March 16, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Most significant among this week's news trends, as been the case more often than not since the beginning of the year, was the announcement by several hosting providers that they had expanded their footprints with new facilities.
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On Monday, we reported that FiberNet Telecom Group had announced it is developing a new colocation facility at 60 Hudson Street in New York City. According to the company, the 11,000 square foot expansion will increase FiberNet's presence at the address by more than 36 percent and it's total colocation space footprint by about 12 percent.
On Tuesday, Web hosting provider WebUnited announced it had added a new 3,000 square foot data center in Delray Beach, Florida. The facility will be ready for occupancy, says the company, before the arrival of the 2007 hurricane season and expands the company's reach to the South Florida communities of Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.
And on Thursday, Web hosting provider InterServer announced that it had completed its new 6,000 square foot data center in Secaucus, New Jersey after nearly a year of planning, construction and development. The new facility, located in a separate portion of the same building as the company's primary data center, will add room for servers and networking equipment, as well as 2,000 square feet of office space.
While several Web hosting firms made announcements related to new or expanding facilities, this week also saw several announcements related to the gathering or issuing of industry data.
On Monday, Web hosting provider Rackspace Managed Hosting announced that it had released the results of a survey regarding software as a service customers. The company says that while SaaS customers demand application availability, few understand their uptime guarantees. Nearly 36 percent of responding customers didn't know the uptime guarantees provided in the SaaS vendor service level agreement. The company says that service providers need to ensure that they communicate SLAs to their customers.
Also on Monday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced that it had released a report on the root-server attack its systems experienced in February. According to ICANN, the organization's DNS root servers were targeted by an attack in February, but only two were significantly affected. The two affected were the US Department of Defense's G-root server and ICANN's L-root server, the only servers that had yet to deploy the Anycast technology.
Along with this week's several prominent trends came a plain old significant bit of hosting news from a software provider well known in the business.
SWsoft announced on Thursday that it would begin bundling its Virtuozzo server virtualization software with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell. SWsoft will package the software together in an effort to provide customers with an integrated solution that provides a new choice for virtualization based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform. And the partnership with Novell may broaden the market for SWsoft's virtualization products.
While nothing in this week's news leaps out as an issue of ongoing significance, there's certainly some merit to the suggestion in Rackspace's results that Web hosting providers ought to investigate the understanding among their customers of their service level agreements.
