HostReview Editor's Desk

Hosting, Internet services and Domain registration back on stage

Hosting industry is battling with security threats and growing in service popularity

by Milena Sotirova
June 22, 2004

Worms continue to make their way through the internet despite the ongoing excelling growth of domains and even IP addresses.

The widely reported denial of service attack at Akamai Technologies took place between approximately 8:30 AM ET and 10:45 AM ET on Tuesday, June 15th. According to the official release, the denial was caused by a sophisticated, large-scale attack that Akamai identified as being targeted at specific Web sites that are Akamai customers. The attacks lead to delays of DNS services and timed out DNS requests.

Virus news for the last week was focused on Zafi.B variant reporting vulnerabilities. The latest most ineffectual threat was caused by I-Worm/Zafi.B. The virus spreads via e-mail or users shared folders in networks. While the original Zafi.A uses only Hungarian, the new Zafi.B spreads through email in English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish etc. The worm sends itself in emails mostly as .pif attachment and in rare cases it sends .exe or .com.
In other hosting news, Network Solutions Inc. reported gains of 15,766 hostnames in May, the 14th-best gain out of more than 1,500 major providers tracked by Netcraft. NSI added 60k new hostnames in May, trailing only Go Daddy, 1&1 Internet, Tect Ag and eNom in that category.

According to Netcraft, since March 2001 the numbers of IP addresses have increased by only 11%, since 1999. Domains have increased by 103%, while web facing computers have increased by 355%.

The financial outlook remains focused in North America. Indicative of the industry growth are the results of IDC, showing that in 2004, more than 40% of worldwide IT spending will come from the U.S. According to a new IDC study California, New York, and Texas combined are almost as large as Japan, the second largest market in the world. Finally, in the latest report expectations show that the server market will achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.8% over the next five years, representing a $60.8 billion opportunity in 2008.