Web Hosting Year continued the industry growth with expansion in adding of new services and dynamic development of the offered services. Netcraft reported 2004 to be dynamic for the web hosting industry year with more than 10.9 million hostnames added. The research, released in the end of the year, showed that the five hosting providers that gained more than 100,000 active sites during 2004 are growing companies and familiar names.

The leader, according to the Netcraft report, is the German giant 1&1 Internet. The company is reportedly expanded into the American market gaining more popularity. The second one is The Planet, expanding in managed services atop dedicated servers. Extreme growth is reported by The Planet, showing 490% growth of active sites.

In the security field, the first six months of 2004 showed an increase in the number of attacks against online servers, which caused millions of dollars of losses potentially reaching $20.1 million for a global sized company, according to marketing research published in the last week of July.

The alarming signals for the growing threat are becoming more and more problematic for businesses to the end of the year. The problems seemed to to be global for the businesses, since the research data showed that 48 percent of enterprises will be doing more business over the Internet in distribution and services.

Bagle and Sasser worms are statistically most malicious and their impact on the businesses were the most harmful in the first half of the year. The Bagle worm first appeared in January as an e-mail attachment. Several months later, there were more than 25 variants of the virus, spreading thru the Net.

The latest viral threatsinclude worms and trojans spread fast than the previous years.The effectiveness of solving the virus problem was dependent on the fact that even the newer anti-virus filter solutions, relied solely on rules created after a virus has started spreading.

In the consumer security sphere, as viruses and worms proliferate, consumers are taking action by embracing two levels of protection, according to Forrester research. The first is hard security measures like antivirus and personal firewalls, the second, considered by the report is soft security measures like installing ad- and spam-blocking software.

The year passed through successful acquisitions, launches and new technology developments. The following are the highlights of the industry events thought the year.

December

According to the research published by Netcraft, Datapipe is the most reliable hosting company site during second half of 2004. The agency monitored the leading hosting company sites countingthe day's downtime during the period.

Another research, launched by IDC has analyzed the largest European solution services players. The criteria were their opportunity alignment and ability to gain share in the Western European SCM, CRM, and overall business solution services market.In three studies IDC presents 2004 Leadership Grids.

The last month of the year was rich on successful agreement announcements. Equinix, Inc. (www.equinix.com), a provider of network-neutral data centers and Internet exchange services, announced that it has signed a long-term lease for an additional 103,000 square feet of data center space in San Jose close to the company's two other Internet Business Exchange™ centers in the region.

The successful deals was seen on the search engine market with Yahoo! Inc. has evaluated the market and once again named GOT as the exclusive provider of email marketing tools to Yahoo! customers.

"The partnership between Yahoo! and GOT has delivered a tremendous amount of value to small businesses, enabling them to cost-effectively generate revenue, build brand and strengthen customer relationships," said Eric Melka, President and CEO of GOT Corporation.

Interland (www.interland.com) announced the general availability of its two newest dedicated hosting plans, Managed Services Bronze Support and Managed Services Gold Support.

According to a new survey on consumer shopping patterns this holiday season released by Sun Microsystems, Inc. (sun.com), 91 percent of American consumers will walk out of a store and shop elsewhere if they cannot find the particular gift they want.

eNom Incorporate (www.enom.com), located in Bellevue, Washington, has licensed and launched the CM4all (www.cm4all.com) WebsiteCreator as another OEM customer of CM-AG in the USA.

1&1 Internet, Inc. (www.1and1.com) announced the company is providing safer, faster and more powerful management of its root servers by pre-installing Plesk 7.5 Reloaded.

November

The released in November IDC report revealed that U.S. manufacturers will spend $77.1 billion on IT in 2004. This is nearly 5% growth over 2003, a marked improvement compared with recent years, says the document. The IDC's research shoes that manufacturers are simultaneously watching their bottom lines and struggling to grow their top.

In another IDC report covering the SpyWare problems, it is revealed that the need to identify and eradicate these parasitic programs will drive AntiSpyWare software revenues from $12 million in 2003 to $305 million in 2008.

"Today, more malicious SpyWare can easily infiltrate corporate firewalls," said Brian Burke, research manager, Security Products at IDC. "These programs make their way into the corporate Intranet under the guise of less-threatening network traffic and, once in, they can wreak havoc."

According to the recent report released by Netcraft, in the December 2004 survey the gain of 808,722 sites continues the Internet's powerful growth as a medium for communications and commerce. The research shows that the trends contributing to the expansion include the growth of retail e-commerce as well as lower prices for domain names.

Domain registrars and hosting companies reported small businesses have been active purchasers of domains and web sites. The report reveals that the Internet's benefits as a business tool have overcome fears about Internet security.

Aplus.Net (www.aplus.net), a web site hosting and development firm for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), announced the launch of a browser-based web conferencing service that dramatically simplifies online conferencing.

TemplateMonster (www.templatemonster.com) has improved its customer service by adding on-line marketing services for on-line Marketing from Overture.com.

The round of lawsuits announced by AOL, Microsoft, Earthlink and Yahoo! is the second time junk email-related enforcement actions have been filed by the Anti-Spam Alliance, which was founded in April 2003 and is chiefly led by the four companies.

October

In the released research, IDC reports that the worldwide software revenue increased 5.1% to $178 billion in 2003. It was projected to rise to $189 billion in 2004. According to the published data, over one-third of 2003 worldwide revenue was attributable to the five leading vendors: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Computer Associates.

"Even though the software industry is recovering from its first-ever decline, the double-digit growth rates experienced in the last decade will not return in the foreseeable future," said Dr. Anthony Picardi, senior vice president of Global Software at IDC.

According to Dr. Picardi, issues of complexity, security, software quality, as well as a myriad of changing macroeconomic factors are the challenges to industry growth.

Aplus.Net (www.aplus.net) launched an upgraded version of their award-winning web Control Panel, which allows webmasters to conveniently manage all of their hosting services, websites, FTP accounts, registered domains and emails from one location with a single log-in.

MCI (www.mci.com) announced that its global IP network has been recognized for the fourth consecutive year as the world's most connected Internet backbone network.

The Go Daddy Group, Inc., (www.godaddy.com) announced the release of Microsoft SQL Server support for its hosting customers using the Microsoft Windows platforms.

Affinity Internet announced the launch of ValueTraffic (www.valueweb.com) - giving customers a full-service online advertising agency at an affordable price.

September

The recent reports on vulnerabilities and virus threats showed increased activity in the scale of danger affecting banking institutions and online merchants. On, a phishing attack altered the SunTrust Bank web site in the last week of September. The action allowed fraudsters to collect customer authentication details using the bank's own site.

According to the released in October IDC report, the latest FutureScan results for Octobershowed that buyer Intent, which reflects market demand for IT products and services, was 1041, down from 1085 in September. To compare, the October's results indicated that although user spending expectations have cooled, the market continues to show signs of improvement.IT spending was expected to continue growing over the next 12 months, but at a moderate pace of almost 7%.

Digital River, Inc. (www.digitalriver.com ) announced that it launched a new online store as the first pre-approved seller of downloadable software on eBay.

SWsoft (www.sw-soft.com) announced a joint strategic partnership with Acronis, Inc. (www.acronis.com) to jointly develop and market Virtuozzo™ and Acronis True Image Server 8.0™ solutions for enterprises and hosting providers.

Aplus.Net (www.aplus.net), announced the availability of a comprehensive Firewall Service to protect dedicated and managed servers from malicious users and attacks.

August

The released in September Netcraft's reports says that the gigabyte is becoming the new storage benchmark for shared hosting accounts. The providers seek to compete on features like server space and bandwidth, rather than price. Go Daddy announced this week expanded shared hosting plans. The new offering is 1 gigabyte of web server space priced at $9.95 a month. Just a week ago Yahoo upgraded its shared hosting plans including 2 gigabytes of storage in the $11.95 "starter" package.

IDC announced the launch of FutureScan, a set of market metrics that measure supply and demand in the IT industry. The new metrics is based on indicators and customer surveys. Values are based on expectations of future growth. The indexing is based on 1000 indicating zero growth and each 10 points representing roughly 1% of expected growth or contraction. Despite the robust buyer expectations for September, IDC continues to predict that U.S. IT spending growth for the next 12 months will remain under 7%.

GoDaddy.com, a domain name registrar, has improved its email offerings by increasing storage space by up to 500 percent while providing additionalmailboxes and mobile mail applications to users.

Hostway Corporation (www.hostway.com) announced providing of small business owners with secure and reliable business-class email service.

July

In the July 2004 survey Netcraft reports the open source Apache server has gained more than 4 million hostnames in the first half of 2004. That has closely tracked the existing trends, leaving market share virtually unchanged so far this year.

Microsoft Corp. announced it would add support for the AMD Opteron (TM) with Direct Connect Architecture in Microsoft® SQL Server (TM) 2005, the next generation of Microsoft's flagship database product.

Equinix, Inc. announced the introduction of the Equinix GigE Exchange Portal, the industry's first analysis tool to monitor traffic exchange or "peering" relationships between Internet service providers (ISPs), content providers, and other network service providers through Equinix's GigE Exchange Service.

June

Reporting the last month confirmed the expectations of industry growth. Worm attacks and server troubles were the opposite line in the picture.

The IDC's study "Asia/Pacific Policy and Strategies Influencing Government IT Spending, 2004", has found that the focus of many Asia/Pacific governments is on squeezing more value out of their IT investments. In the region, the Australian and Singaporean governments have led in demanding more value out of their IT investments, as a result of tightening budgets.

Pathlore Software Corporation (www.pathlore.com) has unveiled its Virtual Classroom Connector (VCC), allowing users to independently select and integrate leading virtual classroom/web conferencing services.

Rodopi Software (www.rodopi.com) announced the availability of a new domain name registration module for the Rodopi OSS and EasyOSS™ web based IP service automation products.

May

During May we were on top of industry news wave for some successful DataCenter and service launches. Interland (www.interland.com) came up with launching of their new web site to satisfy the growing customer needs. Terremark (www.terremark.com) reported expanding of business through new successful contracts.

During May, an Italian hosting company,Seeweb, was the most reliable of the hosting company sites we monitor. Second placed was the Jumpline site, which was top of the chart last month, reported Netcraft.

In the virus threat arena during May, the threat posed by phishing has racheted up a notch with the Korgo worm. The virus's auto-infects unpatched Windows systems with a keylogging trojan, stealing online banking information, and secretly transmits data back to the fraudsters. The MCafee reported shows that the worm spreads with a random filename and acts as a remote access server to allow an attacker to control the compromised system. The month passed through extensive reports on virus and spam activity.

MessageLabs (www.messagelabs.com) reported the April data for 67.6% of overall messages sent as spam. The junk mail and virus mail increase remains the hot topic for industry challenges and seems to provoke more aggressive actions from the big players in industry.

Terremark Worldwide, Inc. announced that it has signed contracts with new customers and existing customers to expand their relationship with the NAP of the Americas.

April

For the month we had an evidence of growing activity in the hosting industry by promoting of new services, successful acquisitions and new tools released by hosting companies. In something of a twist on the ordinary arrangement, last month web hosting industry events was switching from virus threat warnings to new technology achievements.

One of the news for the last month was that SAVVIS Communications grew by more than 800 percent in April as it integrated the U.S. hosting assets of Cable & Wireless, which it purchased in Februaryfor $155 million. It is estimated that the shift of more than 350k hostnames from C&W to SAVVIS is one of the largestsales in the industry.

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (www.akamai.com) and Scene7, Inc. announced today that the companies are now offering a unique imaging solution, Dynamic Imaging On Demand™ (DIOD)

Peak 10, the Southeast's data center solutions provider, announced it has expanded its portfolio of managed services to further its ability to deliver more cost-effective alternatives to companies that internally support and deliver storage, monitoring, security hosting and disaster recovery solutions.

March

The month passed under the virus threat storms, successful partnership establishments and new launches at the technology evolution sphere.

Virus attacks set on the hot seat hosting companies after the newly released versions of the internet infection warned the security at the hosting company Data centers. In the released in the first week of April report, by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) is said that Witty broke new ground by simultaneously infecting dozens of machines maintained by security-savvy users, as was reported by Netcraft. Witty's spread was limited primarily by its destructive nature and the small installed base of the ISS products it exploited, CAIDA noted, positing that similar tactics could be repeated using huge "botnets" of compromised boxes targeting Windows machines.

Verio, a leader in global IP solutions, announced that VARBusiness Magazine has awarded a five-star rating, the publication's highest honor, to the successful viaVerio® Partner Program.

Ensim Corporation, announced new releases of Ensim Pro and Ensim Basic that support Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 3.

February

The last two weeks showed an abundance of hosting events, scaled from new service launches to successful partnership agreements. With the growing number of Web Hosting servives available on the Internet, in its financial aspect, hosting industry is growing also in numbers, according to the reported results for the fourth quarter and for the first month of 2004.

In regard to the security issues, the newest version of MyDoom was detected through its characteristics of deleting Microsoft Word and Excel documents from a victim's hard drive, along with images and videos. MyDoom.F was discovered Feb. 20 spreading slowly at first, but has been prompting increased warnings from security vendors as it began to spread more widely.

Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com), and AppIQ, Inc. announced a strategic partnership that strengthens Sun's heterogeneous storage management software strategy to deliver increased choice and flexibility to its customers while lowering costs and complexity in the data center.

January

Announcementsin the web hosting industry during the first two weeks of January showed an effective start of the New Year companies' plans for growth. The surveys show that the small-businss market for web hosting continues to grow in the first days of the New Year. The diversity in the small business web hosting needs will be focused on relatively common requirements, due to companies' efforts to achieve the competition results. In result, the hosting market will present a significant growth in direction to provide service to more SMB companies instead of developing to bigger business market.

By the start of this month the hosting events were organized over the new launches and company integrations. Over the first weeks of February the hosting events showed innovation in the ways to sell hosting to the next wave of customers by providing new services, customized support structures and hosting plans.

In the scope of Security, the last week was saturated with the new measures in virus control, anti-spam software and new worm modifications spreading news.

A new network worm known as Doomjuice has been found, according to F-Secure.com. This worm was regarded as closely associated with the previous Mydoom worms. The new virus infects Windows machines which are already infected by Mydoom.A and the attack is predicted to be automatically processed.

The damages were considered as unpredictable in size because the new worm can infect the computer totally and it doesn't spread over e-mail. Although the virus attack failed to hobble the Net, there were indications of a continuous growth of the virus threat.

The MSN® (www.msn.com) network of Internet services, the world's No. 1 online destination, and Network Associates Inc., the leading provider of intrusion prevention solutions, announced in the first week of the year the broad availability of McAfee® Security's anti-virus and personal firewall services as part of MSN Premium subscription service for broadband users in the United States.

Digital River, Inc. (www.digitalriver.com) announcedthat it signed an e-commerce agreement with Qarbon. Based on the agreement, Digital River build and launch an e-commerce site to support the online marketing and sales of Qarbon's family of multimedia authoring tools and software.

As hosting industry spending increase, we can see the powerful results of technology development in the next year. One of the core investments will relate hosting with security as a trend as it can be said 2004 was devoted to technology implementations both in user friendly tools and software and expanding of web services.

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