(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Cloud computing did as much as any other technology, idea or product to define web hosting in 2009. It was a constant subject of conversation in the industry - a major topic at just about every hosting event this year, regularly addressed in new product announcements and press releases and was the buzzword service that customers sought out and hosting companies worked to align their products with.

It would be next to impossible to even summarize everything that took place under the cloud computing banner this year, but, in reviewing the cloud’s effect on the hosting landscape in 2009, I’ll certainly try to hit most of the high points.

Let’s start close to the year’s chronological end, in late November, as Microsoft officially introduced the long-discussed Windows Azure cloud platform at its Professional Developer’s Conference. Still in its “community technology preview” stage, the Microsoft cloud services platform will enter a production environment on January 1, 2010.

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Original article by David Hamilton, www.thewhir.com

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A report published Monday on the Register said a new phishing scam has been uncovered, targeting the webmasters of legitimate websites by appearing to be their hosting providers and asking for their administrator login details.

The new scam, which was reported on Saturday by security researcher Gary Warner, via a post on his blog, targets the customers of a long list of hosting providers, including some of the most widely used hosting companies – Go Daddy, Hostgator and Yahoo! among them.

Customers of these and other hosting companies, a list of more than 90 in total, have received emails that vary somewhat in content, but ultimately ask, “due to the system maintenance, we kindly ask you to take a few minutes to confirm your FTP details.”

Clicking on a link in the email takes the user to a page that imitates the appearance of the widely-used hosting control panel cPanel. Should the customer enter their information, they are then forwarded to their hosting provider’s login page.

“The goal seems to really be capturing the FTP userids and passwords of webmasters,” writes Werner. “You can imagine what sorts of badness this campaign may lead to.”

As pointed out in the Register story, an increasingly popular tactic among phishers, and distributers of Malware, is corrupting trusted websites, often a step in the distribution of the viruses that create botnets then used to distribute spam.

The Register cites recently-launched security firm Dasient, a company that provides antivirus-type security scanning and repair for websites, as reporting that 640,000 websites were infected with code designed to launch malware attacks on visitors.

From the webmaster’s perspective, having a website corrupted with malware can lead to a site being added on blacklists that can be very difficult to make it away from. Those blacklists are used by Google and Firefox, as well as other tools, to warn users they may be entering unsafe websites.

Werner advises webmasters targeted by the attack to let their web hosting companies know they have been targeted. We would similarly advise web hosting companies named on Werner’s list to let customers know they might be targeted by this sort of phishing email, in much the way banks have been doing for several years.

Original article written by Liam Eagle, www.thewhir.com

For all Windows hosting accounts we can now restrict access to them by IP address.  This includes the ability to block all except certain IPs as well as allow all except certain IPs.  This setting is made on the IIS website properties.

This restriction is also available on a per application root (directory) basis.  To add this to your website please contact our support team (http://help.brinkster.com).

Last week we launched br.st. We worked hard to make sure it was the best place to experience Twitter on the net. We did not get the press coverage we anticipated. So, to get the word out we decided instead of buying advertising we would do a giveaway contest and give the money in the form of prizes to our users.

We are giving away 21 Nintendo Wii game systems every day (except Fridays) from December 1st through December 24th. AND we are giving away 4 MacBook Pros (13 inch) every Friday in December.

It is pretty simple to enter: login to br.st, click the Wii or MacBook button on the right sidebar, submit the tweet, and you are entered! You can enter each giveaway up to five (5) times per day. And you have to re-enter the contest every day for the Nintendo Wii and every week for the MacBook Pro.

Read the main giveaway page, the FAQs, and the rules. Here’s to hoping you win!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

New Web-based Twitter Client Brings Facebook-like Experience to Twitter

Phoenix, AZ November 23, 2009 – Brinkster, a web hosting company, launched br.st (burst) a web-based Twitter client (at http://br.st), providing a rich experience similar to Facebook. Br.st offers features such as: “as you type” URL shortening, text shortening, expanding conversations, sharing of images and files, inline previews of images and videos, and advanced statistics. “We are excited to debut a Twitter client that truly changes the way you experience Twitter,” said Jared Stauffer, CEO of Brinkster.

By showing users previews of shared images, videos and links, and expanding conversations (via @replies) br.st provides a rich Twitter experience that users have long been requesting. “One thing that makes Twitter difficult to use is the need to click to another website to see what your friends are sharing. With br.st you can see what your friends are sharing right in your timeline,” adds Stauffer. Br.st displays previews of images shared on br.st along with Twitpic, yFrog, Pic.im, Pikchur, Tweetphoto, Pic.gd, Twitgoo, and Picktor. Video uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo, TwitVid, Vidly, Yahoo and Google are also automatically displayed.

Real conversations are now possible on Twitter with the “open conversation” button at br.st. By expanding the conversation users can view what other users were replying to and all previous tweets that were part of the conversation. Users can also expand links from over 130 URL shorteners, taking the guess work out of what lies beneath the commonly used shortened URLs.

The other side of the experience is how easy it is to tweet and share links, images and files on Twitter with br.st. The box users type their tweet into has been enhanced to automatically shorten links that get typed or copy-and-pasted in. When a user adds an image or a file, a short link for the item is created and placed within the tweet. Another feature that is unique to br.st is the Text Shortener. Often when composing a tweet, users have a hard time keeping it under 140 characters. At br.st you click a button and your tweet is shortened by changing your “for” to “4” and your “and” to “&” along with many other commonly used abbreviations.

Other advanced features br.st offers are the displaying of Geo Tags found in images, preview of Google Maps found in short links, comments on images and files uploaded, and advanced real-time statistics for br.st links, images, and files. Br.st also supports Twitter’s new Lists functionality.

Br.st is a service of Brinkster (www.brinkster.com, @brinkster), a 10 year veteran of the web hosting industry.

About Brinkster

Started in 1999, Brinkster is a web hosting company with customers in over 175 countries supporting over 60,000 domains. The company offers shared web hosting, dedicated servers and email hosting services from its own private top-tier datacenter in Phoenix, Arizona. http://www.brinkster.com

Contact Information: press@brinkster.com

Brinkster is a registered trademark of Brinkster Communications Corporation.  All other names of companies or products may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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BEIJING, October 27 (Xinhuanet) — Yahoo’s web hosting service, GeoCities, has closed after 15 years of offering people the ability to set up their own website. GeoCities once boasted millions of users but has fallen out of fashion in recent years. Free blogging services such as Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad as well as social networking sites have left GeoCities with fewer users.

Yahoo acquired the site for 3.57 billion U.S. dollars in 1999 at the height of the dotcom boom, though the site had been operating since 1994 after being established by David Bohnett and John Rezner as the Beverly Hills Internet. Yahoo said sites would no longer be accessible from 26th October, however some pages will still be accessible via the nonprofit Internet Archive project. The giant digital library, which has been archiving the public web since 1996, has set up a special project to archive GeoCities before it is lost forever. “We’ve collected a lot of GeoCities sites over the years - but might not have every site and every page,” the Internet Archive said.

It had also asked GeoCities users to check whether their site has been archived before Yahoo pulls the plug. “GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the web for almost 15 years,” it said. Several companies, including Yahoo, have also tried to entice GeoCities users to move their pages to paid-for hosting services. In a written statement, a spokeswoman said that Yahoo decided “after careful consideration” to shut down the site. “We have enjoyed hosting Web sites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we’re proud of the community that has been built,” the statement said. “Yahoo! discontinued GeoCities on October 26, 2009, as part of our ongoing effort to prioritize our portfolio of products and services in order to deliver the best products to consumers.” The statement noted that other Yahoo features, including Yahoo! 360, My Web and Yahoo! Briefcase, have also been closed recently.

In April this year, Yahoo said that it was closing the site and would now focus on helping “customers build new relationships online”. When Yahoo announced the end of the GeoCities, Rupert Goodwins, editor of the ZDNet technology website, said it was the end of an era. “I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet. It was a fascinating experiment in the pre-industrial era of the internet.”

For those that have failed to download or move their pages, it is now too late to act. According to Yahoo users who do not download files and images before October 26, 2009 will no longer be able to access the data. “After October 26, your GeoCities files will be deleted from our servers, and will not be recoverable,” a statement on their website reads.

Original article written by Rob Welham, xinhuanet.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Phoenix, AZ September 2, 2009 – Brinkster, a web hosting company, debuts a new URL shortener called br.st! (burst).  br.st! allows you to take a long URL, shorten it, share it to 10+ social networking sites, and then track the traffic to it.  In the crowded field of URL shorteners br.st! offers advantages over others with advanced analytics, scanning for malware, preview links with screenshots, easy posting to social networking sites, and iPhone bookmarklets.

Several URL shorteners offer analytics, including market leader Bit.ly, but few offer them as advanced as br.st!  With br.st!, real-time stats are automatically in the visitors own time zone and can display the comparison of up three metrics graphically (total, country, region/state).  Bit.ly displays stats in US Eastern Standard time zone only, does not show location deeper than country, and shows only one metric graphically at a time.

br.st! stats showing three metrics compared.

br.st! scans for malware three different times during the use of a br.st! link.  Each scan is done against the Google Safe Browsing list that is updated every 30 minutes.  Links are scanned when they are first submitted to be shortened, when a preview link is accessed, and when a short link is clicked on.  This helps prevent someone from submitting a link and then adding malware to it after it has been shortened.

br.st! scans for malware three different times during the use of a br.st! link.  Each scan is done against the Google Safe Browsing list that is updated every 30 minutes.  Links are scanned when they are first submitted to be shortened, when a preview link is accessed, and when a short link is clicked on.  This helps prevent someone from submitting a link and then adding malware to it after it has been shortened.

br.st! users also have the option of adding a “-” to the end of any br.st! link to view a preview page.  The preview page displays a screenshot, page title, meta keywords, malware scan information, and the full destination link.

After shortening a link at br.st!, users can type a tweet or post and select from 10+ social networking sites including Twitter and Facebook to send it to.

br.st! also offers bookmarklets for use on the iPhone with Tweetie and Twitterrific.  The iPhone bookmarklet takes the website address that a user is viewing and automatically shortens and posts it into Tweetie or Twitterrific. http://br.st/iphone-bookmarklet.aspx

br.st! is also planning on releasing Google Analytics integration and image and file sharing in the next 60-90 days.

About Brinkster

br.st! is a service of Brinkster, a 10 year old web hosting company with customers in over 175 countries supporting over 60,000 domains. The company offers shared web hosting, dedicated servers and email hosting services from its own private top-tier datacenter in Phoenix, Arizona. http://www.brinkster.com

More information can be found about Google Safe Browsing at the following websites:
http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing/
http://www.stopbadware.org/

Brinkster is a registered trademark of Brinkster Communications Corporation.
All other names of companies or products may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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If you are a Brinkster customer and using the PayFlowPro DLL you will need to update your website in reference to the information below.

The following is from: http://developer.paypal-portal.com/t5/blogs/blogarticlepage/blog-id/devblog/article-id/991

In September 2009, PayPal will begin upgrading its Payflow gateway service from a single-tier SSL server certificate hierarchy to a new, more secure two-tier hierarchy. All older Payflow integrations must be updated to support the new certificate type. PayPal has released a new Software Development Kit (SDK version 4.3+) for Microsoft .NET and Java; along with a HTTPS interface for all other programming languages. All Payflow Pro integrations will need to be upgraded to this new SDK or the HTTPS interface before September 2009.

Information on this upgrade is available at www.paypal.com/gatewayupdate. Here you will find step-by-step instructions to guide you through the update process. During the transition time, you can run both integrations, allowing you to test the new integration and ensure that there will be no transition issues when your old certificate expires.

For more information on this update please visit: www.paypal.com/gatewayupdate.”

With the recent creation of the Brinkster fan page on Facebook, and the creation of the Brinkster Twitter page; Brinkster has officially taken the leap into social networking.  We will be updating these pages daily with important, relevant information, both regarding Brinkster, and the web hosting and technology industries.  In addition, we will also be offering specials and promotions featured exclusively on Facebook and Twitter.

We invite you to come and join us today on Facebook and Twitter.