The investment firm GI Partners has purchased a controlling interest in The Planet and EV1Servers, two of the industry's largest dedicated hosting specialists, according to industry sources. The new owner has lengthy experience in the hosting and data center business.

The Planet and EV1Servers are the fourth and seventh-largest hosting providers in the world, according to Netcraft's Hosting Provider Switching Analysis, and the top two dedicated hosting specialists. Each experienced explosive growth during the past three years, driven by the surging popularity of dedicated servers. The Planet, which is headquartered in Dallas, hosts 896K active sites and 1.3 million hostnames, while Houston-based EV1Servers is home to 685K active sites and 1.2 million hostnames.

WorldCom.com has been taken offline, erasing the web's last traces of the brand that became a symbol of white collar crime and the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. The domains worldcom.com and worldcom.net have been taken out of the DNS database, meaning requests for those URLs return no response. The domains continue to be owned by MCI, Inc. the WorldCom successor that was bought earlier this year by Verizon for $7.6 billion.

When a company is acquired, its domain names are typically redirected to the web site of the acquiring company to capture potential customers searching for the old URL. Redirection services are freely provided by most registrars. But worldcom.com and worldcom.net have no A record listed in their DNS settings, suggesting the domains have been intentionally taken offline to "retire" the name.

The spam-fighting service Blue Security has been under siege by spammers and digital attackers in recent days. On Tuesday it wound up sharing its pain with a large chunk of the blogosphere. When Blue Security's web site was hit by a distributed denial of service attack attack (DDoS), the company temporarily repointed www.bluesecurity.com to a blog on Six Apart's TypePad service. The DDoS traffic appears to have followed www.bluesecurity.com to its new home, overwhelming Six Apart's network and knocking its TypePad and LiveJournal services offline for nearly eight hours.

LiveJournal hosts more than 1.8 million active blogs, according to its stats page, while TypePad is home to thousands more, including many prominent blogs. In a status advisory, Six Apart said a "sophisticated" DDoS struck at 4 p.m. Pacific time and continued to affect its services until past 11:30 p.m. "This has affected all of Six Apart's sites, causing intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com."

The DNS change for www.bluesecurity.com to an IP address on Six Apart's network (204.9.178.12) was first noted on the North American Network Operators Group mailing list Tuesday night. Internal links on bluesecurity.blogs.com indicate that the blog was configured to operate under the www.bluesecurity.com URL. Further confirmation came from other blogs, including The SunBelt Blog, which linked to a post published early Wednesday on bluesecurity.blogs.com and cited it as appearing on www.bluesecurity.com.

Rackspace is the most reliable hosting company site this month, followed by Datapipe and iNetU. Rackspace was perfect this month - it experienced no downtime, and not a single failed DNS request was seen from any of our monitoring points during April. This marked the first flawless month for a host since Datatpipe did it in January 2005, while German host Komplex had a faultless month in March 2004.

This month's top three hosts have consistently been among the strongest performers in our Most Reliable Hoster surve. Rackspace was the most reliable host six times in 2005, compared to four times for Datapipe. INetU made the top 10 six times last year, and was the most reliable host for the second half of 2003.

Three Linux sites are found in the top 10 this month, three on FreeBSD, two on Windows and two on Solaris.

A start-up headed by former MySpace.com chairman Richard Rosenblatt has bought domain registrar eNom, Inc., and is preparing a major push into domain-based advertising and commerce. Demand Media is backed by $120 million in funding from Wall Street investors and venture capital firms, and has been quietly acquiring a portfolio of more than 150,000 domains. Terms of the sale were not announced, as both firms are privately held.

The deal is likely to heighten investment interest in the domain name sector, which has been boosted by a trend trifecta - a surge in new domain registration, rising prices for resold domains and growing revenue from domain-based advertising.

eNom is the third-largest domain registrar with more than 6.4 million names under management. What is less widely known is that eNom is also the world's fifth-largest web hosting provider as measured by active sites - hostnames that contain content and thus are likely to be developed web sites generating hosting revenue each month. eNom hosts nearly 750,000 active sites, offering shared hosting plans priced at $7.80 a month.

The deal demonstrates that Wall Street and major corporation are watching the domain business closely in search of opportunities. "Media companies and advertising networks are now recognizing the central role a domain name plays in bringing users to Internet properties," said Paul Stahura, eNom founder and CEO, who will become president and COO of Demand Media.