MyHosting.com CEO and President Tony Yustein is passionate and opinionated about Windows web hosting. A former regional director for Microsoft, Yustein founded Toronto's SoftCom Technology in 1997, and has built it into a significant player in both web hosting and webmail. In an interview with Rich Miller, Yustein shares his views on Microsoft's approach to hosting and security, and the road ahead for webmail and spam.

Q. In April MyHosting.com introduced a "blended hosting environment" for shared hosting customers that includes both Windows and Linux accounts within a single plan. You'd previously been a Windows-only provider. What led you to add Linux hosting, and to adopt this particular approach?

A. Simply put, demand from our customers. Our experience with our customers showed us that it's not the operating system which drives their choices, but the availability of the applications. Most popular web applications are either in Perl or PHP and use MySQL. We had two options: either install Perl, PHP and MySQL on Windows platform, or offer our customers the native platform which these tools are developed on. This is the main reason we decided to offer a native Linux offering at no additional cost to our web hosting customers. So they get 2 for the price of 1, both Windows Server 2003 and Linux under the same account.

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July was a strong month for hosting companies in the Netherlands, four of whom experienced one-month growth of 23 percent or more, as measured by our Hosting Provider Switching Analysis. New sites accounted for nearly all the growth at NXS, Leaseweb and ProServe BV, while NETHolding/Garnier Projects gained 3k hostnames from yet another Dutch provider, BIT.

New.net, which offers domain names outside the ICANN top-level domain (TLD) system, had the largest one-month improvement, as measured by percent growth in hostnames. New.net domains (which include .shop, .xxx, .ltd and .mp3) aren't recognized by the centralized domain name system, but are accessible to customers of partner ISPs or those who have downloaded software enabling New.net domains. New.net claims that 174 million Internet users worldwide are able to access sites using its domains.

Top Hosting Providers By Percentage Growth, June 04 to July 04 Hosting Company June 04 July 04 Growth % Growth Primary Country New.net 47,944 78,878 30,934 64.5% United States ChinaNetCom 46,515 73,800 27,285 58.7% China NectarTech 25,372 38,176 12,804 50.5% United States Garnier Projects, NL 10,380 15,642 5,082 49.0% Netherlands Host Basket NV 11,757 16,169 4,412 37.5% Belgium NXS 17,616 22,245 4,629 26.3% Netherlands B-one.nu 11,757 16,169 8,441 25.9% Denmark Leasweb 41,490 51,372 9,882 23.8% Netherlands ProServe BV 40,038 49,517 9,479 23.8% Netherlands IKP/GTS 14,848 18,283 3,415 23.0% Poland

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In the heady early days of the Internet as a mass medium – the mid 1990s, say – one of the key acronyms was VOD: Video On Demand. The idea was that this wonderful new Information Superhighway (another phrase very much of that era) would mainly be used for downloading video content. It never happened – in part because people found using the hyperlinked Web a much richer experience, and also because the average bandwidth was simply insufficient.

But the VOD idea was not totally wrong. One of the drivers of Internet uptake among some users – the younger ones – was downloading music. The key breakthrough was the MP3 compression technology, since this allowed a complete song to be downloaded in a reasonable time even with the existing connection speeds.

MP3 is in fact a relatively old idea – a classic case of a solution in search of a problem. Although it has established itself as the de facto standard for music compression, things have moved on. For example, an updated version of MP3 called MP3Pro has been developed. A free player and encoder are available, but relatively few products support it.

Both MP3 and MP3Pro are proprietary standards. This has led to the creation of a completely free alternative, called Ogg Vorbis. Industry backing for the group behind Ogg Vorbis has come from the streaming company RealNetworks. The latter has awarded one of its Helix Community Grants to promote the format as part of its open source Helix platform.

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In the August 2004 survey we received responses from 53,341,867 sites, a gain of more than 1.2 million sites from July. The August increased marked the sixth time in the past year that the survey has shown a monthly gain exceeding 1 million sites. In the last 12 months, the Internet has grown by 10.2 million hostnames.

Market share remained steady among major web servers, with Apache making modest gains of 0.3 percent in hostnames and just under 0.2 percent in active sites. Microsoft's market share remains steady in the wake of a security event in June connected to Microsoft-IIS 5.0. As was noted last month, previous headline-grabbing worms and security events have had little direct impact on web server market share.

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - August 2004

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - August 2004

Top Developers

Developer	July 2004	Percent	August 2004	Percent	Change
Apache	35122146	67.37	36112220	67.70	0.33
Microsoft	11115660	21.32	11311414	21.21	-0.11
Sun	1656671	3.18	1675940	3.14	-0.04
Zeus	754721	1.45	744734	1.40	-0.05

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