Media Temple, Web hosting provider for Adobe, ABC, Sony, NBC, Time, Volkswagen, and Starbucks, was hit with a sophisticated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack Tuesday.

The outage began about 3:50 p.m. PDT, when Media Temple’s domain name servers were deluged by a flood of traffic coming from outside the U.S., and lasted a total of about two-and-a-half hours, according to a tech support representative at the Los Angeles-based company.

“Due to the sophistication of the attack, our normal DDoS firewall prevention techniques didn’t block the attack adequately, as the traffic appears to be legitimate,” the company reported at around 5:40 p.m. PDT.

The company said it had initially blocked all traffic from Asia, South America, and Mexico to reduce strain on the network, but later removed the blocks. As of 6:10 p.m. PDT the network was reported stable.

“Overall, network health is normalizing, however more work must be done to mitigate the effects of this incident and prevent future occurrences,” the company said, adding that it would provide an update at 10 p.m. PDT.

Company representatives did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Update May 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT: A tech support representative at Media Temple said the outage lasted a total of about two-and-a-half hours.

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Securing the best web hosting deal for your new site or sites isn’t just a matter of finding the cheapest web host out there. Opt for that and you’ll soon be faced with more headaches than you can imagine. Here are 10 tips to help you find the best web hosting deal for you!

1. Space and Bandwidth – Make sure you have enough space and bandwidth for what you intend to do. If you’re hosting more than one site on the account, you’ll need to do some calculations. Also, remember, there effectively is no such thing as “unlimited bandwidth” despite claims to the contrary.

2. Competitive Pricing – While you don’t necessarily want the cheapest web host on the block, you also don’t want to overpay. Do some comparison shopping and make sure the price you are being quoted is in line with market standards.

3. Pay Month to Month – If in the event you need/want to make a quick exit from your web hosting plan, make sure you can do this without a big cost to you. The best way is to pay month to month.

4. Don’t Tolerate Downtime – In this day and age, with gobs of server redundancy available, there is no excuse for a prolonged downtime. Outages happen, but if you are down for anything approaching 24 hours, seek another web host.

5. Don’t Buy Domains From Your Web Hosting Company – There are many nightmare stories on the Web about customers unable to extricate their domains from the host where they also hosted them. Best answer is to keep the transactions separate, and buy your domains elsewhere.

6. Back Up Your Site – Make sure you back up your site onto your own computer, as web hosts backup can and do fail. Don’t be a victim; make sure you have a copy.

7. Avoid Being Throttled – If you are on a shared server and begin using at or near your allotment, (whether or not you have an “unlimited” plan!) you may find your site being a victim of “domain throttling”, where the host will scale back your resources, effectively forcing you into a bigger hosting plan. Ask about this up front.

8. Control Panel – Sign up with a host that has an easy to use control panel. In most cases this will mean cPanel.

9. Spam Servers? – The last thing you need is for the search engines to think you are a spammer, merely by virtue of being on servers that have been tagged as agents of spam in the past. A good way to check this is to run your host’s IP address on the Spamhaus Blocked IP List at Spamhaus.org

10. Check Out Support – If at all possible check out the support you’ll receive once you’re a client. Phone support is best, live chat next best, and getting back to you in reasonable amount of time is essential.

Do your due diligence with most, if not all, of these and you’ll be on the way to the beginning of a fruitful relationship.

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Original article by www.intac.net

(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

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

Joomla has announced the immediate availability of its 1.5.11 security release.

Users of the platform have been urged to download the release to upgrade their system as soon as possible by Joomla.

Updating the Joomla Hosting platform could allow continued ease of the web hosting service, which allows a website to be up and running as soon as possible.

Ensuring security fixes are in place can support web developers and designers in efficiently building websites for clients and to provide an effective service.

Joomla last announced a security release 11 weeks ago and the Development Working Group claimed that it continues to provide frequent updates for the Joomla community.

Individuals and businesses who require a “full-fledge, stable, extendable system that will help you to build a powerful website” can use Joomla, a Tech Republic blog noted.

The publication added: “Joomla is perfect for enterprise deployment where every piece of content must be well tracked.”

“Standout features” of the content management system include a language manager - which can support multiple languages at once - and syndication and news feeds to allow RSS content to be added to a site.

Original article written by Dipika Patel of Global Gold

“After the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, mothballed data centers operated by bankrupt companies such as Exodus and PSINet were the most visible signs of the IT-driven downturn. Today, despite the worst recession in 50 years, Web hosting is one of the few thriving segments of the IT industry.

Web-hosting firms have seen growing demand for services ranging from simple shared hosting and co-location to managed hosting, virtualization and cloud computing. Companies benefitting from the trend include Digital Realty Trust, Equinix, Internap and Savvis — all of which reported revenue increases in the first quarter of 2009…”

Read the full post here: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/051309-web-hosting.html?page=4

Original article by Carolyn Duffy Marsan, Network World

Last week, Brian Krebs of The Washington Post spoke with Joe Stewart, a senior security researcher at Atlanta based SecureWorks, who probably has done more than any other researcher to make life more difficult and expensive for cyber crooks.

“…Stewart says the world needs a more concerted effort to identify — if not apprehend — top cyber criminal actors. He also said that ISPs need to be held more accountable when they ignore overt signs of persistent criminal activity on their networks.”

Read the full interview here: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/

Original article by Brian Krebs, The Washington Post