ResellersPanel, the reseller web hosting trailblazer, announces that it has expanded its data center network by adding Pionen – a Stockholm-based top-class facility operated by Bahnhof, one of Sweden’s largest ISPs. So far, the clients under ResellersPanel’s automated reseller hosting program have been able to choose between Peer1′s facility in Fremont, California, and the BlueSquare data center located in Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK.

The new Swedish facility has a very interesting history. It used to be a nuclear bunker during the Cold War era. Designed to serve as a fallout shelter and located inside a solid granite cave, 30 meters below the ground surface, it is said to be able to survive even a hydrogen bomb hit.

The whole facility is powered by two German Maybach submarine diesel engines, which can produce a power output of 1.5 megawatts. Its interior includes waterfalls, a greenhouse-like Network Operations Center, a glass-encircled conference room suspended above a collocation hall. A triple redundancy Internet backbone access is guaranteed by both fiber optics and extra copper lines.

All clients under ResellersPanel’s turnkey reseller program having shared hosting accounts can set the new Swedish facility as a default data center choice for their online stores from their Reseller Control Panel. Customers who have elected to choose a Virtual Private Server package instead will soon be able to take advantage of the Stockholm-located data center as well.

“Prompted by the huge popularity that our United Kingdom data center located 25 miles outside central London has gained among our European customers, we’ve decided to open the doors of still another renowned European data center for them in an attempt to better meet their growing needs,” said Nick Blaskov, CFO of ResellersPanel.

“The cluster technology that we’ll be shortly employing,” he continued, “reduces the load on a given server by distributing requests made to it to other servers, thus ensuring faster data access.” Mr. Blaskov concluded that “ResellersPanel’s portfolio of offered services will soon include a brand new data center option for clients located in yet another continent”.

About ResellersPanel
ResellersPanel is the first company to offer a completely free, fully-automated turnkey reseller hosting program, which has helped more than 100 000 resellers create web hosting companies of their own and sell shared hosting accounts, dedicated, semi-dedicated and Virtual Private Servers, domain names and SSL certificates, without having to purchase them beforehand. Beside the free program, ResellersPanel also offers a cPanel reseller hosting program.

The current generation of IP addresses (IPV4) will run out in 2011, at which point only new IPV6 addresses will be available. With such a huge change to the core of the Internet, only a minority of ISPs have active IPV6 networks while some do not even have plans to deploy them.

Karl Robinson, Managing Director of StratoGen said “The UK government, industry associations and the providers themselves have mostly failed to act in a sufficiently timely manner to ensure a successful switch to IPV6.  I fear we will see a panic rush to IPV6 when IPV4 addresses run out, without adequate planning or deployment testing by the providers. The subsequent fallout could put the short term survival of a number of businesses at risk.”

IPV6 is largely independent of the current IPV4 addressing scheme, with existing IPV4 devices unable to directly communicate with IPV6 machines. Current IPV6 usage is well below 1% of total Internet traffic.

David Elliott, Technical Director of StratoGen said “A successful global deployment of IPV6 is looking ever more unlikely. The ISPs and hosting providers are simply not investing the time and resources required to get their systems IPV6 ready. When businesses find they cannot get their office connected, or reach certain sites on the Internet there will be huge frustration.”

In addition hardware manufacturers have been reluctant to offer software upgrades for their devices to support IPV6 addressing, preferring to concentrate on new products which offer a payback for their investment in the new technology. Most existing devices could be updated to a ‘dual stack’ system which provides support for both addressing schemes, but software development costs are proving too costly.

“Customer apathy towards IPV6 will quickly reverse when the current generation of IP addresses runs out. As an industry, we are not doing enough to look after organisations that rely on us for their crucial business communications” said Robinson.

Set in 1,400 acres of parkland in the Usk Valley, Wales, The Celtic Manor Resort is playing host to this year’s Ryder Cup. The three hotels at the resort have six restaurants, five bars, three golf courses, two health clubs and many other leisure facilities, and it’s one of the premier leisure destinations in the UK. In order to further build its online presence and attract visitors in the run up to the Ryder Cup, the resort uses a combination of text descriptions, high-quality images on its websites and a promotional video featuring a tour of the premises and grounds.

With the Ryder Cup starting in early October (1st -3rd), online traffic is expected to increase significantly as the event approaches with 50% of the traffic coming from overseas. Therefore, Celtic Manor needed to ensure that visitors could watch the video content wherever they were in the world, without it stuttering, becoming jerky or affecting the overall performance of the website.

“After some research, hosting our website in multiple locations on multiple continents looked like a fairly expensive option,” said James Lewis, marketing manager at Celtic Manor. “We needed a method that allowed viewers from around the globe to get good quality video, but which didn’t require a large amount of configuration, wasn’t cost-prohibitive, and ideally, would be separate from our own website so that there were no performance degradations at peak times.”

In the end Celtic Manor opted to use Hostway’s Content Delivery Network (CDN). The CDN works by caching media-heavy components of the website, including images, videos or podcasts, on seven locations around the world, making it perfect for Celtic Manor’s requirements. Users requesting this content will be directed seamlessly to content stored on the closest server to their location, rather than the Celtic Manor website.

Each server requires very little configuration, and Celtic Manor’s current package can handle 50Gb of traffic each month (over 2,000 downloads or streaming users). Because the video is completely separate from Celtic Manor’s website, the video and high res images can be viewed as often as users wish without affecting the main site. The IT and marketing team have access to analytics about CDN usage, so that if viewings of the video increase, they can upgrade their package to give them more bandwidth. Similarly, if the Celtic Manor team need to take the video down for any reason, they can turn it off at very short notice.

“Although pictures are an essential tool on our website, it’s video content that really allows us to offer an in-depth experience of our resort,” continued Lewis. “The CDN is very cost-effective, doesn’t require much set up, and allows us to host high-quality video without affecting the performance of our site.”

Internap Network Services Corporation today announced that Rhapsody, the number-one digital music subscription service in the United States, has moved its Seattle-based data center to Internap’s newly expanded colocation facility in the Seattle area of Washington. The Internap facility provides a state-of-the-art green environment that also optimizes availability and IP network performance, ensuring that Rhapsody’s catalog of more than ten million music tracks are accessible to its subscribers.

Rhapsody provides customers with on-demand access to millions of songs across a range of devices, including PCs, mobile phones, MP3 players and Internet-connected TVs. Consumers are turning to digital music services as a primary way of buying and listening to music, with research from Nielsen SoundScan showing that online music sales accounted for 40 percent of U.S. music purchases in 2009. Digital music providers are in turn demanding that data center facilities can guarantee service levels around the availability of their music libraries to subscribers.

“As part of our transformation to an independent company, the decision around where to colocate our data center infrastructure was paramount,” said Paul Vandegrift, director of partner and vendor management at Rhapsody. “Internap provides all of the critical elements we are looking for – including an eco-conscious approach that aligns with our own corporate green standards. They also offer a highly reliable IP network that delivers an optimal subscriber experience through rapid, constant access to our comprehensive music library. Solving latency is critical to our business model, and Internap’s solution gives us peace of mind.”

Responding to continued market demand, Internap recently added 7,500 square feet of net sellable space to its Washington data center, marking the third expansion of the facility and bringing it to a total of 20,000 square feet. The expanded facility incorporates the latest in green design and best practices to maximize power and cooling efficiencies, including roof-top cooling units, high-efficiency lighting, “drop ceilings” and ultrasonic humidification technology.

As with all Internap data centers, the Seattle area location utilizes the company’s Performance IP™ network, which uses patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology to analyze network performance characteristics and deliver traffic over the fastest possible route. MIRO routes traffic over redundant, high-speed connections leveraging all of the major Internet backbones in each market, resulting in intelligent, optimized and highly-reliable delivery of customer content, applications and communications throughout the world. Because of the MIRO technology, Internap is able to offer a 100 percent uptime service level agreement.

“As more organizations outsource critical business infrastructure that houses customer-facing applications and services, the end user experience relies directly on the quality of the data center,” said Scott Hrastar, SVP of IP services at Internap. “With richer business applications and operations moving to the Internet, through models such as SaaS and cloud computing, latency and network performance become the critical path to business performance, transparency and ROI. MIRO delivers these benefits by ensuring the highest possible availability and performance for companies such as Rhapsody.”

Internap’s data center offering includes secure, scalable colocation and managed hosting services with advanced monitoring and 24/7 live customer support. Customers can easily access its Performance IP network and Content Delivery Network (CDN) from its worldwide locations.

ServInt, a pioneering provider of managed web hosting for businesses worldwide, today announced it has appointed Kevin Nicastro to the position of Director of Engineering.

Nicastro joined ServInt in 2004 and was instrumental in the implementation of ServInt’s award-winning VPS and SuperVPS products.  In addition, he was the lead architect for ServInt’s cross-country network.

As Director of Engineering, Nicastro leads the group that designs and develops the software and hardware required to deliver ServInt’s hosting services.  Nicastro and the Engineering group are responsible for projects ranging from back-end development to retrofitting legacy infrastructure.  Nicastro reports directly to ServInt Chief Technology Officer Matt Loschert.

“Kevin’s team is responsible for ServInt’s technological innovations,” Loschert said.  “His team has built the strongest network in ServInt history, and we’re ecstatic about our Engineering team’s ongoing work in building our next-generation hosting platform.”

ServInt Chief Operating Officer Christian Dawson added, “Kevin’s new position will provide him with the tools he needs to continue ServInt’s aggressive growth.  Kevin’s appointment is the latest in a series of announcements surrounding the growth of our management team.  With these leaders in place, ServInt is innovating the next generation of web-hosting solutions for businesses everywhere.”

Google announced today that Google Chrome Frame has reached stable status and left its beta version. The plug-in for bringing HTML5 and the latest Web apps to IE 6, 7, and 8 allows developers of websites and apps to support legacy browsers, with the plug-in handling the HTML5 rendering when a user’s old browser can’t handle the task.

Users that are currently using the Chrome Frame beta will be automatically updated to the stable version, and future updates will happen on the same update schedule as Chrome itself.

Swedish web host Binero today shut down the sites ”Sverigedemokrater.se“ and “Vaktad.se“. The domains were registered in the same Binero account under the company name of Gottfrid Swartholm Warg, founder of The Pirate Bay, while the content is hosted by Wikileaks host PRQ. When it could be proven that Swartholm was not the owner Binero shut down the domains and contacted the police. Both the sites contain personal information on people accused of sympathizing with the Sweden democrats, or being Security guards.

The web should be free, but no wild west. We have fought hard to improve the reputation of the hosting business for years, and whenever we find faulty user information, we act. In these cases we also know that the sites have caused considerable suffering. We acted as fast as we could to contact Gottfrid, even if that did take a while. He denied both ordering and owning the sites, said Binero founder and CEO, Anders Aleborg.

From the 20th of September onwards, Sverigedemokrater.se contained names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail and maps showing the way home to 5700 members of the Sweden democrat party (SD) or people who are to have requested information about the party. The information is believed to have come from an earlier hacker attack on the SD home page on April 16th. The site slogan was “Find a buddy near you“. During Thursday, the content was replaced with a torrent link leading to the members registry.

On the page Vaktad.se lay personal photos, phone numbers and adresses to hundreds of security guards, along with accusations of misuse of force or authority.
The legal responsibility for the content on the pages lies with the vendor offering the server hosting the content, which is PRQ, also known as the host handling the content for Wikileaks. If there is a suspicion of false user information and hence breach of contract, the vendor whose name servers host the domains can also act, which is the case here.
Since its creation in 2007, Binero has worked to offer fair terms and more openness in the swedish hosting industry: no binding period, no period of notice and a refund for unused time once the service is discontinued. In 2009 the host successfully ran a two week petition “Namnbank.se“ which stopped the Post- and Telecom Authority (PTS) proposal of prior filtering of all combinations of the word “bank“ in Swedish .se-domain names. In 2009 and 2010, Binero was elected “Best Swedish web host“ by Internetworld magazine.

Hosting.com, the leading provider of hybrid hosting solutions – managed, cloud and colocation, today announced the addition of Log Manager and Threat Manager to its cloud product portfolio. This solution provides a cost-effective security and compliancy solution to SMBs and mid-level Enterprises in a production-ready cloud environment. Organizations of all sizes utilize Alert Logic’s Log Manager and Threat Manager to meet IT security compliance requirements for vulnerability management, intrusion protection and log management.

Hosting.com customers face a wide range of PCI, HIPAA, SOX and GLBA regulations that are designed to protect consumers’ rights and ensure corporate integrity. While it’s important for companies to take steps to satisfy these mandates, compliance can be costly. Many organizations face several challenges on their way to compliance, such as realigning and often straining IT resources and making significant infrastructure investments that are required to meet these regulations.

Alert Logic Log Manager™ is an easy-to-deploy solution to address the complex and costly security and regulatory compliance management issues facing organizations today. Log Manager provides cloud-powered log management to collect, store, report and correlate log data in one of Hosting.com’s highly secure, redundant SAS 70 Type II audited datacenters. Log Manager cost-effectively collects, aggregates, correlates, alerts and reports on log data without forcing customers to deploy costly infrastructure.

Alert Logic Threat Manager™ combines intrusion protection and vulnerability management technology into a single solution that offers both proactive and reactive protection from the latest threats. Threat Manager’s unique Software-as-a-Service architecture eliminates the false alarms typically associated with other network intrusion detection technologies.

Hosting.com and Alert Logic will host a free webinar on How to Overcome the 3 Biggest PCI Compliance Challenges with Cloud-Powered Solutions on Thursday, October 28 at 1 pm Eastern. The webinar will address how cloud-powered solutions can provide effective and sustainable log management, IDS, and vulnerability management; an affordable and easy to implement solution; and a reduction in the amount of time your team spends on PCI compliance. Register for the Webinar.

Trent Pham, Hosting.com Senior Manager, Security Service, added, “With the introduction of our multi-tenant security solution, organizations of all sizes have access to the necessary tools to protect their critical data and applications and most importantly, their customers. As more companies move to cloud and hybrid environments, they require the necessary controls to keep their data and applications secure. This security service can be added to any platform service or hybrid solution and is available across all Hosting.com datacenters.”

Hosting.com helps organizations achieve Compliance Solutions across our Cloud, Colocation, Dedicated and Hybrid Hosting services with state-of-the-art services, such as Log Manager and Threat Manager. From a PCI-certified datacenter, SAS 70 Type II certifications, firewalls, and network segmenting to backups, data archiving and server replication – customers can mix and match the level of compliance necessary to meet their business needs.

Together, Alert Logic and Hosting.com cloud-based security and compliance solutions deliver the following key benefits:

Enables regulatory compliance by providing IDS, Vulnerability Management, and Log Management
Improve network security by detecting security incidents and vulnerabilities along with making log data available for analysis and forensics
Reduce datacenter footprint and costs through our Software-as-a-Service based delivery model

“Businesses of all sizes are subject to the same regulatory scrutiny and threats to data privacy,” said Gray Hall, CEO at Alert Logic. “By taking advantage of our APIs for integration and multi-tenant technology, Hosting.com serves as a showcase for how service providers can partner with Alert Logic to address the needs of their customers, large and small.”

Hosting.com customers access the secure web-based Customer Portal to manage their Alert Logic security solutions. The Customer Portal provides the ability to be alerted to attacks, manage firewall blocking rules, search log data, and to execute and review vulnerability scans and run reports. The portal allows customers to seamlessly manage security in their managed hosting environment. View the Log Manager and Threat Manager demos.

The Planet, the global hosting leader, today announced it is among exhibitors at the 2010 Channel Partners Conference & Expo, taking place Sept. 20-22 in Washington, D.C., at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center. The company will showcase its Partner Plus program at booth 1043, including its newly enhanced referral program that provides industry-leading commissions for partners.

“Solutions providers look for partners they can trust with their clients’ IT requirements,” said Drew Jenkins, The Planet’s channel sales manager. “Our referral program gives partners increased opportunities to build revenue streams with some of the industry’s most competitive commissions, coupled with The Planet’s multi-faceted hosting capabilities. This conference affords us the valuable opportunity to have real-time conversations with current and potential partners, in addition to staying on top of trends across the channel landscape.”

As a show special, The Planet is offering conference attendees one free month of Server Cloud, its high-performance cloud hosting product. Participants can stop by booth 1043 to acquire the promo code, redeemable on The Planet’s website at http://www.theplanet.com. The company is also continuing its popular Server Challenge, which tasks conference attendees to post the fastest time in correctly rebuilding a server. An Asus Eee PC netbook will be awarded to the participant who wins the Server Challenge, and The Planet will also hold a drawing for a Flip mini camcorder.

Internet TV will soon hit the mass market as more consumers turn their backs on traditional sets and opt to view online, with global sales of internet enabled TVs predicted to reach over 90m by 2013, finds Business Insights.

According to a new report by the industry and market analyst, the world is now entering the ‘era of internet TV’ with consumers expecting to be able to access their TV and video content from the internet.

Richard Absalom, a Business Insights analyst, said: “The internet era of TV will create mass market reach with consumers looking for content to be delivered to them across many different devices, anytime and anywhere.
“User experience will be key to the market as consumers will expect the same quality viewing experience whether they are watching a TV, a PC or their mobile phone screen.

“For TV service operators the stakes are high and those that have a good strategy for converging content across various devices will attract new customers and generate new revenue streams.”

According to Absalom, Google and Apple will be the strongest players in the internet TV market across all three screens, although they will face major competition from TV and games consoles manufacturers.

Meanwhile he believes that TV apps will soon become commonplace, propelling web-based services and mobile-like apps to the core of the TV viewing experience.

He said: “Global sales of internet enabled TV sets are forecast to reach over 90m by 2013, which gives an indication of the high demand for internet TV services. For service providers to exploit fully the upcoming potential, they need to instigate a strategic approach to the planning, creation and delivery of a multi-channel brand engagement plan.”