"We have signed a letter of intent to acquire certain assets of Ventures Online as part of a transaction in which Ventures Online will move into our data center," said Lee Woodward, president of Data393. "The combined companies will be one of the few web hosting companies to own its data center and be profitable with positive cash flow. We are excited about the opportunity to join with Ventures Online and continue to grow its hosting business."

Go Daddy gained 116K hostnames in November, more than doubling the growth of every other provider, according to our Hosting Provider Switching Analysis. German hosting giant 1&1 Internet was a distant second with a net gain of 54K hostnames, while Yahoo! was the only other provider to grow by more than 16K. That marks a slowdown from October, when the top four companies grew by at least 50K hostnames and the top 10 all gained 21K or more.

Go Daddy continued to set the pace for domain registrars, adding 151K new hostnames (compared to 61K for Network Solutions and 21K for eNom) while seeing about 40K expire. It was also a strong month for telecom hosting units, as Sprint, SBC Communications, Level 3 and Deutsche Telekom each gained more than 10K hostnames.

This month's hosting Hosting Provider Switching dataset shows 1&1's American unit gaining 7.3K new hostnames, with another 3K-plus hostnames switching from other providers. The largest single chunk came from Go Daddy (683 hostnames), followed by EV1Servers, Network Solutions, Register.com and eNom. All are domain registrars except for EV1Servers, whose net loss to 1&1 likely represents a shift in hostnames registered by EV!Servers resellers, rather than a flight of dedicated server customers to 1&1's shared hosting accounts.