Web Host Industry Review: Weekend Reading – January 28, 2011

By Liam Eagle, January 28, 2011

A graph taken from Renesys' website which shows Egypt's sudden Internet downtime

Every Friday, WHIR editor in chief Liam Eagle assembles some notes on stories from the web hosting industry this week that you might have missed or that might, for one reason or another, be worth revisiting.

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Friday was a busy day around the WHIR newsroom this week, as most of the companies, government agencies and African nations with things to get done before the end of the week waited until we closed for the day on Thursday.

Of course I’m being glib, but waking up this morning to the news that the Egyptian government had decided (and, perhaps more significantly, managed) to basically turn off the country’s connection to the Internet was pretty astonishing.

And it had us scrambling, especially falling as it did on the eve of InterXion’s IPO – just about as significant a hosting industry specific event as we’ve seen in the young year of 2011. We also posted a Noise Filter story collecting certain points of fact and opinions from around the web on today’s offering.

The title for most notable hosting industry event of 2011, however, can be safely assigned to the late Thursday announcement that telecommunications carrier Verizon had agreed to acquire publicly-traded data center operator Terremark for $1.4 billion. 

Rounding out that very busy Friday was a bit of a continuation of the WikiLeaks saga that dominated headlines through the last six or seven weeks of 2010. It was reported that the FBI had obtained 40 warrants related to DDoS attacks that have taken place in apparent support of the whistle-blowing website.

Earlier in the week, we saw some other interesting regulatory news, as it was reported that the US Department of Justice was seeking new data retention requirements for ISPs.

And pulling on that thread a little more, WHIR blogger David Snead put up an excellent post this week looking at some of the rules around the effects of injunctions on hosting providers, in light of a recent Seventh Circuit court ruling that an injunction involving a customer’s content could not be enforced against the host.

One more very interesting thing from earlier in the week – after years of non-specific depletion warnings, Hurricane Electric said this week that it expects the final blocks of IPV4 addresses to be issued at the top assigning level by next week, meaning that not far down the road, Regional Registries and ISPs may not be able to fulfill requests for IPV4 addresses.

Of course, this week, as with every week, we’ve gathered a collection of the hosting industry’s sales and promotions, which you can browse in our Sales and Promos Roundup.

Finally, I’d love for you to check out something that we actually conducted last week. We had a great webinar, sponsored by LogicBoxes, on the ICANN accreditation process for registrars. And on Tuesday of this week, I posted the video version up to the WHIR Webinars archive. I highly recommend it.