There was a wide range of creative sales and promotions for the week ending June 26, including discounts in areas of web hosting including reseller hosting, online backup, web hosting tutorials, disaster recovery, and domains.

midPhase Launches $1 Reseller Hosting Program

For the next 30 days Turnkey web hosting solutions provider midPhase will provide new and existing customers with an unlimited number of websites to resell for only $1 for designers, developers and entrepreneurs seeking to launch their own startups.

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Confirming previous speculation, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced on Friday it has named former US cybersecurity chief Rod Beckstrom its new CEO and president.

On Thursday, the WHIR reported that the Associated Press that Beckstrom is rumoured to become the new president and CEO, citing two anonymous sources close to the ICANN talks.

The former US cybersecurity chief for the US Department of Homeland Security will replace current ICANN head Paul Twomey, who has held the position since March 2003.

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The widespread availability of “bulletproof” hosting in China has made that country a haven for spammers, according to a blog post by University of Alabama researcher Gary Warner, referenced in a Friday article by PC World.

According to the blog post, Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the university’s computer and information sciences department, examined the millions of spam messages received in the UAB Spam Data Mine between May 1 and June 18, 2009, discovering that 70 percent of all domains used in spam have a .cn top-level domain.

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IT and business experience services provider BTR Associates has selected Virtualization and automation software provider Parallels’ operating system-level server virtualization software, Virtuozzo Containers, to help it deploy and manage its hosted virtual desktop offerings, which delivers machines on a network an operating system, applications and data on-demand from centrally managed servers.

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Indian telecommunications giant Tata Communications announced on Friday it has signed a global agreement with data center provider Telx , where Tata will offer Telx customers complete colocation services in North America, India, EMEA and APAC.

In a filing with the Bombay Stock Exchange, the companies said that for contact for contractual arrangements.

The partnership will leverage each firm’s colocation space in their respective countries of operation.

They will cooperate to develop a portfolio of managed services to support their customers.

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Internet users around the world flooded news sites and social media networks Thursday in an effort to confirm early reports of pop icon Michael Jackson’s death, triggering massive availability issues.

Celebrity news site TMZ.com, which first broke the news of Jackson’s death, was knocked offline after the site was bombarded with traffic, according to reports by Techcrunch.com.

In an effort to resolve the issue, the site’s webmasters disabled search features in account profiles to better handle the spike in the server load.

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Data center solutions provider i/o Data Centers has officially opened its 538,000 square-foot Phoenix ONE data center, making it, reportedly, the largest commercially available data center in the US, with an area equivalent to nine football fields.

Located in a refurbished building acquired in January, the Phoenix data center is the company’s second Arizona-based data center, according to i/o Data Centers’ Thursday announcement. Phoenix ONE was designed and built to be highly reliable and efficient, incorporating a number of diverse and green data center systems to provide “always on” operations for its customers and reduce the facility’s overall carbon footprint, including a 4.5 megawatt solar array on its 11-acre roof.

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A Swedish appeals court has ruled that the judge who sentenced four men to prison for operating file-sharing site The Pirate Bay made the decision without bias despite his membership in several copyright protection organizations.

According to local news reports, lawyers for the men lost their plea for a retrial on the basis that judge Tomas Norstrom may have been biased when he gave each of the four defendants a year’s prison sentence and ordered them to pay a total of roughly $3.57 million in fines.

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We’ve nailed down the date for our upcoming webcast with Bob Angus of VeriSign, and I wanted to mention it in this space along with wherever else we end up promoting it.You may remember we did one of these before with Dave Cummings of Agile Equity, in which we discussed the process of estimating a valuation for your hosting business, and discussed how hosts can prepare their businesses to make them more attractive to buyers. It was quite successful, and we’ve been looking forward to doing another one since.The new podcast, “Boost Margins and Retain Valuable Customers with Security and Trust” will take place Thursday, July 16, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Eastern time. As communicated rather effectively by the title, Bob Angus will be presenting on the opportunity that exists for hosting providers in selling security and trust services.

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In my last post I discussed some of the planned proposals for new domain name extensions that had emerged here in Sydney. Although on the surface new domain name extensions are very exciting, the notion of potentially introducing hundreds of new gTLDs has created some polarizing issues. Many of these are being fervently discussed here at the conference.

At one session, a very animated discussion took place around the separation of registries and registrars. Domain name extensions are operated by organizations typically referred to as “registries”. VeriSign, for example, is the registry behind the operation of .COM and .NET. Per their agreements with ICANN, registries cannot sell domain names to the public directly; instead, they are required to use registrars (of which Tucows is one).

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