Here are a few developments that I have seen lately regarding web hosting.

WP.com is Now WordPress.com
 First off, on the domain front – the ubiquitous blogging service WordPress has confirmed that it has purchased the domain name wp.com from Yahoo. There has been specualtion regarding the purchase for a few days as the wp.com domain was redirecting to WordPress.com. The news became official when WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg posted the information on the domain acquistion on the WordPress blog. You can read the details here: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/wpcom. The purchase price was not announced – however – judging from the latest domain prices and the obvious rarity of 2 letter domain names, you can bet it was well into the six figures. For reference, you can see the list of the top 100 domains sold this year here: http://www.dnjournal.com/ytd-sales-charts.htm.

Susan Boyle Cybersquatters
 On a related domain name theme, UK’s guardian.co.uk is reporting that since April 11, more than 30 websites have been launched that take advantage of the name Susan Boyle. Ms. Boyle has shot to fame on UK television and subsequently on YouTube as a contestant on the program ”Britain’s Got Talent”. Ms. Boyle is an unemployed 47-year-old Scottish charity worker who claims to have never been kissed. Her cover of the song ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ from the musical Les Misérables became a global YouTube hit hours after it was posted. So anyway – no big deal that all these domains are being registered and these websites set up. It just stands in stark contrast to Ms. Boyle herself who has no web presence whatsoever. She does now have an agent, however. Details and the full story are here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/23/susan-boyle-cybersquatters.

Professional Hosting Launches
 In a story covered by MyHostNews, website hosting company 34SP.com launched a new groundbreaking hosting service entitled, Professional Hosting. According to the company, The new plan specifications break down as follows: 5GB storage, 20GB transfer per month, free spam and virus filtering and free weekly backups among many other features. The new Professional Hosting plan is priced at £3.95 per month. There is no minimum contract, and every plan is sold with a 30 day money back guarantee. To learn more please visit: http://www.34sp.com/professional-hosting.

GeoCities R.I.P.
On a slightly nostalgic note, one of the original successes in the nascient web hosting industry – GeoCities – has met its demise. The owner of the service, Yahoo, has announced that it will shutter GeoCities sometime this year. For those of you that weren’t around back then, GeoCities was a free web hosting service launched in 1994. It was purchased during the peak of the dot-com boom by Yahoo for a stunning $3.57 billion (that’s with a B!). It was sort of the original MySpace / Facebook. According to Wikipedia the site became doomed by its own financial model, ”In 2001, amidst speculation by analysts that GeoCities was not yet profitable (it having declared an $8 million loss for the final quarter of 1998), Yahoo! introduced a for-fee premium hosting service at GeoCities and crippled the accessibility of free and low-price hosting accounts by limiting their monthly data transfer for webpage visitors; since then the monthly data transfer limit for free accounts is 4 GB. Later, the paid accounts were unified in the Yahoo! Web Hosting service and currently have no data transfer limits. The limiting of data transfer for free accounts made less popular the GeoCities hosting service as well as the hosted pages.” In closing the service Yahoo issued the following statement: ”We will be closing GeoCities later this year. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer.”

A friend and business acquaintance of mine, Mr. Brett Tabke, will be holding his webmaster conference next week in Las Vegas. The official title is, WebmasterWorld’s Search and Internet Marketing Conference, however, it is know by most attendees as PubCon. (This refers back to the earlier days of the conference when it actually took place in a pub.) The dates of this great event are November 11-14 at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.

PubCon is a conference that centers on what it takes to succeed as a webmaster. That drives the focus towards search engine optimization (pretty much every search engine and all the major search experts show up), search marketing, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, and how to gain traffic at a website and then monetize it.

The list of speakers is truly impressive. Brett has invited experts from web hosting to take part in the past several shows, and the audiences have been very accepting of our message. This year a web hosting panel will be part of PubCon and feature, Ben Fisher, Vice President with TechPad Agency, Amy Armitage, Director of Business Development with Lunarpages Web Hosting, and Curtis R. Curtis, Senior Vice President with Superb Internet.

Lunarpages and TechPad Agency will both have booths at the show. There are other hosting and hosting related companies that will participate as well, including: SmarterTools, an information technology (IT) management software company that builds applications to simplify and automate the day-to-day operations of hosting businesses. iNetU, a managed dedicated server company will have a display booth at PubCon, as will domain registrar and hosting provider, Register.com. Additionally, Affinity.com will participate in the show, featuring its customized monetization solutions for different types of publishers including search portals, toolbars, online directories, domain parking, blogs, URL errors, desktop applications and content websites. The Affinity.com brand is owned by hosting giant, Hostway.com.

The founder of PubCon, Brett Tabke, commented on this year’s keynote and charity events as well, ”I am really looking forward to this year’s kickoff keynote by Shawn Rorick. He is doing things with Cirque du Solieil marketing, that most of us haven’t even heard about yet. Remember when all the stories about the in video game advertising that presidential candidates were doing hit awhile ago? They talked about how progressive and leading edge it was? Rorick was doing that stuff two years ago already at Cirque. So the question we have to ask, ”is what is he doing THIS year” that we won’t know about until two years from now? We also have a charity casino this year in the middle of the networking lounge in the expo hall. After that, there is a party or cocktail reception every night of the conference. My advice would be to start working and get in shape now!”

Daniel Foster, a founder with website hosting company 34sp.com, commented on the importance of attending industry conferences such as PubCon, ”In the hosting industry – being that it is truly competitive, one needs to keep apprised of all the information and expertise available to succeed. PubCon offers a great opportunity to learn from search experts and the search engines themselves. The networking events at these types of conference also offer the opportunity to have a deeper discussion in an informal atmosphere.”

To learn more about PubCon or to sign up visit: www.PubCon.com. Be sure to look for PubCon London in July of 2009 as well. If you are involved in web hosting, websites or webmastery in Europe – it will be a must-attend event in 2009.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for Host Discussion Blog.

If you missed it, the U.S. stock market (along with the rest of the world markets) has been dropping like a rock. To put a bit of perspective on the state of affairs consider this:

The venerable and respected investment bank known as Lehman Brothers which had been in existence for 158 years has gone bankrupt. The former CEO has been facing a Congressional hearing into whether or not the company misappropriated funds in the days leading up to the collapse.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below 10,000 yesterday. How low is that? The first time the index crossed 10,000 was back in 1999. So if you had invested $1,000 in the Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks in 1999 and waited almost 10 years until today – you would have earned nothing.

If you need further detail on the abysmal state of the financial markets you can visit any major news outlet or financial website. The particular sector that interests me at this time are those companies involved in web hosting. In the publicly traded markets there are two firms that are pretty much web hosting ‘pure plays’. That is, their entire business is built around only web hosting-related business activities: Web.com (ticker symbol WWWW) and Rackspace (ticker symbol RAX).

So how have the web hosting companies been fairing over the past month? Terrible.

For comparison’s sake, let’s sat that you had a bunch of money to invest 1 month ago. Here is how much you would have lost in each of the following investments:

Microsoft – you would have lost 2.9 percent in the past month.

Dow Jones Industrial Average – lost you 11.3 percent.

Google – sorry, you lost 16.4 percent in the past month.

The Nasdaq – loser to the tune of 17.4 percent.

Which now brings us to the web hosting companies. If you had the inclination to invest in Web.com or Rackspace over the past month, here is how you faired:

Web.com – you would have lost a staggering 30 percent of your money.

Rackspace – are you sitting down? Good, because your investment has shrunk by one third. You lost 33 percent of your money in one month. Ouch.

Not to belabor the point, but consider the overall valuations of Web.com and Rackspace.

On September 5, 2008 Rackspace was worth around $1.2 billion. On October 6, 2008 it was worth $851 million. That’s a loss of over $400 million.

On September 5, 2008 Web.com was worth $167 million. On October 6, 2008 it was worth $117 million. That’s a loss of $50 million.

That makes me think of what I could do with $450 million. Let’s hope that the downturn on Wall Street and the blood bath in the web hosting sector let up soon. If they don’t, I’m not sure you’d want to invest in web hosting for the next month.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan and is provided courtesy of the VPS and dedicated hosting experts at HostMySite.com.

What do you get when you combine one of the world’s most powerful technology companies with its biggest and most expensive advertising campaign ever? The answer is…Jerry Seinfeld.

Various news outlets including Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that Microsoft is gearing up to spend $300 million in advertising to bolster the flagship ‘Windows’ brand. The theme of the campaign is reported to be ‘’Windows, Not Walls’’ and is expected to focus on how people connect ideas together when barriers are removed.

The Windows brand and Vista in particular have been the subject of a series of impactful and (in my opinion) really funny bashes by Apple – as depicted in recent Mac advertisements which feature a hipster (‘’I’m a Mac’’) and a Bill Gates look-alike (‘’And I’m a PC’’). You can view the campaign ads here: http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/ (fair warning: you can spend a lot of time viewing these as they go back several years – and they’re really entertaining!).

So to bolster its tattered Vista / Windows reputation Microsoft is turning to another powerful icon: Mr. Jerry Seinfeld. The company will pay Mr. Seinfeld a reported $10 million to participate (and one would assume make sure the ads are really funny). Guess who else is starring in the ads according to the reports? Mr. Bill Gates! Wow, so he’s not really retired at all – he’s just career shifted into television advertising work.

This has the makings of an epic advertising battle – and I for one can’t wait. As a marketer for the VPS and dedicated servers hosting experts at HostMySite.com, I have dreamed of going up against a huge iconic company like Microsoft armed with only a paltry few tens of millions in ad money and my sense of what the marketplace will respond to.

I expect Microsoft to hold its own quite well in this advertising battle. After all, it is much harder to get users to switch than to just sit pat. The real shot across Microsoft’s bow has already been dealt in the form of the iPhone – a device which Microsoft has no current answer for. The advertising campaigns seem to be merely stating the obvious: that a new era of mobile, always-on, always-connected computing which relies less and less on the operating system of the local device, and more on ‘the cloud’ has dawned.

So what is Microsoft’s answer to this game-changing shift? Maybe Jerry Seinfeld can come up with one.

Managed hosting company, Rackspace, launched its public stock offering last week to mixed results. Despite the fact that the market has struggle of late, and that only three technology companies have gone public in 2008, Rackspace proceeded with its IPO and the stock first traded on August 11, 2008.

The ticker symbol is ‘RAX’ and the stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock price and company market valuation can be seen via Google Finance at: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=RAX&hl=en. Rackspace competes with managed dedicated server companies HostMySite.com, The Planet, and Fastservers.net among others.

The stock was issued using a ‘Dutch Auction’ technique that was also used to price the Google IPO. While the stock was initially priced at $12.50 for launch – it quickly dropped 20% on the first day of trading to close at $10.70. As of the end of the first week of trading the stock was priced at $10.69. While this may be a disappointment for some, it still values the overall Rackspace enterprise at $1.23 billion. That’s billion with a ‘B’.

Rackspace is profitable, however, at the current pace of earnings the stock trades at over 60 times   earnings (P/E ratio of 60.06). Compare that with Google (P/E of 33.53), Microsoft (P/E of 14.87) or Yahoo (P/E/ of 28.42) and the stock still seems richly priced by comparison.

Regardless of this first week of trading, the entire web hosting community will be closely watching to see how Rackspace fairs in the marketplace over the next few quarters. That is because investor sentiment regarding Rackspace will most likely spill over into the broader hosting market. So it would seem that what’s good for Rackspace is good for hosting – at least in the near term.

Oklahoma City, OK - Web Hosting Directory and Review site FindMyHost.com has released it’s newly revamped hosting discussion community HostDiscussion.com. The re-tooled HostDiscussion.com features SEO friendly community blogs and forums available to all Web Hosts to post their thoughts on Web Hosting at no charge.

In addition to free community blogs, the new site features a popular forum where Web Hosts are permitted to post their latest special offers. Web Hosts are also encourage to participate in discussions aimed at helping consumers find web hosting. Web Hosts are encouraged and allowed to freely post responses to customer requests and discussions – making HostDiscussion.com more Host friendly than other forums. Press Releases and other worthy News are also allowed to be posted in their respected forums.

“We felt Web Hosts needed a place outside their normal channels of traditional online marketing to help get their message across. A forum and blog site such as HostDiscussion.com gives hosts a more personal avenue to reach hosting prospects in a more cost effective and friendly way than traditional advertising,” said Christian Henning, President and Founder of FindMyHost, Inc.

“Hosts can now interact with consumers without fear of being censored, flamed, or banned – free of charge,” said Mr. Henning.

Membership is free to Web Hosts for both the Community Web Hosting Blog as well as the Community Web Hosting Forums. Web Hosts wishing to participate can sign up for a free account at http://www.hostdiscussion.com/register.php.

Web Hosts will also benefit from extensive Search Engine Optimization which has garnered HostDiscussion.com over 80,000 indexed pages and increasing on Google alone. A revised HostDiscussion.com was only submitted to Google less than a month ago.

Partnerships are also available in limited quantity for related Web partners.

About HostDiscussion.com

HostDiscussion was designed to facilitate open communication between Web Host and Consumer. Web Hosts are encouraged to reply to consumer threads and post their own Blogs free of charge.

To learn more about HostDiscussion.com please visit http://www.hostdiscussion.com.

About FindMyHost, Inc.

FindMyHost.com was established in January 2001 to protect Web Host Consumers and Web Developers from making the wrong choice when choosing a Web host. FindMyHost.com showcases a selection of web hosting companies who have undergone our Approved Host program testing and provides reviews from customers.

To learn more about FindMyHost, please visit http://www.findmyhost.com.