SAN FRANCISCO - OpenDNS, provider of the world’s leading Internet navigation and security services that make networks safer, faster, smarter and more reliable, today announced December 2009 statistics for PhishTank.com, the free community Web site where anyone can submit, verify, track and share phishing data. During the month of December, the PhishTank community voted nearly 78,000 times on more than 23,000 suspected phishes. OpenDNS is the world’s largest, fastest-growing DNS service. PhishTank is the only consumer-friendly, anti-phishing effort that publicly shares timely phishing data.

OpenDNS also today announced that in the period since PhishTank launched to the public, its community has verified and helped block more than three quarters of a million unique phishing scams, protecting millions of people around the world.

 

Highlights from the December 2009 PhishTank statistics include:

 

• Total number of votes by the PhishTank community: 78,130
• Total number of unique, suspected phishing scams reported: 23,900
• Country hosting the most phishing sites: United States
• Percentage of phishing sites hosted in United States: 34
• Median time it took for the PhishTank community to verify phishes: 8 hours, 32 minutes

For more detailed information about PhishTank’s December statistics, including the full list of most spoofed brands, please visit: www.phishtank.com/stats/2009/12/

About PhishTank
PhishTank is operated by OpenDNS and is the first and only effort of its kind. Launched in October 2006 to coincide with National Cyber Security Awareness Month, the site employs a sophisticated voting system that requires the community to vote “phish” or “not phish,” reducing the possibility of false positives and improving the overall breadth and coverage of the phishing data. PhishTank makes all phishing data it accumulates public and available via programmable APIs, which allow other software developers to incorporate the anti-phishing data into their tools. The open access is intended to encourage the sharing of information and increase the chance of eliminating phishing all together. For more information about PhishTank, please visit: www.phishtank.com

About OpenDNS
OpenDNS is the world’s leading provider of Internet navigation and security services that make networks safer, faster, smarter and more reliable. Through DNS resolution, cloud-based Web content filtering and security services, OpenDNS empowers millions of households, schools and businesses to control how users navigate the Internet on their network, while dramatically increasing the network’s overall performance and reliability. For more information about OpenDNS, please visit: www.opendns.com

Webfusion has acquired the hosting assets of XCalibre Communications in a acquisition for an undisclosed sum. In a joint press releases, Webfusion states that this will enable Webfusion to strengthen its entry level managed hosting business while extending its offering and provide XCalibre customers with access to a variety of products, along with 24x7 support.

Thomas Vollrath, Managing Director of Webfusion, comments, “XCalibre has an excellent portfolio of hosting products and we are delighted to partner with them. The acquired Xcalibre customer base will benefit from an increased product set and more choice in entry level managed hosting packages. We look forward to the opportunities to widen our portfolio and present these customers with a greater choice of hosting and web security solutions.”

Tony Lucas, CEO of XCalibre, comments: “This partnership with Webfusion is very important to us and will allow us to strengthen our focus on the continued development of FlexiScale platform and other software products. Our roots are in hosting but our passion is development and going forward this experience will shape our transition into and growth as a software and services company, pioneering cloud computing.”

Tony Lucas has stated on his twitter feed that this is the first of three major announcements for the coming months. 

Customers of XCalibre Communications will become clients of Webfusion with immediate effect. There will not be any changes to control panels or services provided. In addition, customers will benefit from Webfusion’s UK-based data centre, round the clock support teams and access to a wider range of products and services.

Webfusion is part of the Host Europe Group, which is owned by Oakley Capital and also consists of 123-reg, donhost and supanames

Review your hosting experience on Hostjury

 

Computer manufacturer Dell announced on Wednesday it has acquired more than 90 percent of IT services and business solutions provider Perot Systems for $3.9 billion in cash.

The acquisition has led to the creation of a new business unit called Dell Services. The division will offer hosting, consulting, applications and business-process outsourcing, expanding Dell's existing managed and modular services.

The business unit will be headed by Perot Systems CEO Peter Altabef, who will report to Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell.

We've stolen this article direct from BoingBoing -- they've got a rather short statement from Michael Geist regarding some upcoming legislation... this is extremely important stuff to contact your MPs regarding:
Original link: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/16/telcos-and-hollywood.html
Michael Geist's longer version: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4464/125/

 

C-27 is the Canadian anti-spam bill that comes out of committee on Monday. The opposition Liberals have proposed amendments which appear to have been drafted by copyright and telecom lobbyists. They would allow for surreptitious installation of computer programs and - even more outrageously - would allow copyright owners to secretly access information on users' computers.

The bill contains an anti-spyware provision, yet the Liberal motion would allow for the collection of personal information on a computer without authorization if the collection is related to a "investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada." Note that that is private sector surveillance, not the police.

On top of these provisions, the Liberals have also tabled motions to extend the exemptions for telecom providers including allow telecom providers to engage in a host of activities - right down to scanning for and removing computer programs - without permission.

With the hearing on Monday, it is critical for Canadians to speak out - yet again - to ensure that C-27 does not leave the door open to private surreptitious surveillance.

Michael has links to contact the relevant MPs with your comments. Yes, we have to keep doing this, because the second we stop, they'll break the damn Internet, put spyware on your computer, and start listening in on every click and email.

 

Fans of fraud: The web hosting industry

The web hosting industry has always been a particularly interesting one. With the combination of low barriers of entry, low cost and the ability to even launch companies with a mere $100 (Hostgator, a prime example, was built on $100 that the CEO Brent Oxley received as a Christmas gift) and scale them into multimillion dollar entities but it also leaves the industry ripe with failed shells of endeavors, companies that disappear overnight and at the top of the pile: Fraud. And no doubt it's largely in part due to the anonymity of the internet, lack of restrictions & guidelines and legal reprocussions -- still, there's hundreds of companies making great names for themselves and all the same doing their clients a great service. We rarely detail the latter, I admit, solely because the former makes for a better read.

Other than the odd article regarding downtime, companies being bought and sold and the once-in-a-bluemoon fraud review post, we rarely come across companies that will go out of their way to propagate fraud or worse: Use their own client's names to post fake reviews. Today we've come across one of these exceptional cases of companies gone wrong. And of course we're not ones to let it go without reprocussions.

At Hostjury we've had frequent fake web hosting reviews being posted -- we remove at least 25% of the posts made on our site on a daily basis. Even worse, sometimes companies even offer to pay us to remove negative reviews, a request I find disturbing. Something I've never comprehended though is why a firm will go out of their way to pay an employee or team member to post fake reviews and not simply take the time to improve on their hosting service. It escapes me how much easier it would be to answer the odd support request, invest in higher quality infrastructure and in the end sleep better at night knowing you're doing the right thing and reduce your own problems in the meantime, increase company longevity and help people.

We've caught several firms in the past posting fake reviews including ipowerweb, AISO, surpass hosting & several others that'll remain unnamed but this time around it wasn't just a mere fake review. This firm actually went out of their way to use one of their clients' actual names during the posting process. If anything, it's a simple case of fraud, but it shows a complete lack of respect for their own clientele. I'll get into their specific case later on in the post..

Who tends to be behind fake reviews
The rather odd trend I have been seeing lately is that there's no particular type of firm or age group that propagates fake reviews. If anything, it's such a diverse range that there's no particular way to class firms that are involved in such tactics (Other than calling them fraudsters). We've had companies that range from 200,000+ domains to 10 domains posting them -- ipowerweb / ipower being the largest we've caught thusfar. In most cases it seems that the larger the firm, the higher up in ranks the fraudster tends to be. We've caught VPs of marketing / sales redhanded in a number of instances down to smaller companies whose own CEOs or founders are involved.

Why do they post fake reviews
It's obvious why hosting firms would go out of their way to post fake reviews. In a lot of cases companies will post fake reviews in order to boost their signup rates, reputation online and save on advertising costs. Afterall, if they can gain clients out of a few fake reviews a day -- why advertise on google, actually put effort into the service & increase their quality to generate word of mouth signups.

So, who'd you catch this time, Hostjury?
This time we caught a firm we'd actually been watching for a number of years because of the fake reviews they've been posting on third party sites. Just recently we had a number of their reviews start showing up on our own site. The company in this particular case was PolurNet, and out of three reviews they've posted all three turned out to be clients who explicitly stated outright that they had nothing to do with the reviews. One particular PolurNet client had actually spent most of this past weekend scouring the web trying to remove reviews PolurNet had posted pretending to be the client. PolurNet has almost 200 other reviews posted on another site that'll remain unnamed but myself & a few others have always suspected them to be fake. Now we know.

(We'll post screenshots if necessary but this particular PolurNet client requested anonymity.)
Hostjury is a fantastic source for PolurNet reviews and news.

SoftLayer Technologies has continued to solidify its financial strength throughout 2009 and is on track to report more than $80 million in revenue for 2009. SoftLayer has experienced 12 months of GAAP profitability and sequential growth.

“We’re extremely proud that our record of success has continued. Our momentum just keeps building,” said Mike Jones, in the press release from SoftLayer. “It’s not a coincidence that, in this economic climate, more customers are turning to us for services designed to help them optimize their operations and focus on their own business objectives. SoftLayer’s results to date can be attributed to the use of cutting-edge technology deployments that did not exist 3-5 years ago.”

SoftLayer, which offers dedicated servers and a range of cloud computing solutions, has more than 5,700 customers in 110 countries. The Plano, Texas company has more than 21,000 servers running in its data centers. Last month SoftLayer closed on $20 million in senior notes from a private investment group, which will be used to fund the continued growth of the company.

For more information or to review this company, visit www.softlayer.com or you can review your web host.

 

Facebook has finally come clean on the number of servers running its site... with 300 million users and a dramatically expanded data center space it now utilizes 30,000 servers. That number comes from Jeff Rothschild, the vice president of technology at Facebook, who discussed the company’s infrastructure in a presentation last week at UC San Diego.

“Today we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 servers,” Rothschild said during the Q&A session following his talk, adding that the number ”will be different today than it was yesterday” because Facebook is adding capacity on a daily basis. That places Facebook among the largest Internet companies that have publicly discussed their server counts, but still well behind hosting providers Rackspace and 1&1 which each house more than 50,000 servers in their data centers.

20,000 Servers In 18 Months

It also suggests that Facebook has added about 20,000 servers since early 2008, which explains why it borrowed $100 million in May 2008 to fund server purchases. Rothschild also shared some huge numbers associated with Facebook’s photo storage operation, which now stores 80 billion images (20 billion images, each in four sizes). Rothschild said the real challenge isn’t storage, but delivery. ”We serve up 600,000 photos a second,” he said.

25 Terabytes of Log Data Daily

The amount of log data amassed in Facebook’s operations is staggering. Rothschild said Facebook manages more than 25 terabytes of data per day in logging data, which he said was the equivalent of about 1,000 times the volume of mail delivered daily by the U.S. Postal Service.

Rothschild also discussed the effectiveness of the company’s engineering operations. Facebook currently has about 230 engineers on staff. (ratio of one engineer for more than 1 million active users)

No wonder they don't offer a support desk!

 

A couple of news articles hyping cloud computing caught my attention today. As always, it involves large corporations trying to convince the masses, (those presently utilizing shared or dedicated hosting environments) that who better than “them” for storing and distributing information in the new millenium ...

Cloud computing is that confusing buzz word utilized inappropriately to describe things like Grid, Utilities, or Autonomic computing. Conversely, Peer to Peer networks and Skype utilities would articulate examples of successful cloud computing environments. There are also a number of initiatives in the good old days where one could allow their computer to be utilized as part of a network during slow times to help the environment (maybe then... but not now!)

Cloud computing as presently envisioned by global capitalists should never replace shared or dedicated web hosting providers. Remember the Ma-Bell days of one size and price fits all, along with all the great service that a monopoly ensured . Need I say more...

Ever had your data hijacked by a hosting provider? Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, believes that cloud computing endangers liberties because users sacrifice their privacy and personal data to a third party. He has stated, that cloud computing is "simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

Others have compared cloud computing to centralized systems of the 1950s and 60s, by which users connected through "dumb" terminals to mainframe computers. Typically, users have no freedom to install new applications and needed approval from administrators to achieve certain tasks. Overall, it limited both freedom and creativity.

Cloud computing has been criticized for limiting the freedom of users and making them dependent on the cloud computing provider, and some critics have alleged that it is only possible to use applications or services that the provider is willing to offer. Tools such as web analytics may not be able to capture the data required for business planning.

While all of the aforementioned criticisms could present itself in any hosting environment, the flexibility hosted clients have enjoyed in the ability to research, and switch to a new host, along with the competitive advantages enjoyed when choosing from a larger pool would be lost in a cloud dominated environment.

Review your host 

 

An astute person reading past blog posts would quickly find HostJury void of most political commentary... the principles involved prefer to utilize their Twitter feeds as the median of choice for this venue. Occasionally we feel the need to deviate from this prescribed format.

It was announced that US regulators will crack down on bloggers who fail to disclose fees or freebies they get from companies for reviewing products. As most of us are aware, while not necessarily cheapest or fastest, it is still very easy to circumvent the reach of the US government regulators... merely host your site with a company that offers shared hosting on overseas servers that are beyond the reach of said regulators.

While this method of modus operandus would effectively frustrate the long arm of the law, many or most, web savvy types are already aware that the internet's very structure alleviates the need for these silly attempts by real world bureaucrats to impose their lop sided vision of web neutrality onto our online persona.

“The internet polices itself “....

There are many so called web hosting review sites on the web, of which most have quickly acquired a reputation of being quite dishonest... promotional sites for their top hosts who happen to be paying to get there. HostJury on the other hand, has worked to earn it's reputation as an “honest review site”, and with the exception of a few disgruntled hosts, continues to be perceived as such!

And so it is with many products and services on the web... products and services are quickly disseminated by various medians that have evolved including the Twitters, Facebook, MySpace, various Sucksites, and blogs like this one. We have no need for the real world to impose their faulty precepts onto us... Rather we need to impose the contrary!

Picture a world where “they” disclose fees or freebies for promoting products!

With lobbyists and special interest groups vying for your tax dollars...or some special consideration with legislation or policy! And no shortage of corrupt policymakers and politicians all to willing to accommodate and take their offers of “gifts”. Indeed it is bloggers who have exposed a great many of these slush funds extraordinaire

We do not need more of their world in ours... we need more of our world in theirs!

Disclosure: I work for HostJury and I am paid real money... although not always enough 

 

A Canadian judge ordered that Rackster Hosting be be adjudged bankrupt. KPMG Trustees in Bankruptcy has been appointed as trustee of Rackster Hosting property. The order took affect on September 24/09

Rackster Hosting is a provider of VPS and dedicated hosting operating from Kelowna BC since August of 2005 according to the company website. While the company website appears to be operating normally, there is no mention of the bankruptcy order in the latest news heading.

It appears that some behind the scene fighting over control of the company was the main reason for the order although the judge stated that in his opinion the company monthly liabilities are continually exceeding it's income.

We are making some requests for further information on Rackster Hosting operating status, and will update this story as more information becomes available.

It has been widely reported that Yahoo is trying to rid itself some unwanted distractions so that it can focus on it's core mandate....whatever that is! It seems that it has also been decided that it should divest itself from its shared web hosting, Yahoo Small Business also.

If a suitable suitor can be found to ante up the bullion necessary for a larger web hosting operation, the move would be seen as part of a broader strategic refocusing, that includes a major marketing campaign that was unveiled. The company is said to be selling off assets that don’t reflect its new consumer focus.

It is hard to determine how many clients will be affected by Yahoo Small Business changing hands. They are one of the larger players in shared hosting hosts, with about 2.2 million domains. Corporate buyers, as well as private equity firms are the only likely candidates that could meet Yahoo’s price expectations of between $350 and 500 million, which may be slightly higher than what buyers seem willing to pay.

Review Yahoo Small Business or your host on HostJury

 

It isn't often that I single out an organization for something as harmless as harvesting email addresses & spamming with complete disregard, but this time I'm making an exception. I awoke to an email this morning from a small firm out of Toronto called NextTree. The company is operated by Jason Matheson (Founder of NextTree) and Christopher Hebert (Co-founder of NextTree), both of which have past experience at Netfirms as Marketing Director & Marketing Manager, respectively. After a few short moments I realized that not only had they spammed me (inadvertently, in attempt to contact one of our clients) but several other clients as well.

What made this particularly interesting is that the email address NextTree spammed one of my clients through was my own, completely unrelated to this particular site entirely & never having been associated with it. The greeting read 'Dear David', as though it were addressed to me but it referenced another website and client in the subject line entirely. Completely baffled by this, I immediately set out to figure out how NextTree would have confused myself and one of my clients. I dug through older whois records, left no stone unturned on google and still came up with not a single link associating my own completely unassociated email address with this particular client.

With still no luck in figuring out where they obtained the contact, I'm left wondering if Jason Matheston is possibly using old Netfirms whois database data to do the web web design related spamming. I did happen to take a few moments to call Jason but beyond stating that he couldn't disclose where he obtained the contact details, he didn't have much else to say. I suppose what's truly disheartening about it all is how someone with previous experience at companies like Netfirms (as large as they are) and even including a positions titled 'Marketing Director' and 'Marketing Manager' really need to sink as low as spamming my clients. Boo, can't you guys come up with something better?

Here's a copy of the email that I received below, along with Jason Matheson's contact details, he seems to be a massive fan of unsolicited email so I'm sure he wouldn't mind receiving some from you, all of your friends and that persistent Nigerian prince who wants to adopt you as his red-headed stepchild.

Dear David,

Have you ever wondered why some websites perform better than others? (Spamvertising, maybe? Or Ci4l1s!)
Some websites were designed by NextTree!

NextTree is a full-service web development company with a passion for spamming, creating highly usable, results driven websites. We'll make your business look better and perform better than the competition. We'll make your business shine.

Visit http://www.nexttree.ca/website/ to discover how we can help you launch a brand new website or put a fresh face on an old one. (Lipstick on a pig? You guys should move to Alaska and watch the Russians with Sarah Palin.)
NextTree can you give your website a professional edge!

Sincerely,

The NextTree Web Design Team Spammers
($10 off your next design if you can guess which cereal box we got our website out of!)
http://www.nexttree.ca/website/

--
NextTree is a registered trademark of NextTree Inc.
2-112 Petra Way Whitby ON Canada.
We are 100% Canadian eh?!

Luckily they're 100% Canadian, since spamming is illegal in the United States & CANSPAM is a $50,000 fine per unsolicited message.
Also luckily, our server infrastructure also resides in Chicago.
 
A few of Jason's email addresses, say hi:
mathesonj@mtonic.net
jmatheson@room100.net
jasonmatheson@HOME.COM

Let's make it official. For the last few months Amazon's lawyers have been urging Amazee to stop using Amazee as their brand name. While the attorneys representing Amazon's Luxembourg subsidiary are demanding the deletion of Amazee in the Swiss trade mark register (rather than waiting for the opposition period to expire and therewith provoking a costly court procedure) their US attorneys have filed an appeal against the registration of Amazee in the US.

Amazee peaceful and cooperative efforts to reach an amicable solution have not born any fruits. While I admit I am confused by this press release, it isn't the names that are confusing!

Amazon claims that the average consumer is likely to confuse AMAZON with AMAZEE. Amazee believe that Amazon is wrong, and that the average consumer capable of separating between Amazon and Amazee.

And since Amazee likes to take a sportive approach to challenges, they will give away a $100 Amazon voucher at the end of this lawsuit

You can vote on whether you'd confuse the names... kind of cute so we have posted a link. 

If you were online and couldn't access some websites today, we might know the reason why. The FBI raided a Dallas building that houses servers for several different websites.

CBS 11 News has learned that the raid is part of a general criminal investigation. Because of the confiscation of computers at Core IP Networks, a number of legitimate businesses have been affected.

From the downtown office building in the 2300 block of Bryan Street, FBI agents seized what one source described as millions of dollars in computer equipment.

Matthew Simpson, the owner of Core IP Networks, said in a letter posted online that FBI agents raided two floors and 'pulled the plug' on his clients' web servers starting at 6 o'clock Thursday morning. Agents also raided Simpson's house in Ovilla.

In the online letter Simpson said, "Neither I, nor Core IP are involved in any illegal activities of any kind. The only data that I have received thus far is that the FBI is investigating a company that has purchased services from Core IP in the past."

Simpson claims nearly 50 businesses are without access to their email and data. Some of those clients provide internet services to car dealers and other companies.

According to Simpson, some residents' access to 911 is also being affected because some of Core IPs primary customers include telephone companies.

The FBI isn't commenting on specifics but said it could take several days to restore the servers of the affected companies. Officials say they could speed up their analysis of the web servers if the affected companies would contact them.

Simpson closed his online letter with the statement, "If you run a datacenter, please be aware that in our great country, the FBI can come into your place of business at any time and take whatever they want, with no reason."

CBS 11 News emailed Simpson about the raid, but as of Thursday evening he had yet to respond.

http://cbs11tv.com/local/Core.IP.Networks.2.974706.html

Speculation by some..
"FBI agents have raided a Dallas data center, seizing servers at a company called Core IP Networks. The company's CEO has posted a message saying the FBI confiscated all its customer servers, including gear belonging to companies that are almost certainly not under suspicion. The FBI isn't saying what it's after, but there are reports that it's related to video piracy, sparking unconfirmed speculation that the probe is tied to the leaking of Wolverine."

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/03/231220

Google says Ecatel.Net - Currently under maintenance!

It would appear from various sources, and rumors circulating the web that hosting provider Ecatel is enduring a variety of issues that could go beyond simple maintenance. One extermely popular site has the following :

Here's the bad news: Apparently, there was a fire in our datacenter this morning. There's another rumor that our provider's servers had to be physically transported to another datacenter. This is apparently not unprecedented. Either way, every single website hosted with them is now down, which includes both Appulous and AppScene. All things considered, we have high hopes that they'll be back.

They then go on to state in the following paragraph... If our provider doesn't come back, then we will search for other ways to bring Appulous back online.

Why not review your hosting provider on Hostjury.com

 

The community site Web Hosting Talk is continuing to reel from what can only be described as a major blow. Just mere months after a previous 'sophisticated' hack and exploit against the site they were recently brought down as a result of their backup servers being maliciously attacked and their content being distributed around the internet. 

Web Hosting Talk issued the following statement when the site became partially usable today after hours offline:

As reported yesterday,  our recent downtime was due to issues with our backup servers followed by the corruption of some db tables from a hack attempt.

We've since learned that this very deliberate, sophisticated and calculated hack against Web Hosting Talk was carried out by gaining access to our offsite backup servers. From our backup servers, the hacker gained access to the WHT db server. The malicious attacker deleted all backups from the backup servers within the infrastructure before deleting tables from our db server. We were alerted of the db exploitation and quickly shut down the site to prevent further damage.

This individual is still in possession of our user table that includes all user names, email addresses and hashed passwords. Absolutely no credit card or PayPal data was compromised.

Passwords are hashed with salt. It would be an unprecedented event to reverse engineer our passwords. My concern is the distribution of your email addresses and the potential spam you may receive. We know the hacker has posted the user table containing email addresses to various places (file sharing sites) and we're working diligently to remove the tables as we find them. If you see the user table posted anywhere, please let us know so we can get it taken off line.

We are working on recovering the deleted data. In the meantime, we've restored to an old db. We cannot yet determine if we can restore to a more recent db backup.

Why the backup system was remotely accessible by remote sources, no one will ever know but a slashdot thread arose just earlier today in regards to the exploit. Many users highly recommended ensuring that the backup systems were not remotely accessible, encrypted if necessary and only given 'write' access by the main webserver. In my opionion, even giving access to the backup server by the webserver was a mistake in itself. In this particular scenario it appears that both systems were completely open to remote sources which was a definite oversight on the Webhostingtalk team's side.

Many of the frequent users of WebHosting Talk lashed out at for what was seen as sloppy management practices... there have been past sucessful attempts to hack the community:

You're comfortable knowing that there's hundreds/thousands of people sitting in front of their computers with a copy of your password, and every other members? I know I'm not. - One particularly annoyed member

My personal advice is that WHT should secure their stuff properly and not just backup to one location. - Captain Obvious

Saying "this is unforgivable" may sound too hard. But it really is. WebHostingTalk, a place where we often read "make backup of backup" got hacked and lost their only backup. Great. - Lulz

 

When launched, Google Checkout  set out to create a fast, secure online shopping experience for their users. Now in their third year of helping merchants increase sales and attract user interest, they are announcing the decision to move from the previous standard fee schedule to a new tiered pricing model where rates decrease as merchants process more transactions through Checkout. For those interested, it would now mimic Paypal! The biggest change is the Adword fee Credit... it is history. While google may present an alternative to paypal... it can no longer clainm to be an attractive alternative!

On May 5, Google Checkout will now charge:

• Google Checkout's transaction processing fees will transition to a new tiered fee structure, where the rates will vary depending on a merchant's monthly sales processed through Checkout.

• With the new tiered fee structure, merchants can qualify for rates as low as 1.9% + $0.30 per transaction in the U.S., and 1.4% + £0.20 per transaction in the U.K.

• We will also be discontinuing the AdWords free transaction processing promotion at this time. As previously announced, Google Grants recipients will still be eligible for free donation processing until 2010.

The Canadian technology service company Millennium Data Systems, which owns web hosting provider HostMDS, has just opened up a new data center facility in the Toronto area. It will be total of 10,000 square feet and its  “Phase 1″ is now complete.

 

The present capacity of the data center is of up to 150 racks. The facility has all the bells and whistles including: Raised floors, Fire Supression, Redundant Power & Fibre, Controlled climate with redundancy, Key Card Access System & 24/7 Security, Video Camera Surveillance, Fiber-optic cross-connections, Multi Carrier (Bell, Shaw, Rogers, Cogent, Tata, etc.)

Millennium Data claims to offer 99.9% uptime guarantee and says it has 60 racks available in “Phase 1″ and are looking to find some tenants. The company is willing to provide package deals and help we hosts and companies that need data storage solutions to reduce their operating costs.

Tony Di Benedetto, CEO of Millennium Data Systems says that site tours are available for those who are interested to get hosted. The company sells full 42U Rack with 1 20amp Circuit for $599 USD. Millenium Data is probably one of the few companies on the planet with a reputation worse than that of iPowerWeb, so as always -- buyer beware.

Wired has a half-decent write-up on some of the more recent fiascos at Godaddy, something I've had a significant amount of personal experience with. Christians seem to be abandoning the service in leaps and bounds due to this years' racey superbowl ads that the company produced. This isn't the first time the ads have struck a nerve with the religion community -- I know of a significant amount of web hosting clients who have been migrating away from the service for precisely the same reason.

The article goes on to state that entrepreneur Brian Harrell, who manages hosting services for dozens of Christian churches and faith-based organizations and uses GoDaddy to host over 160 domains, says he's pulled several of his clients off of GoDaddy's servers after receiving numerous complaints about the company's racy ads that aired during Sunday's game. Although he's just one particular client with a significant amount of domains, he's not alone.

During Sunday's Super Bowl telecast, the domain registrar and hosting company ran two sexually suggestive ads featuring auto racer Danica Patrick -- one featuring Patrick and a few busty models tossing around double-entendres about their breast size, and another featuring Patrick stripping down and stepping into a shower.

Godaddy's response to the issue was:

Although we wish your opinion of our commercials was a favorable one, please know your feedback is highly valued. At GoDaddy.com, we strongly believe that the freedom to express one's opinions is one of the defining factors that makes the United States a great nation.

I love my free speech and freedom too, but with freedom comes great responsibility.
What are your thoughts?

 

There's some interesting rumors floating around on the web right now about a potential Myriad Network sale. Several existing clients have been posting on a popular web hosting related forum about network IP changes, different representatives in support and now suddenly an outsourced helpdesk. Myriad's own WHOIS information for their domain name now reflects another company name suddenly: EMC Telecom

A few quotes from the thread, and a link:

It's probably a long shot but I'm wondering if anyone here knows what happened to Myriad Network. It appears like as if they've sold off their VPS customers to EMC Telecom and the webhosting customers to sprhost, both of which I've not heard of before. Tickets are also getting responded to from supportcenter.tv which I've also not heard of before especially since Myriad had their own ticketing system in place years ago. -- Minglong

And another from a particular user:

EMC...........WOW they could not have made a worst decision where there customers were concerned. My experience with EMC was horrible and I have absolutely no respect for any VPS provider who oversells beyond a "reasonable" amount. With EMC my VPS on virtuozzo was already running 400% cpu load at times before I even had a chance to upload my files to there box. EMC did admit the box was "apparently" oversold and after talking with other VPS customers of EMC I found this was not uncommon but merely how they conduct business. If anyone got moved to EMC I would highly consider looking elsewhere immediately.

Suddenly, things aren't looking so good for Myriad Network clients if the company did in fact sell out to EMC telecom based on this users' previous experience. We'll see how things proceeds.

A logic bomb allegedly planted by a former engineer at mortgage finance company Fannie Mae last fall would have decimated all 4,000 servers at the company, causing millions of dollars in damage and shutting down Fannie Mae for a least a week, prosecutors say.

Unix engineer Rajendrasinh Babubha Makwana, 35, was indicted Tuesday in federal court in Maryland on a single count of computer sabotage for allegedly writing and planting the malicious code on Oct. 24, the day he was fired from his job. The malware had been set to detonate at 9:00 a.m. on Jan. 31, but was instead discovered by another engineer five days after it was planted, according to court records.

Makwana, an Indian national, was an employee of technology consulting firm OmniTech, but he worked full time on-site at Fannie Mae's massive data center in Urbana, Maryland, for three years.

On the afternoon of Oct. 24, he was told he was being fired because of a scripting error he'd made earlier in the month, but he was allowed to work through the end of the day, according to an FBI affidavit in the case.  "Despite Makwana's termination, Makwana's computer access was not immediately terminated," wrote FBI agent Jessica Nye.

Five days later, another Unix engineer at the data center discovered the malicious code hidden inside a legitimate script that ran automatically every morning at 9:00 a.m. Had it not been found, the FBI says the code would have executed a series of other scripts designed to block the company's monitoring system, disable access to the server on which it was running, then systematically wipe out all 4,000 Fannie Mae servers, overwriting all their data with zeroes.

"This would also destroy the backup software of the servers making the restoration of data more difficult because new operating systems would have to be installed on all servers before any restoration could begin," wrote Nye.

As a final measure, the logic bomb would have powered off the servers.

The trigger code was hidden at the end of the legitimate program, separated by a page of blank lines. Logs showed that Makwana had logged onto the server on which the logic bomb was created in his final hours on the job.

Makwana is free on a $100,000 signature bond. His lawyer didn't immediately return a phone call Thursday.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/fannie.html

You would think that people who work behind the internet stay behind it, but on December 15, #HoHoTo brought the techies and internet fans in Toronto out to party for a good cause last Christmas season.

Tickets for the event went on sale on December 9 and #HoHoTo was sold out in just a few days. The event itself was hosted at The Mod Club in downtown Toronto and was attended by nearly 600 people gathered from all across the internet, gathered mainly through the social networking site Twitter. The attendees were, as quoted from HoHoTo.ca, “geeks, phreaks, webheads, twitterfiends, techies, media, marketing, and PR types and all their friends. And everyone else!”

Within the first three days that #HoHoTo was publicized, $10,000 was raised for the Daily Bread Food Bank, and in less than two weeks, organizers raised more than $25,000 from its Twitter and corporate supporters. Toronto based web hosting provider, Fused Network managed to squeeze in a last minute corporate sponsorship amounting to $2,500.

The extra mile

So why go the extra mile to sponsor this event? Fused owner David McKendrick commented: “After checking out the project I was extremely excited to hear about a local event helping out the Daily Bread Food Bank, but they were completely sold out... I immediately went to the organizers and requested if they could open up an additional sponsorship slot so we could contribute.”

The Daily Bread Food Bank collects donations from individuals and the food industry, and distributes the goods among its agencies to provide for meal and food relief programs. The charity helps around 80,000 people in the Greater Toronto Area with meal programs where the hungry are served prepared food.Being an enthusiastic supporter of charities, David was thrilled to have sponsored an event that contributed to this charity.

“You really can't go wrong with helping people get fed, it's such a basic tenet of life that most of us take for granted yet millions die every year just from lack of food. There's a lot of need, every little bit we can do to help makes a huge difference in people's lives."

When asked what experience has Fused Network had with sponsoring charity events, David stated: “Well, this has been our first local charity event and I couldn't have asked for a better way to get the ball rolling with future sponsorships. It was amazing to experience and it helped raise over $25,000 for a local food bank -- it brings a permanent smile to my face.”

Can we expect Fused Network to sponsor future #HoHoTo events?

“We're always looking for great ways to help out locally here in Toronto and this was just a perfect match for us. IT oriented and for a great cause? Count us in!”

About Fused Network

Fused Network is a leading provider of quality web hosting and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada and serving clients in over 45 countries worldwide with infrastructure located in several cities across North America including Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.

For more information on Fused Network you can visit our reviews page or their official site.

Alphared ceases to exist

As of 35 minutes from now, 10 AM EST, Alphared will have their entire network powered down and will be pulled offline. In the last and final blow to the company and firm after declaring bankruptcy, an email was sent out to clients mere hours before everything turned off.

A copy of the email is below:

This Morning December, 23 2008 at 9:30 AM CST, Alpha Red, Inc. entered Chapter 7 Bankruptcy. Doug Brickley of LECG was appointed the Chapter 7 Trustee. The receiver’s duties are to liquidate the assets of Alpha Red and collect past due balances from Alpha Red's current and former clients.

The business will not continue. All services including power, bandwidth, and technical support will be shutdown at 9:00 AM CST on December 24, 2008, tomorrow. We will begin shutting down servers this evening around 8:00 PM CST, December 23, 2008 starting with accounts which have outstanding/past due balances.

If you have paid your bill and are current, you may contact us at support@alphared.com or by phone: (713) 936-2388 to delay your shut-off time until 9:00 AM CST tomorrow morning.

A rundown of the recent events is available in another blog entry at Alphared files for Chapter 11, the company all but disappeared when the Washington state attorney general Robert McKenna filed suit against James Reed McCreary IV and his firm.

 

Clients of Web Hosting Providers who outsource their support services offshore may expect even slower responses than they've grown accustomed to.

There are unconfirmed reports of a major loss of web connectivity, reducing overall bandwidth to a crawl with very high latency, currently affecting most of the Middle East and parts of North Africa and the Indian sub-continent. The disruption started at around 07:30 GMT and has continued ever since. This is affecting all traffic in and out of the region - particularly SMTP.

Typical TTL to the US and Europe is currently around 1800ms on Broadband and 800ms on Tier 1 - compared to 180ms and 90ms respectively under normal conditions.

While unable establish the reason there is speculation it is likely to be a cable breakage somewhere between the Middle East and Europe.

Update

As an update to the above, it is now confirmed that 3 out of the 4 fiber cables that connect the Middle East, North Africa and Indian sub-continent to Europe and US have been cut.

These cables carry around 90% of the Internet and Voice communications to these areas, and will take considerable time to repair. On the last occasion (early 2008) it took almost 1 month to repair.

In the build up to Christmas this will severely affect eCommerce and Call Center activity - this will also affect hosting companies with customers in these regions which will not be able to access their servers/hosting accounts.

The affected cable providers are FLAG, SMW3 and SMW4.

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/

The 7 day graph also shows a slight drop in traffic and an increase in latency:

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/7day.htm

The recent Hostjury posts warning of impending doom for hosted clients of ByteHosting has proven to be accurate. Instead of seeing the familiar Byte Hosting webpage, Byte Hosting clients are viewing an vividly frank and honest explanation by Byte Hosting owner James Reno stating in part:

"As a result of a court-order we are currently required to cease operations (not for sure how, considering we've not even been convicted of any crimes, and have not even yet been able to go to court, but welcome to the USA; where you are now guilty until proven innocent).. This is greatly affecting all of our customers and we are working the best we can to return all equipment to our customers."

 

Previous Client Faulted

"As a result of one of OUR PREVIOUS CLIENTS (yes, client), we have been drug through an extreme legal battle resulting in this court order that we have not had a chance to defend ourselves against thanks to the courts actions. We again are doing everything we can but granted the courts hard-headed and disastrous actions we are very limited in our abilities" states Reno.

Reno continues "Since 1997 we have been providing webhosting services and I have been leading this company (long before we even met this client, and long before this client even existed [according to the courts]). 11 years of my hard work and 11 years of my life, as well as, this companies history have been ruined in 30-seconds by a single court action." 

- James Reno

Source: ByteHosting

A Sad Day  Maybe

The ByteHosting web site states  that there was a loss 28 jobs as a result of this action. Only a very limited number  of these jobs would appear to be connected to web hosting, judging from the public records available. Reno contends that the court is unfairly inhibiting his ability to function. Interestingly enough... that is what the court claims Reno and his co-conspirators allegedly attempted to purvey to the general populous with their little virus scan racket. Either way, a sad day for most ByteHost clients indeed

Update

A Baltimore federal court judge yesterday held Innovative Marketing Inc in contempt of court for ignoring previous orders commanding it to shut down and hand over financial records. This month, the Federal Trade Commission sued the company, claiming it ran an illegal "scareware" operation that tricked more than a million people into spending $100 million on bogus security software by making them believe their computers were under siege from various viruses and spy programs. In an order signed yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Richard D. Bennett ordered the business to pay $8,000 for each day it fails to comply with the earlier orders. The company's chief executive and four other defendants, all of whom have had their assets frozen, did not show up for a hearing last week, prompting Bennett to promise he would have them arrested if they didn't respond. All but Innovative Marketing filed paperwork with the court Wednesday and agreed to comply with court orders by Dec. 23.