Familiar names occupy the top positions in this month's survey of the most reliable hosting company sites, as Datapipe, Rackspace and Interland share the top slot for October. This is the sixth time this year that Rackspace has won or shared the top slot, while Datapipe (four times) and Interland (twice) have also made multiple appearances atop the list. There's one new face in this month's top 10, HostingZoom, a Houston-based mixed hosting company that hosts its company site on a server at The Planet.

Five Linux sites are found in the top 10 this month, along with two sites running on Windows 2000, two on Windows Server 2003 and one on FreeBSD. This continues the strong performance by hosters running their web sites on Linux. Of the 12 providers who have appeared atop the reliability survey for at least one month, six are hosted on Linux, while three use Windows 2000, two host on FreeBSD, and Windows Server 2003 and Solaris 8 are each used by one provider.

The hosting marketing wars are heating up, with leading providers rolling out dirt-cheap shared hosting accounts with massive allowances of disk space, bandwidth and e-mail. Hosting behemoths 1&1 Internet and Go Daddy are competing for small business customers, while also raising the bar for Microsoft, which will begin offering free web hosting and free domain names early next year.

The intense competition for small business customers is further commoditizing the shared hosting space, as plans with monthly fees under $5 now offer more resources than most prospects can imagine, much less use. That's good news for hosting customers, but a challenge for smaller hosting providers, who are pursuing new services and strategies to capture profitable niches.

The latest salvo came Wednesday from Go Daddy, which announced a tenfold increase in the disk space and bandwidth specs on its entry level shared hosting plans. For $3.95 a month, web site operators get 5 gigabytes of hard disk space and 250 gigabytes of data transfer. The company also lowered its domain registration fee to $6.95 per year, good through Nov. 30. "Customers won't find a better hosting price, product or service on the Internet, period," said Go Daddy President and Founder Bob Parsons.

When Go Daddy introduced its hosting plans in 2003, a $3.95 a month account featured 25 megabytes of disk space and 1 gigabyte of data transfer, levels equivalent to less than 0.5 percent of the new specs. A customer using all of the allotted 250 gigabytes of monthly data transfer would pay 1.6 cents per gigabyte. By comparison, many hosting providers charge $2.50 to $4.95 per gigabyte when a customer exceeds their monthly allotment.

Hackers are launching attacks on popular PHP-based blogging, wiki and content management program that failed to patch a serious security hole discovered in July. The attacks exploit flaws in the way PHP libraries handle XML-RPC commands, and appear to be targeting installations of WordPress and Drupal.

If left unpatched, an attacker could compromise a web server through vulnerable programs including WordPress, Drupal, PostNuke, Serendipity, phpAdsNew and phpWiki, among others. These projects all issued fixes six months ago, as did the authors of the affected PHP libraries.