October 15, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- In the Web hosting industry this week, the biggest ongoing story was undoubtedly the saga of news Web site servers seized from a Rackspace data center in the UK, a story that unfolded, bit by bit, over the course of the week.

Last Friday, it was reported that US authorities had issued a federal order to Rackspace Managed Hosting on Thursday morning, ordering the company to turn over Web servers being used to host sites belonging to the Independent Media Group, also known as Indymedia. Rackspace, which hosts more than 20 Indymedia Web sites out of its London, UK facility, said it had complied with the request and turned over the servers.

The seizure was thought to be related to postings on certain Indymedia sites that included photos of undercover Swiss police officers.

At the time, it was unclear how an American authority was able to exert such an influence over a facility operating out of the UK. Rackspace said in a statement that it was acting in compliance with a court order related to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, which establishes procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations including international terrorism.

According to reports released early this week, the seizure of the servers came as a result of a request by Italian and Swiss authorities. While the attorney general of Geneva did not confirm whether the FBI was working at its request, US Ministry of Justice representatives said the order given to Rackspace was made on the behalf of Swiss and Italian authorities.

The pictures of two police officers were reportedly taken during the anti-globalization demonstrations that took place in 2003 during the G-8 summit. The pictures were posted anonymously, and reportedly included the name and address of one of the officers.

On Friday, it was reported that the servers were returned to Rackspace, though the company said that Indymedia had not yet returned to using them. Rackspace declined to comment further on the matter.

All told, the seizure caused more than 20 of Indymedia's roughly 140 Web sites to go offline. According to reports released Thursday, most of the sites were back online, though six remained offline.

While the largest focus of this week's news was the seizure of servers at Rackspace, another prominent topic in this week's news was the range of seminars and user conferences being held by hosting companies and related businesses in recent weeks.

In a feature posted on Tuesday, Philbert Shih described the user conference held by Alabanza in the last week of September. The company took advantage of the opportunity to discuss its recent service outage, which came as a result of a fire near its Baltimore data center just a week before the conference. Alabanza CEO Tom Cunningham apologized for the incident and detailed some of the steps the company had already taken to ensure that the situation would not be repeated. The company also used the conference to discuss the state of the Web hosting business, and to describe some of its recent efforts at developing new resources for resellers, including tools for optimizing operational efficiencies and adding value for customers.

On Thursday, another feature by Philbert Shih described the growing influence of Web hosting at the Miva user conference held at the same time in San Diego. The conference brought together vendors from the e-commerce, Internet payment, Web analytics and Web hosting industries to exchange knowledge about the Miva platform and learn about new services, technologies and strategies. This year, the Web hosting industry was involved in a panel discussion of its own, as representatives from Affinity, Aplus.Net, Simplenet, Hostasaurus and Driftwood Network Services all outlined their own approaches to Web hosting and gave their thoughts on the Industry's direction.

And on Friday, Web hosting provider AIT announced that it had scheduled its 7th reseller conference for the weekend of November 5 to 7, 2004. The event, said AIT, would be part seminar, part networking retreat and would focus on how to build a successful business reselling Web hosting and Internet services. AIT says the two conferences held by the company in each of the last three years have grown steadily in attendance and itinerary. The events include sessions on marketing and partner development, technical talk and using the company's service offerings.

Following a story like the seizure of Rackspace's servers has an obvious advantage for Web hosting providers, most of whom have encountered legal concerns at one time or another, and all of whom would like to know some of the details of legal dealings like these in the event that they should one day encounter a similar situation. There will likely be more from this story in the weeks to come, as there has been no talk yet of whether there will be charges laid as a result of the seizure.