(WEB HOST INDUSTRY WEEK IN REVIEW) — This week’s biggest stories were of the really attention-grabbing sort – an outage at a very big company and a new program at an even bigger one. But the week’s big trend was the string of studies that reports that emerged with the arrival of the New Year.
On Wednesday, Google reported that it had launched a reseller program – big news for hosting providers, which had rightly considered Google a powerful competitor up to this point. Google’s reseller program is designed to enable IT companies to provide their customers with the Google Apps office tools, while receiving a 20 percent discount. It’s not a great web hosting product right now, but with Google’s involvement in hosting offerings of various stripes, a real reseller program is a promising step.
On Thursday, we reported on an outage that had affected an unknown number of sites hosted by Go Daddy. The downtime, which caused some customers to appear offline intermittently for several hours Wednesday, was the result of a denial of service attack, says the company, though the motivation for the attack wasn’t apparent. Go Daddy representatives said the attack affected only a small percentage of its customers – but with the company’s enormous customer base, even that small percent could mean thousands of websites impacted.
While the Google news was bait for speculation and the Go Daddy news drew plenty of discussion of its on, much of the week’s news came from the somewhat less sensational release of studies.
On Monday we covered the release of the Symantec 2008 State of the Data Center report, which offered the results of a survey conducted in September and October by Applied Research. The study spoke to 1,600 data center managers, and the report discusses some of their issues and motivators for 2009.
On Tuesday, we covered the release of Appriver’s year end “State of Security” report for 2008. Written by analyst Fred Touchette, the report covers the conditions surrounding security for the past year. The report describes some of the conditions that result in users falling prey to phishing and malware schemes, and points to some of the biggest security events of the year, including the notable takedown of the hosting company McColo, and the subsequent drop in spam volumes.
And on Friday, Netcraft released its first Web Server Survey of 2009, describing the market share for various web server platforms according to the results of its research during the month of December. The January report, which saw an unusual dip in responses over the previous month, showed Apache gaining market share as Microsoft slipped.
While this week’s news didn’t hold much that promised ongoing drama, it’s a safe assumption that the development of Google’s reseller program will be a process worth some attention.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
No related posts.
