The Web Host Industry Week in Review

• By The WHIR, May 25, 2007

•   Digg
    Delicious
    Reddit
    Newsvine
    Stumbleupon
    Twitter

  (close)

  From:

  To:

  (close)
  Share | Send | Print | Comments (0)

By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com

May 25, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- This week saw ISPCON take place in Orlando, Florida, an event that tends to see service providers in the Web hosting business and related industries issue some of the larger announcements they've been saving up.

This ISPCON event was no exception, as quite a few companies announced new products and upgrades, including several service providers that released programming interfaces for their products.

On Monday, one of the leaders of the hosted application business Salesforce.com announced that it had launched its Salesforce SOA, an extension of its Apex programming language, designed to help developers build on-demand applications. The company released its new tool at the Salesforce Developer Conference, saying it will host and run the custom-written SOA integration code.

On Wednesday, hosting provider SoftLayer Technologies announced that it had launched what it called the first open API designed to control the dedicated hosting environment. The company says the beta release of the API will include the six most used features of its current customer portal.

Also on Wednesday, disk-based backup solution provider R1Soft announced that it had released an API for its line of backup restore and disaster recovery products. The API can be used with any R1Soft product and supports most major programming languages. Developers can use the tool to create automated processes such as automatic billing and provisioning of data protection services.

While several solution providers announced this week that they had introduced programming interfaces for their products, others introduced more standard upgrades to their offerings.

Wholesale Internet solutions provider Tucows announced on Wednesday that it had released the newest generation of the Tucows Email Service. The new hosted email solution combines an AJAX-enabled Web mail interface with a back-end infrastructure built to provide reliability and performance. The solution was built using technology from Nitido, a service provider based in Toronto, Canada.

Along with the series of new services, there were several reports this week of studies that had revealed malicious activity of some significance to Web hosts.

Earlier in the week the Security Fix blog reported that a previous study that had identified Web host IPOWER as the victim of a fairly widespread invasion by malicious software may have significantly underestimated the extent to which the company's equipment had been compromised. While the original StopBadware report had identified IPOWER as host to approximately 10 percent of the 90,000 compromised sites identified in the study, Security Fix reported that a fairly small sample of IPOWER servers appeared to have malicious code installed on roughly 30 percent of the shared sites they hosted.

And on Wednesday, Netcraft reported that peer-to-peer networks are increasingly being hijacked and used to launch distributed denial of service attacks against Web sites. Research groups, including Prolexic Technologies, say peer-to-peer networks are being used to trick large groups of computers into requesting a file from the intended target of the DDOS attack, overwhelming that site with requests. Prolexic says many recent attacks exploit the dc++ open source peer-to-peer client for Windows using the direct connect file-sharing protocol.

While many of this week's announcements involved new applications, several of the programming interfaces introduced this week were beta versions, a state that tends to imply some future reports of interest.

Tags:  security  new products  Week in review  disaster recovery  Windows  billing  Appro  ISPCON  NEC  Netcraft  Portal  Prolexic Technologies  Promise  R1Soft  Salesforce.com  SoftLayer Technologies  Tucows 

• Print | Comments (0)

• (0) Comments
• View Post