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News: DNGLOBE LLC Loses ICANN Accreditation For Failure to Pay Outstanding Fees
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Making the Internet more accessible around the globe, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (www.icann.org) has opened the domain application process to non-Latin characters for website addresses with its inclusion of internationalised domain names. Egypt's communications minister said Egypt will be leading this effort as the first country to open an Arabic language Internet domain, according to a BBC report.
After years of intense technical testing, policy development, and global co-operation, ICANN rolled out the groundwork for the first Internet addresses containing non-Latin characters from start to finish thanks to the ICANN board's approval of the new Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process last month.
An Associated Press report notes that Egypt, Russia, and four other applications have applied for country code top level domains in their scripts. Bulgaria has also reportedly applied for a ccTLD in Cyrillic script, according to local reports.
"It's an historic moment," ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom told an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, according to AP. "Of 1.6 billion [Internet users], more than half are born using languages that do not use Latin scripts, so this means that for more than half of users today of the Internet, they will be able to type domain names entirely in their own language."
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Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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