainedSSL certificates from FreeSSL, which were introduced two weeks ago at $10 but now sell for $19.95. EV1Servers' dot-com domain pricing had been the lowest among major hosting providers, a distinction now held by 1&1 Internet at $5.99 a year. EV1Servers remains one of the lowest priced providers, but the move marks an uptick after months of declining prices for domains.

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Morris Miller joined Rackspace Managed Hosting in 1998 as chief operating officer, and now serves as Managing Director as well as co-chairman along with Graham Weston. Miller's primary focus is on corporate strategy, business development and M&A activity. He recently shared his thinking on key issue affecting Rackspace and the hosting industry.

Q: Rackspace considered going public prior to the downturn in the tech market. Is Rackspace still considering an IPO? What are the key factors for you in deciding whether and when to go public?

A: Fortunately, we are profitable and don't need to go public in order to fund our growth. Instead of focusing on an IPO, we concentrate on building our business for the long haul and creating the best hosting brand in the world. That said, an IPO is something we may consider in the future.

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A data-based analysis of SCO's web site by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) has found that this week's outage was related to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). Data collected by CAIDA's Network Telescope indicates that the sco.com site responded to more than 700 million attack packets over 32 hours, according to the analysis.

"Early in the attack, unknown perpetrators targeted SCO's web servers with a SYN flood of approximately 34,000 packets per second," CAIDA said. "Together www.sco.com and ftp.sco.com experienced a SYN flood of over 50,000 packets-per-second early Thursday morning."

SCO's statement attributing its outage to a DDoS attack had been widely questioned following a critique of the SCO press release at the Groklaw web site. CAIDA has previously used its technology to document Internet traffic events including the Code Red and Slammer worms.

A dynamically updating graph is available here.

A newly publicized bug in Internet Explorer shows that it is possible to craft html which causes Internet Explorer to display an incorrect URL in its address and status bars, making it easier for Internet fraudsters to trick web users into divulging critically important information such as their bank account details, while apparently interacting with a completely authentic URL.

The technique, which can be exploited by anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of HTML tags, is being demonstrated on several web sites. URLs with an '@' such as

http://www.visa.com:UserSession=2f6q9uuu88312264trzzz55884495&

usersoption=SecurityUpdate&StateLevel=GetFrom@61.252.126.191/verified_by_visa.html

[the text to the left of the @ in a url is taken to be a user account on the sitename which follows] are commonly used by fraudsters launching electronic mail fraud attacks on customers of banks and credit card companies.

In the example Explorer serves a page from the local server, while displaying the url as www.microsoft.com.

Microsoft's immediate response is to recommend that people only enter sensitive information on SSL sites, after checking the certificate details.

Mozilla [both Windows and Linux versions] displays the url correctly.