Houston, Texas - (The Hosting News) - July 31, 2007 - Privately held dedicated web hosting company, The Planet, has appointed two new leaders for its advanced services and core hosting businesses. Jeff Nelson will lead the advanced services business, while Todd Mitchell joins the company to lead the core hosting marketing component.

Both Mr. Nelson and Mr. Mitchell, will report to Vice President of Marketing and Product Management Steve Kahan. With the appointment of these new general managers, the company rounds out its marketing team to address the three pillars of its business: the new Microsoft business team led by General Manager Cody Menard, complemented by Advanced Services General Manager Jeff Nelson and Todd Mitchell, Core Hosting General Manager.

Mr. Kahan explained, ”Through these three businesses, we will build products and services that support the entire range of customers who rely on The Planet for running their IT infrastructures. Whether it’s a customer looking for additional managed services; resellers who want to extend their business with core product offerings; or integrators looking to expand their Microsoft solutions, The Planet will span the entire spectrum. This strong trio of managers will help drive all aspects of the business to ensure customer success and drive revenue attainment. They bring deep experience in their respective domains and add significant expertise to the marketing team.”

Mr.
Nelson will focus on building products, solutions and services as the company extends its reach into the managed services arena. He joins The Planet from Rackspace, where he spent more than five years during its expansive growth cycle. With Rackspace, Mr. Nelson developed products and services for its managed services portfolio to drive customer satisfaction.

Mr. Nelson’s previous experience includes work with Enron Broadband Services and @Home Networks, in security and network engineering roles. He is certified as a New Product Development Professional through the Product Development and Management Association (www.pdma.org). Mr. Nelson earned an M.S. in Technology Management from the University of Texas at San Antonio and a B.A. in literature from the University of Oregon.

Joining the company from shared hosting reseller Site5, Mitchell will develop products, solutions and services for The Planet’s resellers and also ensure superior customer experience for its SMB customers. At Site5, he most recently served as president and chief operating officer, helping to drive revenue and expand its customer base. Previous experience includes work with ProNIC Solutions and NDi Media. He attended St. Lawrence College and John Abbott College, both located in Canada.

The Planet’s network is designed without single points of failure, which means the network operates with full redundancy for its core routers and distribution switches. The company also offers carrier diversity, with connections to seven Tier-1 telecommunications providers. As a result, customers never face obstacles or suffer from poor peering connections, sub-optimal routing paths, or congested or oversold networks that limit the power, speed and availability of their sites.

Ultimately, The Planet endeavors to provide the following:

• High level of network capacity and speed to deliver peak performance
• Instant scalability to handle even the largest spikes in network traffic
• Parallel, redundant, multi-tiered network routing and switching architecture to assure reliability and stability
• Multiple layer network security that prevents Delayed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks from harming businesses
• Knowledgeable experts with a passion for excellence and a commitment to operate the best networks in the business

The Planet is a leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 22,000 small and medium size businesses and 2.8 million web sites worldwide, using the best choice of servers, software tools and support, backed by state-of-the-art facilities and network connectivity.

For more information about The Planet, please visit: www.theplanet.com.

Portland, Oregon - (The Hosting News) - July 31, 2007 - Privately held Portland, Oregon web hosting provider, Weberz, has completed the acquisition of privately held United Kingdom based hosting company, Relio Hosting, Ltd.

Relio has provided H-Sphere based international web hosting services since May 2002 during which time is has established itself as one of the industry leaders in shared and reseller H-Sphere web hosting. Relio has been a long-term partner of Weberz, making it a perfect addition to the Weberz network.

Robert Rolfe, System Administrator of Weberz offered, ”We are committed to improving the overall hosting experience by giving our clients the web hosting tools, features, security, and support they deserve. We are very excited about the acquisition of Relio and our continued commitment to offer superior support and service to our ever-growing community of users. This acquisition helps further set us apart from other H-Sphere based web hosting companies. From the start, we have developed deep synergies between the two companies; in compatible technologies, operations and systems, rich histories of creativity and more importantly, an overall mission to ensure complete client satisfaction.”

Relio Hosting clients will immediately have access to the Weberz superior toll-free U.S. based phone support services and will now also have the ability to take advantage of new services including dedicated server availability and will soon also have access to Weberz support for ColdFusion. Clients of both companies will continue to enjoy the benefits of their current hosting plans and features without any service interruption. Clients with questions, concerns or looking for more information should check on the Relio Hosting Forum for frequent updates.

Mr. Rolfe continued, ”We are working to make the transition as seamless as possible for existing Relio clients. They can continue using their existing web hosting plans and also now have access to the many great benefits of Weberz. It’s only to get better from here - as we add more capabilities and services our clients wanted for some time.”

Weberz is one of the largest H-Sphere based web hosting provider in the Pacific Northwest. Weberz started offering web hosting services in 2002 under the We Host Webpages brand until April 2005 when Weberz was acquired by We Host Webpages, and all hosting services were later merged into the Weberz brand in 2006. Today Weberz offers shared hosting, reseller hosting and dedicated servers to clients on all around the world and strives to be the most client friendly web hosting provider.

To learn more about Relio Hosting, Ltd., please visit: www.relio.com.

For more information about Weberz, please visit: www.weberz.com.

Mechanicsville, Virginia - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - July 31, 2007 - Web hosting and domain registration provider, Netpreneur Host, has partnered with Mobile SMS Marketing, to offer a service designed to allow users to achieve more intimate relationships with customers, than through other methods of marketing.

By allowing customers to communicate through cell phone text messaging, the service utilizes the Mobile SMS Marketing phone number, together with a special text string. When end-users send a company’s unique text string to the phone number provided by Mobile SMS Marketing, they are added to that company’s list, and can be sent special offers and updates from the company. For instance, sending the word CLUB to 41513 from a cell phone demonstrates how a night club or disco might use the service.

Daniel J. Briere, CEO of Netpreneur Host explained, ”This new service allows businesses to quickly build large lists of opt-in cell phone users, which provides a captive audience of people with whom businesses can build deeper, more intimate relationships than with traditional marketing. The Mobile SMS Marketing service is a very exciting addition to our existing services that we are very happy to be able to provide to our users, and which will further differentiate us from other web hosting providers.”

Mobile SMS Marketing represents a new form of opt-in marketing for technology-oriented consumers. During an introductory period, Mobile SMS Marketing is waiving the service setup fee, and also offering discounts for three-month and six-month accounts.

To learn more about Netpreneur Host, please visit: www.netpreneurhost.com.

Research cheap web hosting, budget hosting and website hosting services and resources at Cheap Hosting Directory.

Louisville, Kentucky - (Website Hosting Directory) - July 31, 2007 - Microsoft Windows based hosting services, MaximumASP, has chosen Global Crossing as a third Tier 1 bandwidth provider to deliver high bandwidth availability and rapid response times.

The addition of a third bandwidth provider allows MaximumASP customers to leverage multiple high speed Internet connections through fully redundant OC-12 SONET-based connections supplied by Qwest, AT&T, and now Global Crossing. By intelligently routing traffic across these providers, MaximumASP gives the client the best local and international network paths, allowing customers to fully maximize the optimal routes for Internet traffic.

Eric Peek, Director of Security at MaximumASP commented, ”One of MaximumASP’s responsibilities is to anticipate the requirements and growth needs of our customers. A third internet bandwidth provider ensures even faster response times to and from our datacenter and a better experience overall for the end user.”

MaximumASP has seen rapid growth with customers that are using the Internet to distribute software as a service (SaaS), providing on-demand video over the Web, as well as hosting popular sites that have been referenced on blog and linking sites such as Digg and Twitter. The need to rapidly ramp-up bandwidth availability has been a primary requirement for these customers, and MaximumASP has responded with a flexible network design that allows quick changes to customer rate limits, a modular core network that provides easy expansion without customer downtime, and the addition of bandwidth providers as needed.

Mr.
Peek added, ”By partnering with Tier 1 providers such as Qwest, AT and T and Global Crossing we are giving our customers the response times and extensive bandwidth requirements expected in today’s marketplace. Additionally, we don’t take shortcuts on performance or reliability and that’s why we settle for nothing less than Tier 1 internet bandwidth.”

MaximumASP, based in Louisville, Kentucky, was founded in 2000 as an outsourcing firm for Microsoft Windows based hosting services. The company currently hosts more than 44,000 domains for customers in over 60 countries.

To learn more about MaximumASP, please visit: www.maximumasp.com.

Atlanta, Georgia - (The Hosting News) - July 30, 2007 - Internet performance network services company, Internap Network Services Corporation, has entered into a three-year business relationship with privately held data center facilities and managed services firm, Quality Technology Services (QualityTech).

Under terms of the agreement, Internap will be the preferred provider of content delivery network (CDN) services and the exclusive provider of IP connectivity services to all of QualityTech’s customers, including 350 recently acquired enterprise accounts. The contract represents revenues of approximately $15 million for value-added CDN and IP over the three-year term. This agreement is hoped to significantly strengthen Internap’s position as a leader in the Internet solutions category.

James P. DeBlasio, President and Chief Executive Officer of Internap remarked, ”This is one of the largest agreements in Internap’s history and another significant win in the CDN/IP space. QualityTech’s decision to select Internap for value-added Internet solutions validates our strategy of providing best-in-class, bundled solutions to meet the demands of enterprise customers. We are gratified that an increasing number of high quality service providers, like QualityTech, appreciate the highly differentiated approach inherent in Internap’s route optimized CDN and IP solutions. We look forward to providing the industry’s best service levels and technology solutions to QualityTech’s customers moving forward.”

Through Internap’s premium IP service, which uses Private Network Access Points (P-NAPs) to speed Internet traffic from one location to another, QualityTech’s customer traffic will avoid the congestion and bottlenecks of traditional single-carrier networks. The service includes proactive technical service and support - all backed by proactive Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for 100% uptime. Internap’s CDN is also the industry’s only global, high-capacity solution that takes advantage of this unique multi-carrier architecture. Both solutions benefit from Internap’s proprietary intelligent route control technology to ensure the consistent, reliable performance of mission-critical applications.

As part of the agreement, Internap will take down space in multiple QualityTech world-class data center facilities to help satisfy current and future market demand. QualityTech’s data centers feature industry-leading standards for security, environmental control and scalability. The infrastructure will support high power density deployments and is designed to provide maximum power and cooling up to 150 watts per square-foot. As a result, Internap can better meet the high power density needs of enterprises with increasingly complex applications, such as rich media and streaming video.

Mark Waddington, President of QualityTech remarked, ”With our recent growth, QualityTech was at a tipping point and needed to join forces with the right partner to enable our customers’ ability to reliably deploy mission-critical applications. As IP-based communications converge and the demand for networked services increases, our combined solution with Internap is a major step towards delivering the highest level of performance for our clients and supporting the unique requirements for emerging technologies such as streaming audio and video.”

QualityTech provides day-to-day IT operational support to improve operational efficiencies, mitigate risks and control costs associated with managing information technology infrastructure. Additional managed services, such as planning and consulting, configuration and implementation are also available to help meet IT requirements for deploying complex Internet applications. Both Internap and QualityTech will provide solutions to enterprises in industries ranging from financial services and e-commerce to gaming, media and entertainment.

Quality Technology Services (QualityTech) is a managed services and IT infrastructure company providing Managed Services, Data Center facilities, and Professional Services to businesses. Services are delivered via a national footprint of secure state-of-the-art Data Centers, a high-performance backbone and content delivery network, and an ITIL certified world-class services organization. QualityTech provides enterprises the ability to deploy, manage and scale their mission-critical IT operations for optimum performance and cost-efficiency.

Internap is an intelligent route control solution, developed to provide reliability, performance and security to the Internet, as well as a global integrated content delivery service, designed to enable businesses to stream digital media over the Internet. The company provides patented and patent-pending technologies that address the inherent weaknesses of the Internet, to enable enterprises to deploy business-critical applications such as e-commerce, VoIP, and audio/video across IP networks. The company provides additional solutions, including video and audio streaming, advertising placement, reporting and analysis, live event broadcasting, media asset management, integrated web hosting and consulting services. Internap currently serves more than 3,000 customers throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

For more information about Quality Technology Services, please visit: www.qualitytech.com.

To learn more about Internap, please visit: www.internap.com.

Herndon, Virginia - (The Hosting News) - July 30, 2007 - SWsoft has authorized Wichita, Kansas-based IT solutions and network consulting firm, Concergent, to resell its Virtuozzo operating system server virtualization software, which will be packaged with corporate IT services from Concergent.

Concergent provides backup and co-location services for small-to-large customers throughout the U.S., as well as a full range of information technology services to Midwest clients in a variety of fields including healthcare, education, real estate, manufacturing, and hospitality.

SWsoft Virtuozzo is designed to help to dramatically reduce information technology infrastructure costs by making better use of existing assets, improving flexibility and availability, as well as enhancing overall manageability of IT assets.

Dan Reisig, managing member of Concergent offered, ”The Virtuozzo technology is an excellent complement to our existing product portfolio. There is no question that our customers will see significant benefits from this type of cutting-edge OS virtualization technology.”

Kurt Daniel, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances at SWsoft remarked, ”There is increasing demand for effective virtualization solutions. Concergent is a welcome addition to our efforts to deliver IT solutions that meet this growing demand.”

SWsoft Virtuozzo is designed to dynamically partitions a single Windows or Linux operating system instance into highly-efficient and scalable virtual environments. Virtuozzo includes patented technology that enables density of up to hundreds of virtual environments per physical server. Virtuozzo addresses the challenges of operating system sprawl faced by today’s data centers. Its unique architecture and management tools make Virtuozzo the ideal solution for provisioning, monitoring and managing virtualized server resources.

Concergent provides IT solutions and network consulting to companies of all sizes throughout the Midwest. Housing one of the area’s only class-A data centers, Concergent provides network monitoring and management, integrated network security, and the automated back up and co-location services vital to IT disaster recovery and business continuity. Concergent’s certified consultants are experienced in providing IT support solutions to a broad range of market segments, from commercial and residential real estate to aerospace and healthcare.

Founded in 1999, SWsoft is a recognized leader in server automation and virtualization software. With more than 10,000 customers in over 100 countries, SWsoft’s suite of products delivers proven performance, reliability, manageability and value. With offices around the world; SWsoft is a high growth company, funded by Bessemer Venture Partners, Insight Venture Partners and Intel Capital, offering comprehensive solutions, transparently integrated through the OPEN FUSION Initiative - including Virtuozzo, Plesk, SiteBuilder, HSPcomplete and PEM.

For more information about Concergent, please visit: www.concergent.com.

To learn more about SWsoft, please visit: www.swsoft.com.

Chicago, Illinois - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - July 30, 2007 - Web hosting and managed technology services company, Hostway Corporation,
recently exhibited at the Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) Summit 07, in Washington, D.C.

Attendees learned about Hostway’s private label hosting offering, as a fully integrated platform of basic and enhanced web services, including: web site design and hosting, email, ecommerce, online backup and storage, merchant services, hosted Microsoft Exchange, CRM and Microsoft SharePoint.

Billed as the ”Power to the People” event, the summit celebrated a seismic change in business and culture, in the digital revolution, focused on the democratization of media, and how cable can empower customers and viewers through innovative technologies, trusted services, and inspired content. Some of the speakers included:
Bernadette Aulestia,
SVP, Affiliate Marketing and Product Management,
HBO; Bob G. Benya, SVP VOD,
Time Warner Cable; George Bodenheimer, President, ESPN, Inc. and ABC Sports,
Co-Chairman, Disney Media Networks
ESPN, Inc.; Francoise Bourdonnec,
Director, Domestic Designs and Technologies Research,
Intel Corporation; and Justin Connolly, SVP National Accounts, Disney and ESPN Media Networks.

CTAM, the Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing, is dedicated to helping the cable business grow. As a non-profit professional association, CTAM provides marketing education and networking opportunities to more than 5,500 members, through conferences, consumer research, publications network of regional chapters, and the CTAM Executive Management Program at the Harvard Business School. CTAM also facilitates unified, national cooperative marketing efforts on behalf of its corporate members,such as the Cable Movers Hotline, Business Services Initiative, On Demand Consortium.

Hostway has been recognized as a leading web hosting provider by online hosting resources. TopHosts has ranked Hostway as the number one hosting provider from 2000-2006. Hostway has also been rated the number one E-commerce Hosting Provider by Web Host Directory, the most reliable web hosting provider web site by Netcraft and the best web hosting company by HostReview. Hostway Corporation provides domain registration, web hosting, web design and online marketing services to more than 400,000 customers worldwide. Hostway helps individuals, small businesses and large enterprises achieve more value from web-based technologies by reducing their complexity and cost. Founded in 1998, Hostway is one of the five largest web hosting companies in the world with offices in North America (Chicago (HQ), Austin, Tampa and Vancouver), Europe (Belgium, France, Frankfurt, Hannover, London and Netherlands), Asia (Korea) and Australia (Sydney).

To learn more about
CTAM, the Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing, please visit: www.ctam.com.

For more information about Hostway Corporation, please visit: www.hostway.com.

San Diego, California - (Website Hosting Directory) - July 30, 2007 - Wapple web hosting services provider, has launched a totally free design, hosting and management solution, for mobile websites, funded by the inclusion of relevant, targeted third-party banner advertising through AdMob, Admoda and Millennial Media.

According to the company, the new Wapple ad-funded solution provides free use of the innovative Wapple Canvas suite of mobile Internet design tools that is now even easier to use, with a new range of templates and step-by-step design wizard. And once created, the Wapple Delivery Engine will ensure that the site is reconfigured and optimised to display the best results on any mobile device, on any network and from any country.

Those that prefer not to incorporate banner advertising can still use the standard Wapple Canvas Free package, with a small cost incurred for the Wapple Delivery Engine when the site goes live. More advanced Wapple Canvas packages with additional functionality, such as integrated billing, are also available.

Rich Holdsworth, CTO at Wapple explained, ”The Wapple ad-funded model not only removes all the barriers to creating an essential mobile presence by making it quick, easy and free, it also allows anyone to create a highly functional, professional, mobile-search ready site that looks good and actually works properly on some 5,000 mobile devices including PDAs, the Sony PSP and new iPhone.”

Mr. Holdsworth remarked, ”Our simple set-up wizard and templates guide users through the design process and give them the freedom to brand and style their sites totally as they want. It is also easy to add extended functionality, interactive elements such as polls and user feedback, as well as rich media content including games, videos and music.”

Wapple Canvas is a toolkit that is accessible from anywhere in the world through a PC web-browser. The simple, point and click, drag and drop interface makes it possible for anyone to build and get a mobile web site up and running in moments.

Wapple provides a fully hosted solution that comes with a Wapple url that can easily be pointed to the user’s own domain. The Wapple Delivery Engine automatically customises and renders mobile internet pages to individual browser-based mobile devices and delivers rich optimised WML, HTML, XHTML, CHTML content to 3G, iMode, GPRS and GSM networks as well as Wireless Lan.

Data is also collected on visitors to the sites and full statistics are provided. The Wapple core technology automatically generates and submits a Google site map that describes each site’s pages and content to ensure strong positioning in mobile search engines.

Wapple was established in 2004 and is one of the first mobile Internet site creation, management, billing integration and solutions deployment providers. Its web-based tools are designed to allow companies to create professional and user-friendly mobile internet sites. Wapple’s portfolio already includes TDK, Mobil1, Metallica and The Washington Post mobile sites along with new media agencies such as, G8Wave, MyThum, Cherry Media, PlayerX, Generiq and Brickhouse.

Admoda is a mobile advertising solution from Mobvision that provides access to a publisher network of 400,000,000+ WAP impressions per month.

AdMob is the a mobile advertising marketplace, with over 32,000,000 page views a day available and having served more than 4.5 billion advertisements in just over a year.

The Millennial Motion, Millennial Marketplace, and Decktrade product suite from Millennial Media is a complete mobile advertising solution, developed to maximize results for both advertisers and publishers.

To learn more about Wapple, please visit: http://wapple.net.

San Francisco, California - (The Hosting News) - July 27, 2007 - Managed hosting and colocation company, Hosting.com, managed to avoid problems associated with the widespread power outage affecting the San Francisco area recently. Hosting.com’s San Francisco data center located at 630 Third Street, remained fully operational and online throughout the duration of the outage.

Early estimates by PG and E put 30,000 - 50,000 customers without power during this event, many of which were businesses whose operations are completely dependent on power, such as PG and E itself and area data center providers in the downtown San Francisco area.

Darren King, President and CEO of Hosting.com remarked, ”While it’s unfortunate that the downtown San Francisco area was hit with a massive power outage, we couldn’t be more pleased with the way our facility withstood the test. As a result of our redundant infrastructure and thorough testing and maintenance of that infrastructure by seasoned data center experts, we are happy to report that not a single Hosting.com San Francisco colo client within the data center was affected.”

Hosting.com management plans to fully analyze and evaluate this event and all published reports over the next few days to further prepare for and take any additional steps necessary to ensure that all clients continue to remain unaffected by future power outages. Management believes the recent instability of the power grid in San Francisco will have no impact on the construction plans currently underway that will double the size of Hosting.com’s San Francisco facility and provide its clients with collocation suites up to 3,000 sq. ft. to house their mission critical infrastructure.

Since 1996, Hosting.com has provided managed hosting, colocation, disaster recovery and business continuance services to a global customer with a high level of security, reliability and responsiveness. Hosting.com monitors, manages, and enhances the web-based platforms of Web 2.0 companies, software as a service providers (SaaS), content distribution networks (CDN), and medium to large enterprises whose web presence is crucial and high availability mandatory. Hosting.com currently owns and operates its proprietary content delivery grid (CDG) via data center facilities in Louisville, Kentucky; Irvine, California; San Francisco, California; and Boston, Massachusetts. For more information, please call 800-446-7627.

For more information about Hosting.com, please visit: www.hosting.com.

Houston, Texas - (The Hosting News) - July 27, 2007 - The Planet privately held dedicated hosting company, has completed a direct connection with facilities-based network operator, GameRail, under which subscribers will have access to all game servers on The Planet’s network, across six data centers in Houston and Dallas.

Will Charnock, Vice President of Technology at The Planet remarked, ”The Planet has always been a destination for competitive online league gaming events. With this peering connection, GameRail is able to extend the reach of our customers to additional cities with a hyper-competitive, low latency and smooth connection to the online gamer.”

The Planet is widely recognized as a first choice for major game server hosts and online game players. With the new connection, GameRail subscribers will be able to bypass the congested and high-latency Internet with a private line straight to their desired game server at The Planet.

John Alden, Vice President of Business Development at GameRail added, ”With the addition of The Planet to our network, our subscribers will see a substantial increase in the desired content titles and game play environments they prefer. The Planet’s powerful network performance and reliability provide optimum connections for serious online gamers.”

Online multiplayer computer gaming is one of the fastest growing entertainment activities in the U.S., with more than 40 million people now playing regularly. GameRail recently introduced the first and only network designed to meet the speed and quality needs of the online gaming community. GameRail’s bypass network delivers a ”direct-connect” from the game player to the game host, and avoids the congestion and inefficient routing paths of the regular Internet.

Progression LLC, a Missouri LLC, dba GameRail, is a facilities-based network operator that directly connects game players with broadband to game hosts and vice versa, thereby eliminating game play degrading high latency hops on the Internet. GameRail has interconnection facilities in eight major US markets including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Palo Alto, Seattle and St. Louis.

The Planet’s network is designed to be without single points of failure, which means the network operates with full redundancy for its core routers and distribution switches. The company also offers carrier diversity, with connections to seven Tier-1 telecommunications providers. As a result, customers never face obstacles or suffer from poor peering connections, sub-optimal routing paths, or congested or oversold networks that limit the power, speed and availability of their sites.

Ultimately, The Planet endeavors to provide the following:

• High level of network capacity and speed to deliver peak performance
• Instant scalability to handle even the largest spikes in network traffic
• Parallel, redundant, multi-tiered network routing and switching architecture to assure reliability and stability
• Multiple layer network security that prevents Delayed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks from harming businesses
• Knowledgeable experts with a passion for excellence and a commitment to operate the best networks in the business

The Planet is a leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 22,000 small and medium size businesses and 2.8 million web sites worldwide, using the best choice of servers, software tools and support, backed by state-of-the-art facilities and network connectivity.

To learn more about GameRail, please visit: www.gamerail.com.

For more information about The Planet, please visit: www.theplanet.com at The Hosting News.

Waltham, Massachusetts - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - July 27, 2007 - Domain name marketing solution, NameMedia, has entered into a strategic marketing partnership with web hosting and domain name registering services provider, HiChina. Under the terms of the agreement, HiChina will list AfternicDLS domain names on its two leading brands, Domains.cn and Net.cn.

HiChina provides domain and online services to China’s rapidly growing small- to mid-sized business (SMB) community as well as multinational corporations such as China Telecom, DaimlerChrysler, and Toyota.

Long recognized for its award-winning e-commerce services, HiChina will provide its business-focused client base with access to more than 2,000,000 high-performance domain names via NameMedia’s AfternicDLS domain sales platform, driven off of the company’s Afternic.com sales channel.

Peter Lamson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of NameMedia remarked, ”NameMedia is very pleased to partner with HiChina. Our partnership will provide China’s SMB community with needed access to quality domain names. AfternicDLS members will also benefit, as we have opened the rapidly growing Chinese domain market for domain sellers, enabling AfternicDLS members to participate in a market estimated at 20 million businesses.”

NameMedia was recently recognized by the Domain Name Journal as the largest seller of secondary domain names in the world. With saleable inventory exceeding two million names, businesses worldwide are able to easily find the best domain name for their online identity through NameMedia’s domain marketplace.

Matthew Zhou, Vice President of HiChina offered, ”We look forward to our partnership with NameMedia. Chinese businesses rely on HiChina for their Internet needs. Providing our customers with a broad selection of quality domains will drive even greater business success for our clients.”

AfternicDLS provides domain sellers with the ability to sell domains through a global distribution network, driving higher sales volume and achieving maximum pricing for its members. NameMedia has expanded its distribution network to more than 50 marketing partners, making it the broadest distribution network in the world for secondary domain names.

NameMedia offers comprehensive domain-related services, including an industry leading Marketplace, custom domain valuation appraisals, anonymous buyer services, domain escrow services for secure domain transactions, and the Active Audience parking platform.

Founded in 1996, HiChina has become the largest domain name registering and web hosting services provider in China. It has been an accredited registry by both ICANN and CNNIC, which are the highest Internet administrative organizations worldwide and nationwide. It is currently serving more than 300,000 enterprise users with fast, stable and secure websites. HiChina is greatly reinforced and becomes a flagship of the internet services in China. In early 2005, HiChina has launched a B2B service platform Mymai.com. HiChina is the first one-stop service platform to provide fundamental internet services, as well as value added internet services, including e-marketing and e-commerce services. Headquartered in Beijing, HiChina has established 12 branches in major cities and has developed over 9000 agents covered 31 provinces and cities nationwide.

NameMedia is a Direct Search and premium domain names marketplace. The company’s goal is to leverage the power of Direct Search through a proprietary publishing platform that creates revenue-generating search destinations, including the company’s network of vertical online properties. NameMedia also has the industry’s largest marketplace for buying and selling premium domain names. NameMedia is a privately-held, venture-backed company headquartered outside Boston in Waltham, Massachusetts.

For more information about HiChina, please visit: www.net.cn.

To learn more about NameMedia, please visit: www.namemedia.com.

Palo Alto, California - (Website Hosting Directory) - July 27, 2007 - Social utility portal, Facebook, has acquired Parakey, a startup operated by Co-Founders of Mozilla Firefox, an open-source and non-profit web browser. Parakey is Facebook’s first acquisition. Financial terms of the transaction were not released.

Firefox founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, will join Facebook’s team to work on the development of Facebook Platform and the company’s website.

Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Facebook remarked, ”Blake and Joe built the Firefox web browser and then turned to the developer community to build on top of the foundation they’d established, not unlike what we’ve done with Facebook Platform. The work they’ve done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook.”

Messrs.
Ross and Hewitt are best known as the co-founders of Firefox, which has been downloaded more than 300 million times by people worldwide. Hewitt went on to build popular web development tools such as Firebug. In early 2006, Ross and Hewitt founded Parakey to build a platform bridging the gap between information on the web and the desktop.

Mr. Ross commented, ”Facebook Platform is finally making it easy to share experiences with friends and family over the web, a goal Joe and I have worked toward for years. We are thrilled to join the most innovative technology company in the industry.”

Founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook was developed so that people could better understand the world around them by developing technologies that facilitate the spread of information through social networks. The site has nearly 19 million active users in over 47,000 geographic, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks, and according to ComScore’s MediaMetrix report, Facebook ranks as the sixth-most trafficked site in the United States. Facebook is privately held and headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

To learn more about Facebook, please visit: www.facebook.com.