theWHIR

February 10, 2012 -- In the week ending February 10, 2012, there were a few promotions carried over from last week as well as one love-themed promotion just in time for Valentine's Day. Action Web Group launched its Sweetheart Special, Asphosting.com.au is offering a 20 percent discount on its reseller hosting plans, WestHost is continuing to offer .CO domains at a discounted rate and A2 Hosting offers its Core VPS Hosting package for $1. - theWHIR

February 10, 2012 -- Bandwidth connectivity solutions provider AboveNet announced on Tuesday it has named Michael Tighe its new vice president of marketing. AboveNet's private optical network delivers network and IP services in and among some of the largest hosting providers and data center operators in the US and European markets. - theWHIR

February 10, 2012 -- -- Open source web content management provider DotNetNuke announced on Friday it has launched its newly redesigned DotNetNuke Store, intended for developers to purchase modules, skins, and application extensions for the DotNetNuke platform. - theWHIR

February 10 - 2012 -- Yahoo Small Business is taking the “trusted advisor” principle a step farther these days with the development of its Yahoo Small Business Advisor site, an information portal that puts the advisory role before even the service provider relationship. - theWHIR

February 10, 2012 -- Managed web server provider SevenL Networks has attained the 7L.com domain name for an undisclosed amount from a private owner to rebrand its company. According to the press release, negotiations were prolonged as it was hard to reach an agreement on the price of the domain with the previous owner. - theWHIR

February 10, 2012 -- - IT services firm Verne Global announced this week it has officially opened its first data center in Reykjanesbær, formerly a US Naval Air Station, just west of Reykjavik, Iceland. The 1,640 square foot data center, whose cost is estimated at $700 million, sits on 45 acres of land. - theWHIR

February 10, 2012 -- Cloud and managed hosting provider iomart announced on Thursday that it has carried out a group-wide virtualization for UK government office supply provider office2office. According to the press release, prior to this, o2o's IT was focused on a single set of offices and one server room in Norwich. - theWHIR

February 10, 2012 -- Data center operator Telx announced has announced new details about its upcoming flagship 215,000-square-foot, three-story data center at 2 Peekay Drive in Clifton, New Jersey, which is expected to be completed by the fourth quarter of 2012. - theWHIR

February 10, 2012 -- Web hosting provider ZNet Technologies announced on Friday that it has released a new website WHMCSExtras to offer web hosts WHMCS addons. ZNet says WHMCSExtras focuses on enhancing the WHMCS billing platform with four Admin area addons, including a renewal addon, upsell addon, partner addon and client profile addon. - theWHIR

February 10, 2012 -- An Iowa state economic development official said Thursday that the state is competing with Nebraska for a $1.2 billion data center project dubbed "Project Edge". The company hopes to break ground in May, with an initial first phase investment of $500 million. Debi Durham, director of the state Partnership for Economic Progress, said that while she cannot disclose the name of the company because of a confidentiality agreement, she did confirm that it is not Google, IBM or Microsoft or IBM -- companies that have all been speculated and currently have other data centers in Iowa. - theWHIR

February 10, 2012 -- Telecommunications provider Cincinnati Bell announced on Friday its plans to restructure or acquire financing for its data center division, operated by colocation firm CyrusOne. Cincinnati Bell acquired CyrusOne in June 2010 for $525 million to bolster its data center and colocation business. In 2011, CyrusOne generated revenues of approximately $185 million. - theWHIR

February 9, 2012 -- Web analytics firm Netcraft released the results of its February 2012 web server survey this week, and while Apache has gained the most hostnames, nginx was the only server to experience a non-negligible market share increase this month. - theWHIR

February 9, 2012 -- Cloud hosting provider ScaleMatrix announced on Tuesday it has launched the ScaleMatrix Channel Partner Program. As a provider of cloud hosting, colocation, and data security solutions, the partner program should allow the company to reach a greater market through its channel partners that it did not have access to before. - theWHIR

February 9, 2012 -- Distributed denial of service protection services firm Prolexic Technologies announced on Thursday it has closed an $8 million Series B investment led by private equity firm Camden Partners. DDoS attacks have been increasing at exponential rates in recent years, putting all Internet surfers and websites at risk. Recognizing this, DDoS mitigation services should be a standard part of business continuity/disaster recovery planning and be included as part of all hosting companies' services. - theWHIR

February 9, 2012 -- Google is set to launch its cloud storage service in the next few weeks or months, according to several reports on Thursday. While Google currently offers several storage products such as Picasa and Docs, this will be the its first unified cloud storage solution. - theWHIR

February 9, 2012 -- Content delivery network operator Akamai Technologies announced on Wednesday it has named James Benson its executive vice president and chief financial officer, succeeding J. Donald Sherman, starting March 1. The news follows the recent completion of Akamai's acquisition of web performance optimization technology provider Blaze Software. Content delivery networks are beneficial to hosting companies in that they provide added value to their customers, which translates to growth of business and increase in revenue. - theWHIR

February 9, 2012 -- Google will disable online revocation checks in future versions of Chrome, and will reuse its existing update mechanism to maintain a list of revoked SSL certificates instead, according to a blog post on Sunday by Google researcher Adam Langley. There are many problems with online revocation checks including soft-fails and compromised security if an attacker intercepts HTTPS connections and bypasses the revocation checks. - theWHIR

February 9, 2012 -- Cloud hosting solutions provider Virtustream announced on Thursday it has completed its previously announced acquisition of cloud exchange software developer Enomaly. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed. First announced in December, the deal seems like an appropriate fit, joining two companies in the hosting space that provide cloud-based hosting and management solutions. - theWHIR

February 9, 2012 -- CenterBeam executive vice president, North American Solution Center and chief customer officer Anthony Hardt says in a phone interview with the WHIR that the company aims to continuously improve through its feedback from customers, but also from its employees. - theWHIR

February 9, 2012 -- Cloud services provider VPS.NET announced on Thursday its plans to expand its offerings to reach a total of 13 separate global locations by April. According to the press release, the new locations include Singpore, Frankfurt, Paris, Manchester and three new locations in the US. VPS.NET specializes in cloud hosting and offers VPS cloud servers, as well as VPN, CDN and geo hosting. - theWHIR

February 9, 2012 -- - The Ministry of Tourism of Brazil has sent a letter to domain marketplace Sedo, demanding it takes down an .EU domain whose name suggests it involves Brazilian-related porn content, according to a report by TechDirt. This appears to be a clear case of a country's government overstepping their boundaries, and a situation that any hosting company - large or small - could potentially find themselves in. - theWHIR

February 9, 2012 -- Cloud software and CDN provider OnApp announced on Thursday that it has named Carsten Sjoerup chief technology officer. In this role, Carsten will lead OnApp's development teams in the UK, Malaysia and Ukraine. OnApp cloud software enables hosting companies and service providers to create cloud services, and recently launched a CDN designed specifically for web hosts. - theWHIR

February 8, 2012 -- Content delivery network provider Akamai Technologies announced on Wednesday it has acquired performance optimization technology provider Blaze Software in a cash transaction. This marks the second acquisition for leading CDN operator Akamai in the past couple months, which recently purchased rival CDN provider Cotendo for a net cash payment of about $268 million. - theWHIR

February 8, 2012 -- Web hosting provider Verio announced on Wednesday that open source email and collaboration platform VMware Zimbra for OEM resellers and via its partners. Zimbra was bought by VMware in 2010 from Yahoo! and has two versions: an open-source version, and a commercially supported version Zimbra Network. Zimbra Open Source Edition provides organizations with email, calendar and collaboration. - theWHIR

February 8, 2012 -- Web hosting provider Hosting.com announced on Tuesday that it has launched application performance monitoring to give its customers as a way to manage applications in the infrastructure stack. Availability of applications is expected to be 24/7, so customers can use this type of monitoring solution to ensure the optimization and uptime of applications. - theWHIR

February 8, 2012 -- IT services provider CSC announced on Tuesday that it has named Mike Lawrie president and chief executive officer, as well as current board director Rodney F. Chase as non-executive chairman of the board of directors. Lawrie will join the company no later than March 31, 2012. He succeeds Michael W. Laphen, who previously announced in October he is retiring as the company's chairman, president and CEO. - theWHIR

February 8, 2012 -- Email security provider eleven announced on Wednesday that it has seen explosive growth of phishing email in December and January. According to the report, phishing email's share surged by 194 percent in December, and by a further 214 percent in January. - theWHIR

February 8, 2012 -- Security researcher Moxie Marlinspike is calling on the support of browser developers to participate in his new open-source project that is designed to authenticate a secure sockets layer certificate's credentials, according to a report by The Register. Convergence, which is currently in its Beta phase, is available as a Firefox add-on and enables users to query notary servers so that they can ensure the legitimacy of an SSL certificate attached to a particular site. - theWHIR

February 8, 2012 -- Digital certificate authority Trustwave admitted via a blog post on Saturday that it issued a SSL certificate to a private company to spy on SSL-protected connections within its corporate network. This move has caused some in the Mozilla community to suggest Trustwave's root certificate be removed from Firefox. - theWHIR