Hostingplex acquired by Millenium Data
Millennium Data Systems announced it has acquired the assets of Toronto based managed hosting provider Hostingplex (www.hostingplex.com).
Hostingplex is the third acquisition of Millennium this year.
”We believe that Hostingplex is a great fit for the organization and look forward to serving their 5,000 small medium business customers”, Matthew Saunders, COO of Millennium Data Systems stated.
“Its been a very busy summer for us with acquisitions”, noted Tony Di Benedetto CEO of Millennium Data Systems. “In total we have added 12,000 business customers to our Network, expanded our data center capabilities and introduced many new managed services and offerings to our customers”, added Di Benedetto. “Our focus remains to fortify and build upon our managed services platform aggressively by acquiring accretive and highly synergistic managed service providers”.
Management expects Hostingplex assets to be fully integrated by September 2008, with no disruptions to Hostingplex’s 5000 clients.
We reported on the botched transfer of clients after the acquisition of Hostvector by Millennium Data Systems, that resulted in days of downtime.
Millenium Data Systems acquisition of Hostvector
Millennium Data Systems Acquires VistaPages Inc.
About HostingPlex
Since 2000, HostingPlex has been providing mission critical web hosting solutions to businesses, both in the public and private sectors of today's marketplace. HostingPlex is a service of Inverdigm, which is a privately-owned, IT-related services company located in the City of Toronto.
Find other sites on a server by entering a domain address
Ever wonder how many other domains are sharing you server real estate. Bet you do every time your site is taking just a little to long to load. Well now there is a cool little tool thatmay just help you know. While there is no guarentee that you'll get the complete list, it will certainly give you an idea of the number of domains shared on a server.
A reverse IP domain check takes a domain name or IP address pointing to a web server and searches for other sites known to be hosted on that same web server. Data is gathered from search engine results, Knowing the other web sites hosted on a web server is important from both an SEO and web filtering perspective, particularly for those on shared web hosting plans.
http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/
Background
All web sites are hosted on web servers, which are computers running specialized software that distribute web content as requested. Each web server typically has a single IP address, a unique numeric identifier assigned to no other computer on the entire Internet. Web sites are usually associated with domain names, textual strings like "google.com" that are easier for users to remember than numeric IP addresses. Since HTTP version 1.1, many domains can be hosted on a single IP address.
As of 2003, more than 87% of all active domains names were found to share their IP addresses (i.e. their web servers) with one or more additional domains. More than two thirds of these domains share their server with fifty or more additional domains. Simply put, most web sites are hosted on servers that host many other web sites.
While IP sharing is typically transparent to ordinary users, it may cause complications for both search engine optimization and web site filtering.
Concerning SEO (search engine optimization)
Almost all popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) increase a web site's rank based on the number of links pointing towards the web site. In an attempt to falsely inflate a web site's popularity, an individual may generate hundreds or even thousands of dummy web sites containing little to no content except for links pointing towards a specific domain name. One method that search engines use to detect this type of miscreant behavior is to see if these inter-linking web sites are hosted on the same IP address or IP address range. If the web sites are in the same IP address range, it is highly likely that they are operated by the same individual. Search engines devalue links from web sites pointing to other web sites hosted on the same IP address range.
Conversely, search engines value links from web sites hosted on different IP addresses. An effective search engine optimizer would go further than hosting inter-linking web sites on different IP addresses. They would host the web sites on completely different class C network addresses. They would make sure that all of their domains were registered with different registrars under different names. They would not use the same template on more than one web site. They would erase all traces that their sites are operated by the same individual. They would go through all of this trouble with one goal in mind - to game the search engines in order to bring in more organic traffic.
For most web sites, having a dedicated unique IP address will have little to no effect on search engine rankings. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team, stated:
"If you are an average webmaster and just running a few sites, I wouldn't worry about them being on the same IP address and I definitely wouldn't worry about them being on the same server. That's something that everybody does."
Concerning web site filtering
With so many sites sharing IP addresses, IP-based filtering efforts are bound to produce "overblocking", which is the accidental denial of access to web sites that abide by the stated filtering rules. Overblocking occurs when a single website containing some form of adult or explicit content is blocked by its IP address. If this happens, all other sites hosted on that IP address, regardless of their content, will be blocked as well. Unfortunately, research has indicated that it is not atypical for a single web server to host a mixture of sites that are sexually explicit and sites that are not.
Overblocking is a problem known to affect filtering in China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and other countries that employ government-mandated country-wide web filtering policies. Additionally, research has indicated that IP address filtering is used by many commercial web filters installed in libraries and schools in the United States. Sometimes Internet services providers are legally required to implement IP address level filtering. For example, under 2002 law, the Attorney General of Pennsylvania ordered Internet service providers in Pennsylvania to disable access to sites found to offer child pornography. Most providers receiving such orders reportedly use router-level filtering to disable access to the affected IP addresses, even though those IP addresses host scores of additional web sites without child pornography.
Solution
To avoid any of the potential problems related with IP address sharing, it is best to acquire a unique IP address for your web site. Contact your web host and tell them you would like your own unique IP address. Be sure to let them know you would like a fresh IP address, not a recycled one. Web hosts will often reuse IP addresses that spammers have previously blacklisted. You may need to speak with several individuals until you can find a technician who can understand your request. Acquiring a unique IP address for your web site can cost anywhere from $25 to $100 for an initial setup fee, and $2 to $25 per month thereafter.
1&1 botches Microsoft Exchange update
By Chris Williams
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/08/1and1_exchange/
Budget hosting provider 1&1 Internet has hit problems while updating its Microsoft email platform. Customers have been unable to access web mailboxes for more than 24 hours.
Reg readers quickly spotted the problem and were told that the firm, which also owns gaffe-prone West Country hosting oufit Fasthosts, didn't know when the problem would be sorted.
We received this statement from 1&1 on Friday afternoon explaining the outage:
Some of our customers using Microsoft Outlook Web Access have in the past 24 hours experienced a problem accessing their mailbox. No customers using 1&1's Linux mail servers nor MailExchange customers have been affected.Following preparations for an update to new software for Microsoft Exchange 2007 Front-end, one server serving the Outlook front-end has partly been inaccessible as a result of a change in its IP address. The IP address of this server was apparently made available too late for some DNS servers for some ISPs, resulting in some hundred customers using these DNS servers not being able to access their mailbox via Outlook Web Access.
The vast majority of DNS servers have already incorporated the change to this Exchange front-end server, however, due to different DNS server configurations run by ISPs and users, a number of users may still be experiencing a reduced performance. Customers experiencing such an issue can try to refresh their DNS cache with the command IPCONFIG/flushdns. An alternative work-around would be to use a different mail-client other than OWA until the DNS-server has fully updated.
Millennium Data Systems Acquires VistaPages Inc.
Vaughan, Ontario Canada – July 31, 2008 – Millennium Data Systems, an emerging Canadian managed services company announced it has acquired the assets of VistaPages Inc. (www.vistapages.com), a Toronto based managed hosting provider.
“VistaPages operations team and their 5,000+ SMB customers will now have access to a greater breadth of services and product offerings via Millennium’s suite of hosted and managed services”, commented Paul Di Benedetto, Chief Technology Officer at Millennium.
“The acquisition of VistaPages reinforces our business mandate to aggressively grow our managed services practice via accretive acquisitions”, added Tony Di Benedetto CEO of Millennium Data Systems. “VistaPages is the second acquisition for Millennium in 2008, the first being HostVector and we will continue on the path of acquiring additional managed service providers”, added Di Benedetto.
Management expects to have VistaPages completely migrated onto Millennium's national IP Network by end of August 2008. The national network allows clients to deliver content in a more efficient manner to its targeted audience by reducing latency and network hops.
We do hope that the acquisition goes better than the recent Millenium Data Systems acquisition of Hostvector that resulted in days of downtime. Start praying!
About Vistapages
VistaPages, Inc. is a privately-owned organization located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. At VistaPages, we understand that our customers' web sites are important and they require reliable services to ensure that service is not interrupted. We have established a solid foundation to offer a reliable, easy to use and low cost web hosting solution for small-to-medium sized businesses.
VistaPages is a leader in providing its customers with a reliable solution to individuals and small to large-sized businesses, helping thousands of customers get their web sites online, with ease.
For more information please visit; www.millenniumdata.com or contact;
Millennium Data Systems
905-669-4700
College Classes On Malware Writing Still Piss Off Anti-Virus Firms
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080803/1834441874.shtml
Over five years ago, we wrote about a college that was starting to offer a new computer science class in writing computer viruses. And, of course, various anti-virus companies went ballistic, claiming how dangerous it was. Yet, as we pointed out at the time, anti-virus companies don't have the greatest track record in actually stopping viruses -- so it seemed only reasonable to teach people to better "think like the enemy." Anyway, it appears not much has changed. Theodp writes in to let us know about an article in Newsweek about a very similar course being taught at Sonoma State University by George Ledin, where students are tasked with creating their own malware.
Once again, various security companies are condemning the technique, even sinking so low as to compare Ledin to A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who sold nuclear technology to North Korea. They even insist they won't hire his students -- which seems particularly short-sighted. As Ledin points out, it appears that this is really more about the security companies wanting to keep the world more scared than they need to be of malware, so as to pretend that they're the only ones who can solve the "problem" -- when the truth is they're not very effective at it. He complains that anti-virus firms keep their code secret (thank you, DMCA). He points out that if they were willing to open it up, and let lots of folks work on improving it, it would get much, much better. All he's trying to do is help more people understand the enemy without first having to work at one of those companies that's been so ineffective in stopping malware -- in the hopes that maybe some of his students can actually come up with a better soltuion.