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.

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.

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.

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.

A dynamically updating graph is available here.

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.

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.

"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.

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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 

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.

A dynamically updating graph is available here.

The site has been down since 4:20 a.m. Mountain Time (11:20 am GMT) , when it experienced "a large scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack," SCO said in a statement. The attack affected the company's web site, e-mail, intranet and customer support operations. SCO said it is working with its Internet Service Provider to restore the site to operation.

SCO is working with law enforcement officials and its ISP to gather information to help identify the origin of these attacks. The company said the DDoS, known as a syn attack, used "several thousand servers (that) were compromised by an unknown person to overload SCO's Web site with illegitimate Web site requests."

The SCO site was offline for more than three days in August, and cited a DDoS for that outage as well.

The Petco case is at least the fourth instance in which the FTC has pursued enforcement actions against companies whose security and privacy practices fall short of assurances made to consumers. "Consumers have every right to expect that a business that says it's keeping personal information secure is doing exactly that," said Howard Beales, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "It's not just good business, it's the law."

The purchase by a unit of Gores Technology Group allows Cable & Wireless to exit its unprofitable US hosting business, which includes assets bought from Exodus and Digital Island. The bankruptcy filing will allow the company to dramatically slash the cost of exiting leases of surplus data center facilities. Under Chapter 11, debtor companies can reject leases for unneeded properties, and renegotiate leases to reduce costs going forward. As part of the bankruptcy filing, Cable & Wireless will provide the US unit with $100 million in debtor in protection (DIP) financing. This type of loan must be repaid prior to pre-bankruptcy financial obligations.

Conventionally, the drop sites for these attacks are hosted in Asia, however the ip address in this mail is registered to Pacific Bell, and is most plausibly a Pacific Bell ADSL customer machine acting as a reverse proxy to the actual machine collecting the Nat West customer banking details.

Sites running on BSD operating systems occupied six out of the first seven places: Secure Dog Hosting runs OpenBSD, while New York Internet, INetU, USWest, IPowerweb, and Yahoo all use FreeBSD.

The Gentoo event comes just two weeks after a server compromise at The Debian Project was traced to an exploit in the Linux kernel that allowed local users running Userland software to upgrade their privileges to root.

"We have signed a letter of intent to acquire certain assets of Ventures Online as part of a transaction in which Ventures Online will move into our data center," said Lee Woodward, president of Data393. "The combined companies will be one of the few web hosting companies to own its data center and be profitable with positive cash flow. We are excited about the opportunity to join with Ventures Online and continue to grow its hosting business."

In the December 2003 survey we received responses from 45,980,112 sites.

Go Daddy gained 116K hostnames in November, more than doubling the growth of every other provider, according to our Hosting Provider Switching Analysis. German hosting giant 1&1 Internet was a distant second with a net gain of 54K hostnames, while Yahoo! was the only other provider to grow by more than 16K. That marks a slowdown from October, when the top four companies grew by at least 50K hostnames and the top 10 all gained 21K or more.

Go Daddy continued to set the pace for domain registrars, adding 151K new hostnames (compared to 61K for Network Solutions and 21K for eNom) while seeing about 40K expire. It was also a strong month for telecom hosting units, as Sprint, SBC Communications, Level 3 and Deutsche Telekom each gained more than 10K hostnames.

This month's hosting Hosting Provider Switching dataset shows 1&1's American unit gaining 7.3K new hostnames, with another 3K-plus hostnames switching from other providers. The largest single chunk came from Go Daddy (683 hostnames), followed by EV1Servers, Network Solutions, Register.com and eNom. All are domain registrars except for EV1Servers, whose net loss to 1&1 likely represents a shift in hostnames registered by EV!Servers resellers, rather than a flight of dedicated server customers to 1&1's shared hosting accounts.