The U.S. unit of 1&1 Internet has beefed up its domain registration packages in a bid to compete head-to-head with Go Daddy and Yahoo for U.S. business customers, the company said today. 1&1's new plan is stilll priced at $5.99 for a one-year .com registration, but will now include private domain registration, a feature that is a paid add-on at other providers. The enhanced plans also include a 1 gigabyte e-mail account and a web starter page at no additional cost.

The moves by 1&1 will intensify the pitched battle to attract U.S. small business customers launching web sites. 1&1, which is based in Germany and hosts more than 5 million hostnames, says the new bundle will become its standard domain package, and is not a limited-time promotion. The move further blurs any remaining distinctions between hosting providers and domain registrars, as providers in both sectors diversify and use discounts and freebies to acquire customers. Private registrations could be the next battleground in the discount war.

Jumpline, France Telecom and Pair Networks share the top slot as as the most reliable hosting company sites this month.

Pair, a Pittsburgh, Pa. shared hosting company, is a regular in our survey, with numerous top 10 appearances in addition to being the most reliable provider in February 2005, July 2004 and February 2004. Jumpline was previously the most reliable provider in April 2004. The Columbus, Ohio provider specializes in virtual private servers. France Telecom made its first appearance in our reliability survey in May.

This month Linux, Windows and FreeBSD all have 3 sites each in the top 10, with one running Solaris.

The secret to one of the Internet's fastest-growing businesses can be found on a web server operated by Oversee.net, a little-known Los Angeles Internet marketing company. That single server houses more than 500K hostnames, all bearing web pages filled with pay-per-click advertisements from Google and Yahoo Search Marketing, and generating revenue for the owners of those domains.

Oversee operates Domain Sponsor, one of the largest players in the domain monetization industry. These services place pay-per-click ads on parked domains, optimize the sites to attract traffic, and split the resulting ad revenue with the domain owner. Their success has helped the domain resale market evolve from a speculative venture into an industry with a defined business model, which is now attracting considerable interest from venture capital firms.

Domain parking services use advanced analytics for ad matching and traffic building, and are efficient in their use of web hosting, packing thousands of domains on their servers. These operations have helped solidify the statistical leadership of open source hosting platforms, as nearly all are served by Apache web servers running on either Linux or FreeBSD.

EurID, the operator of the new .eu top-level domain (TLD), says registrars won't be allowed to sell .eu domains through resellers. In a statement on its web site, EurID says its agreement with the European Commission prohibits .eu sales by parties that haven't been approved by EurID. "This means that the offering of services as a 'reseller' ... is completely excluded," says the statement. While no firm date has been set, the launch of .eu domain sales is expected to begin in early 2006. Domain industry insiders say similar reseller bans are being considered for other upcoming TLDs, including the .xxx and .travel extensions.

Resellers are an important sales channel for many domain name registrars, who provide back-end management of the domains sold by partners. The reseller model is used by thousands of web hosting companies, allowing them to seamlessly sell domain names alongside their core hosting and e-mail offerings. Some registrars specialize in the reseller market, providing private-label domain management sites, which can be branded with the resellers' logo and marketing. One of the largest reseller networks is operated by eNom, which is among the registrars approved by EurID to sell .eu domains.

Domain registrar eNom has once again made a major landgrab of .info domains, registering 320,000 names in June, giving it the largest net gain in this month's Hosting Provider Switching Analysis with an increase of more than 287K hostnames.

There were several significant percentage gains in this month's analysis as well, including a large switching gain for Las Vegas hosting provider Powerpulse.cc/Colocation Gateway, which had more than 84K sites transfer from Rackspace. NR Software was also among the leaders for percentage gains with a net increase of 90.7K sites, driven by 133K new sites and a pickup of 2K hostnames from MCI.