February News in Review!

There has been a lot of news to keep you going in February and the amount of activity in the web hosting industry confirms our suspicions suggested in January - 2006 is likely to be a great year! February was the month Interland changed its name to Web.com, Inc. to further align itself to its core products and services. It was also the month US President Bush received a firm rebuttalf rom Portland-based ThinkHost. After dealing with George W. ThinkHost, Inc. took on the environment by raising awareness of green energy amongst web hosting providers. Grey Creative Group also opted for ‘Green' solutions. Again in February Globat launched a series of attention grabbing activities including sponsoring an MBA students' term paper and buying a fly on Ebay. Whatever press Globat generates for themselves it won't be a patch on that GoDaddy managed in February… the company got approval for its latest Superbowl commercial and very few people on the planet failed to hear about it! Later in the month GoDaddy.com went on to voice disapproval of the pending agreement between ICANN and VeriSign, encouraging others to follow suit.

In January everyone counted their money for 2005 and in February announced their losses and gains in February. Tucows Inc. reported record net revenue and EarthLink's 127,000 web hosting accounts helped the company to record earnings. To help keep the money rolling in companies came up with some excellent promotions. WebHostinger.com launched a free hosting promotion while 1PlanHost.com celebrated 10 years in web hosting with discounts. RackFirm Inc. gave away iPods and Globat.com offered a Valentine's promotion. Some people had more money to spend than others: XFONE USA acquired EBI Comm, Inc. and Canada Web Hosting acquired Bagna Networks Inc. Others thought of new products and services to bring the cash in… Greatmail announced dedicated hosting options, ResellerClub Version 6.1 was launched, and the Great Hosting Company kicked off new services, as did Globix Corporation.

To keep things heading in the right direction February saw the announcement of a number of partnerships. DemoWolf partnered with TGHC, and Hawaiian Telecom chose to resell Interland web hosting products. In addition, Optimized Learning Inc. chose Hosted Solutions for its web hosting. A number of companies fought the good fight against Phishing and such other attacks… Auckland-based Web Drive averted a potential phishing attack, Hushmail Partners with Comodo Technologies to authenticate its site, and One World Hosting presented ‘NOSPAM '. There were also plenty of awards floating around last month. HostTheBest was announced a “Safe Shopping Site” while Hosting.com got gold. Aplus.Net was named in the top 5 SEM hosting providers and iServe was recognized as number one in New Zealand. In addition, Comodo was named a ‘hot company' and Register.com won a excellence award. There was also plenty of activity in the domain name area. NetNames launched simultaneous domain and trademark searches, eNom registered five million names, A2LD offered 12 months free web hosting with domains, Easyspace launched a ‘Whois Privacy' service and Grassroots.org and Moniker.com offered US and Canadian nonprofit organizations free domain names.

As ever, the trend of hosting companies adding more and more to packages and plans continued… 2MHost increased plans 500 percent, ServerPronto sets the bandwidth standard with their introduction of gigabit dedicated servers, while Oxyte Communications, LLC doubled disk space and bandwidth and XO Communications enhanced their Concentric hosting plans. AIT added a number of free utilities to plans and Verio launched Business Management Tools. Web hosting provider WireNine.com introduced PHP 5 support, UK dedicated provider JAB Web Solutions announced new packages, IrdHost announced doubled disk space and bandwidth and ONET Hosting Solutions increased its plan features.

All in all... a fun month!