The chart below shows that since March 2001 IP address counts have not increased significantly, while computers have broadly sustained an increasing trend, other than for the Code Red and Nimda dip in 2001. This primarily reflects increased use of HTTP 1.1 virtual hosting which can share an IP address. Since the survey started in 1999, IP addresses have not quite doubled, while computer numbers have more than quadrupled. Since March 2001 computer numbers have increased 84.3%, yet IP addresses only by 7.9%.

The methodology is described in the Hosting Provider Server Count.

The Nachi worm exploited a RPC DCOM hole, for which Microsoft issued a patch a month prior to the worm's release, which Diebold neglected to install on the infected machines. Last week Diebold announced that it will include Sygate Security Agent software with all its new ATMs and offer to install Sygate agents on its existing Windows-based ATMs.

• Graham Weston, Rackspace
  Graham is CEO of Rackspace, one of the companies to pioneer dedicated hosting.



• Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP
  Creator of PHP.



• Jim Gray, Microsoft Research
  1999 Turing Award winner, creator of the TerraServer and Skyserver websites, and manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Reseach Center.



• Andreas Gauger, 1&1
  CEO of 1&1, the world's largest hosting company with 3.4 Million hostnames and 1.8 Million active sites.



• Mark Cox, Red Hat
  Director of Security, Red Hat, and cofounder of the Apache and OpenSSL projects.

The stock sales end a lengthy period in which hosting and data center providers were frozen out of Wall Street following the collapse of the Internet and telecom bubbles. The disappointing IPO by Loudcloud was viewed by many as the last gasp of the dot-com boom. Bankruptcies of publicly-held companies like Global Crossing, WorldCom, Exodus Communications, PSINet and Metromedia Fiber only deepened investor disdain for telecom and hosting shares.

A table of the top Windows Server 2003 Hosters is provided as an excerpt from our Hosting Provider Server Count.

The survey shows over 3,700 Windows Server 2003 servers already deployed worldwide in hosting environments, growing from 250 in March of this year, with some 17,000 in self hosted environments.

The largest collection of hostnames on Windows 2003 is being run by eNom, a domain registrar based in Bellevue, near Microsoft's headquarters. However, it is interesting that the dedicated providers such as EV1Servers and ServerBeach appear to have sold more Win2003 machines than companies with a big installed base of Windows 2000 servers. In particular, EV1Servers has only been offering Windows as an option since August. EV1Servers and ServerBeach are growing at such a rate that it is not inconcievable that they could maintain the lead, even as the traditional Win2000 hosting companies migrate their customers over to the new operating system.

Hostway started the price-cutting in May when it lowered its domain prices to $6.95 a year, and in August EV1Servers began selling domains for just $5. Now the world's largest host, 1&1 Internet, is offering domains for $5.99 a year as it launches its US hosting service.

1&1 Internet registered 9,000 co.uk domains between Oct. 21 and Nov. 3 after setting prices at $3.35 a year (£1.99). EV1Servers experienced a similar surge, registering 10,000 domains in the first month of $5 pricing. "Our low cost registration service has not only benefited existing clients but also given us the opportunity to work with many new users," said Mario Rodriguez, EV1Servers' Customer Service Manager.

Smaller providers are also offering aggressive pricing - or none at all. Yesterday DotCanada began offering free domains to any hosting customers who commit to a 12-month plan, with no limit on the number of domains.

A table of the Hosting Providers who grew the fastest over the year September 2002 to October 2003 is provided as an excerpt from our latest Hosting Provider Server Count. Companies are included in the filter if they started September 2002 with more than 600 servers, and finished October 2003 with at least 1000, and grew at a rate of 66% or better, year on year. This removes hosters which can show a significant percentage increase by virtue of being small at the start of the period.

The merger ends the arms-length relationship the two companies sought to maintain after WorldCom acquired Digex parent Intermedia in early 2001, in which Digex remained an independent company although WorldCom owned the majority of Digex' shares. That allowed Digex to stay out of bankruptcy when WorldCom sought protection in July 2002. But the depth of the business ties between the companies left a cloud over Digex, which placed itself for sale late last year.

"I see (hosting prices) getting more competitive," said Parsons. "Hosting is getting to be a commodity. It truly is."

As European providers and domain registrars expand into the US hosting market, low-priced hosting plans are a potent tool to gain attention and market share. Go Daddy, the fastest-growing domain registrar with more than 3.6 million registrations, recently introduced shared hosting accounts ranging in price from $3.95 to $9.95.

"The biggest problem I see is that a lot of protocols we use were developed in the 1970s," said Hancock, the Chief Security Officer at Cable and Wireless. "The bottom line is that all those protocols need to be redone. Until we start improving those protocols, we'll continue to see problems."

Cable & Wireless plans to exit the US hosting market and has been trying to sell operations that include at least 12 data centers. C&W had no specific comment yesterday on reports that the company's US operations will shortly file Chapter 11, a possibility it acknowledged in June, saying it would "consider all options" for disposing of the assets it purchased from Exodus Communications and Digital Island.

Documents written by the British pioneer are being cited by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in urging US officials to invalidate a controversial patent which could cover key Web functionality, including the Internet Explorer web browser and several tags in the HTML standard.

The patent in question is held by the University of California and licensed to Eolas Technologies, which in August won a $521 million court judgment against Microsoft after a jury found that the Internet Explorer browser infringed the UC/Eolas patent.

Many businesses in the UK are receiving mails asking them to re-register their details with yellovvpages.com. Yellow Pages, operated by Yell, is one of the UK's main telephone and business directories. www.yellovvpages.com with two 'v's is not connected with Yell, or a US business called Yellow Pages.

In the November 2003 survey we received responses from 44,946,965 sites.

Apache has a significant percentage gain this month as register.com, a leading domain registrar with a domain parking system serving responses for over one million domains eliminated its Windows front end, and reverted to Linux and Apache which it ran previously. Barely weeks ago its largest rival, Network Solutions made a similar switch from Microsoft-IIS back to SunOne, nee Netscape-Enterprise, for its own domain parking system.

During 2001 and the first half of 2002 several companies hosting very large numbers of hostnames including Webjump, Namezero, Homestead, register.com and Network Solutions migrated to Microsoft-IIS. Subsequently these businesses have either failed, significantly changed their business model, or reverted to their previous platform, and Microsoft-IIS share is now in line with its long term pre-summer 2001 level of around 20%.

The massive 1&1 Internet AG continues to gain the largest number of hostnames (+151K), followed by GoDaddy (+93.5K), which launched a new shared hosting service in August, IP Exchange GmBH (+71.6K) and EV1Servers.Net (50.6K).

The tests were made available to the OpenSSL team, and three specific vulnerabilities were found. These could result in denial of service, or theoretically allow execution of arbitrary code, when OpenSSL is presented with a malformed client certificate. The fixes for these problems are available in the latest versions (0.9.6k and 0.9.7c).

Sites running on BSD operating systems occupied the first four places: Secure Dog Hosting runs OpenBSD, Pair Networks, INetU, and IPowerweb all use FreeBSD. The top placed European company site was Energis, who provide the connectivity for Netcraft's own web sites. None of the performance measurement points is on Energis' network.