UK-based colocation provider IXEurope has agreed to be acquired by U.S. data center specialist Equinix for £240.9 million ($482 million U.S.), the two companies said Thursday. The deal continues an aggressive global expansion for Equinix, which has data centers in major markets across the U.S. and Asia and is investing more than $500 million in new data centers in the United States.

IXEurope operates 14 data centers throughout Europe, including centers in London, Zurich, Frankfurt, Munich, Paris, Dusseldorf and Geneva. The company’s 450 customers - which include Rackspace, Attenda, Merrill Lynch, Avis Europe, Deutsche Boerse and Citigroup - should see little change in the near-term, as the entire executive team of IXEurope will continue with the company as Equinix UK, based in London. Equinix often invests in infrastructure upgrades for its acquired data centers, but said this won't be required for IXEurope's facilities.

WebSite Pros has acquired Web.com for $129 million in a deal that reflects the growing importance of marketing services in the small business hosting market. WebSitePros is a publicly-held Jacksonville, Fla. company specializing in web design and Internet marketing, and will pay the equivalent of $6.52 a share for Web.com, which is the successor to hosting pioneer Interland.

Web.com has long been the focus of buyout rumors amid active consolidation in the U.S. web hosting industry, as mid-market players seek to scale up to compete with the huge platforms of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Go Daddy. The combined company will have more than $117 million in annual revenue and 234,000 paid customers, the companies said in a press release. Web.com currently hosts 318K hostnames, while WebSite Pros hosts a modest 43K sites. By comparison, Microsoft and Google each gained more than 500K hostnames during May.

Microsoft has recently switched its main website, www.microsoft.com to Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft-IIS/7.0.

Although Windows Server 2008 is not yet released, Beta 3 is publicly available for early adopters to use. Internet Information Server 7 is already released, but will probably not see widespread use until Windows Server 2008 (formerly "Longhorn") is released, since it only runs on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista.

There are already around 2,600 sites running Windows Server 2008 on the Internet. Whilst some of the servers running Windows Server 2008 are at Microsoft itself, the majority are not, with developers and hosting companies taking advantage of Windows Server 2008's availability under a Go Live license which allows the beta to be used for testing or in a live environment without cost.

Windows Server 2008 is due to be released in the second half of 2007, although there has been media speculation - fueled by the 2008 name - that a release may be at the end of that period. Once it is released, it could be expected to take a long time for large numbers of sites to move over to the latest version; it took several years for the installed base of Windows Server 2003 to overtake Windows 2000, and there are still some 5 million sites running on Windows 2000 even today.

Rackspace and , New York Internet are the most reliable hosting companies for May 2007, followed closely by DataPipe, Verio, GoDaddy and Kattare.

With this month's results, Rackspace and New York Internet continue to reinforce their track records as industry leaders in reliability. Rackspace, a managed hosting provider based in San Antonio, Texas led our monthly reliability survey six times in 2006 and twice thus far in 2007. On May 23 the company announced $70 million in financing to support future hardware purchases and expansion of its data center network. New York Internet, a colocation specialist in New York's financial district, makes its 10th appearance atop the leaderboard since 2003.

iPowerWeb is ninth in the May rankings with no downtime, but experienced a major outage yesterday, which affected customer sites as well as the company homepage.

Three of the 10 most most reliable hosts run their web sites on Linux, two on Windows, three on FreeBSD and one on Solaris.

In the June 2007 survey we received responses from 122,000,635 sites, an increase of 3.97 million sites from the May survey. This month we have expanded our graph of server software publishers to include Google, primarily due to Blogger's move from Apache to GFE.

The change at Blogger which commenced last month is primarily responsible for the further decline of 2.2% in Apache's headline market share, and most of the larger 7.4% decline in active sites. Although not a server product like Apache or Microsoft-IIS, Google's services are an increasingly popular alternative platform for running a blog or simple web site (googlepages.com), or content that would have formly been hosted on a desktop or networked filesystem (e.g. spreadsheets.google.com).

Google debuts with a 3.99% share of the server market in hostnames, and a 6.59% share in active sites. Most of those sites were previously running on Apache.

This month's data also yields some of the strongest evidence yet of the power shift in web hosting, with search portals and domain registrars experiencing enormous growth while paid hosting specialists lag behind. Microsoft (+532K) and Google (+521K) each gain more than half a million sites, while Go Daddy (+455K) and Demand Media (+245K) continue to amass huge numbers of users on their hosting platforms. This trend, along with the growth of social networks and image/video hosting services, is prompting deals in the hosting industry as providers seek the scale and breadth of services to compete.