Yahoo remains a reseller, buying its domains from Australian wholesaler Melbourne IT, which manages the domains. Yahoo isn't saying whether it obtained a better rate from Melbourne IT or has decided to accept less profit per domain to offer a more attractive price, but describes the new rate as a "marketing promotion" rather than a permanent change. For the moment, the price cut makes Yahoo's web hosting services slightly more affordable for its target small business customer. The web portal is already one of the top players in the small business hosting market with more than 587k hostnames.

One of the key factors driving new applications and wider adoption of the Internet has been the increasing bandwidth available to the public. For example, the World Wide Web started to take off among ordinary computer users in the mid-1990s once images were added to pages, and this only became feasible when dial-up modem speeds had increased sufficiently to allow graphics to appear after a few seconds' downloading.

Another instance of how access speed sparked a dramatic shift and rise in online use occurred at the end of the 1990s, when it became possible to download digital music files in a reasonable time, thanks to the rediscovery of an older compression technology, MP3 - strictly speaking MPEG Audio Layer-3. Taking advantage of this, millions of young people started to swap tracks from CDs through Napster, and a huge new class of users were drawn in to the world of the Internet.

Microsoft says the exploit affected servers running Windows 2000 and IIS 5.0 server that are not fully patched against a bevy of security holes detailed in April, known collectively as MS04-011. The initial version of the patch included bugs that crashed Win2K systems. Microsoft posted a web page confirming the IIS issue and referring system admins to a knowledgebase article detaling the workarounds and fixes available for affected Win2K machines.

Internet users wanting to avoid potentially vulnerable sites can use Netcraft's What's That Site Running feature to determine a site's operating system and web server version.

The method of infection appears similar to an exploit reported last year at Interland, in which a footer file inserts malicious code onto a web page, instructing the user's browser to download a trojan. In the new exploit, compromised Internet Information Servers (IIS) are seeding HTML files with footers containing Javascript code, which then uses a sophisticated new hacking technique to trick fully-patched versions of Internet Explorer into downloading a trojan - in this case, one known as "msits.exe" residing on a server in Russia.

With more than 3.9 million hostnames, Germany's 1&1 is the world's largest hosting specialist. The overwhelming majority of its sites are powered by Linux, with just 88,000 of 1&1's hostnames on Windows, almost all of them in its German operation. 1&1 showed its marketing muscle with its entrance into the U.S. market earlier this year, as it has quickly gained more than 147K hostnames and 78K active sites.