US web host midPhase Service, with SoftLayer Technologies, has launched a new range of midPhase dedicated servers, as an expansion of the midPhase portfolio to offer existing and new customers the complete web hosting line up.

Marc Bollinger, General Manager of midPhase noted, ”Everyone at midPhase has been working really hard to refresh our portfolio, to offer customers more robust and unique offerings. We think these new dedicated servers are a fantastic addition and will be very successful. We are also extremely happy to announce this unique partnership with SoftLayer which has already combined the strengths of both companies to bring a solid product to the table.”

The new dedicated servers use the latest server technology and offer customers a fantastic deal, with the entry level server starting at just $199 per month, with free set up. All dedicated servers come with the choice of Linux or Windows operating systems and control panels (including cPanel and Plesk), 24 / 7 support, include a whopping 10TB of bandwidth per month as standard, and free, unlimited SSLs.

Standardized dedicated hosting, service oriented architectures, infrastructure management systems, on-demand hosting solutions, remote management solutions, virtualized datacenter management, among other things.

SoftLayer offers customers world-class datacenter capabilities including the most advanced services, management convenience, and administration features ever assembled to manage the outsourced IT environment.

Earlier this month, SoftLayer expanded its data warehouse capacity, while improving its backend system performance with service oriented architecture (SOA), by adding an application layer processing cluster. The data warehouse expansion included the installation of multi-petabyte storage arrays from EqualLogix (now Dell) in its Dallas, Seattle, and, when launched, Washington D.C. facilities to serve as the backend data storage powering all of SoftLayer’s on-demand service offerings. Servers from SuperMicro provide the processing power for the new SOA infrastructure. Together, these improvements have been engaged to accelerate deployment of new features and increase performance for all SoftLayer customers (whether they use the SoftLayer Application Programming Interface (API) or the SoftLayer Portal to manage hosted IT infrastructure) and allow the company to maintain its leadership in bringing new products and services to market.

SoftLayer used industry-standard best-practices to create its SOA to deliver on the architectural style’s two fundamental concepts: – Enable a set of simple, ubiquitous, and open communication interfaces – Deliver data using an open schema (e.g. XML) through the interfaces SoftLayer’s SOA allows data to be captured, processed, and presented to users in a form chosen by the system administrator, delivering on the company’s commitment to give customers total control. The architecture is highly scalable, with the capacity to process millions of transactions per hour across thousands of physical and virtual servers, as well as with any number of related services.

midPhase Services provides budget, reseller, VPS, and dedicated hosting solutions to clients worldwide through its family of brands: midphase.com, anhosting.com, and autica.com. midPhase operates its services out of downtown Chicago in a state of the art Cimco datacenter. midPhase Services is part of the UK-2 Group, a major player in the hosting industry, for more information please visit www.uk2group.com.

Located in the INFOMART in Dallas, Texas, SoftLayer was formed in June 2005 by a team of industry executives seeking to deliver low cost next generation on-demand hosting services for the small to medium enterprise (SME). Utilizing proprietary software, coupled with the industry’s first network-within-a-network topology, the company delivers the power and control to securely manage IT environments while providing comprehensive scalability.

To learn more about the new midPhase dedicated servers, please visit: www.midphase.com/dedicated.

For more information about midPhase, please visit: www.midphase.com.

To learn more about SoftLayer, please visit: www.softlayer.com.

The acquisition is designed to make LeaseWeb’s network infrastructure more hierarchical and scaleable and enables a bandwidth capacity increase to 1900 Gigabits per second (1.9 Terabits). The two CRS-1s (non-stop machines) will have a vital role in the new hosting network. In the near future, they will play a central part in connecting all data centers in LeaseWeb’s network to the outside world. LeaseWeb opted for two machines because this offers the ultimate uptime guarantee. It allows LeaseWeb to safeguard its service level agreements with customers to an even greater degree.

Con Zwinkels, the Managing Director of LeaseWeb noted, ”To date the volume of our data traffic has doubled or done better than that every year. If you calculate what this means for the future. Right now we have 80 Gigabits per second. It will be 160 a year from now. The required capacity will be 320 Gbps the year after that, and we will be close to 1.3 Terabits in a couple of years. We were unable to guarantee the growth potential with the current network structure., With the acquisition of the new Cisco CRS-1 platform, however, we can now realize that growth capacity. Moreover, the CRS-1s are ready for 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet from a technical perspective. So we will be able to use those standards as soon as they are available on the market.”

LeaseWeb customers currently use 80 Gigabits per second in bandwidth. The acquisition of two Cisco CRS-1s enables LeaseWeb to expand its hosting network to a capacity of 1900 Gbps (1.9 Terabits). The total investment for two of these Cisco machines is nearly 2.4 million US Dollars.

The CRS-1s are geographically separated in different data centers. The existing sixteen Catalyst 6500 switches will have to relinquish their central role and only transport the Internet traffic of customers internal to the hosting network. It makes LeaseWeb’s network more hierarchical with fewer cross-connections, which yields great benefits in terms of network management.

Coks Stoffer, the CEO of Cisco Netherlands remarked, ”I am happy that LeaseWeb, an internationally successful hosting provider, has opted for Cisco’s CRS-1. The demand for bandwidth is growing very quickly at LeaseWeb. The CRS-1 and the associated new network design for LeaseWeb will enable them to accommodate the predicted growth of their Internet traffic. As a result, LeaseWeb customers can be sure that the growth potential, in terms of bandwidth, will be huge in years to come.”

LeaseWeb is able to scale its bandwidth quickly and efficiently via telecom carriers and Internet exchanges. Its philosophy is to always maintain twice as much capacity as the customers are consuming. At present, the available capacity for customers is 160 Gbps.

LeaseWeb is an international supplier of hosting products and services that specializes in both Microsoft and Linux, and focuses primarily on the professional market. The company is among the top 30 hosting providers in the world and provides services such as web hosting, dedicated hosting, colocated hosting, VPS and streaming, as well as technical support. LeaseWeb owns a first-class Cisco-powered network offering a bandwidth of over 160 Gbps, which extends across five data centers in the Amsterdam region via the major telecom carriers. LeaseWeb is also present on internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Frankfurt, New York, Vienna , Stockholm, Warsaw, Zurich, Prague and Madrid. Founded in 1997, hosting provider LeaseWeb now manages 11,000 servers. Its customers include Starbucks, Hyves, Telegraaf Media Groep, Koninklijke Joh. Ensched, PricewaterhouseCoopers, AVRO, Direct Wonen, and Univ.

To learn more, please visit: www.leaseweb.com.

Robert Miggins, Vice President of business development for PEER 1 noted, ”In keeping with the needs of our self-managed hosting customers, this product provides the highest security while being easy to install and manage. We know our customers, who come from a great variety of industries, and pride ourselves on offering the best and most affordable tools to support maximum business growth.”

The firewall product, mGuard Smart by Inominate, provides added security and is fully self-managed by customers via a web interface. This provides the kind of control and flexibility ServerBeach customers expect and can take full advantage of for their business or web presence. The mGuard Smart offers an extremely high degree of security and performance. It can be integrated anywhere both quickly and simply without modifications to the server, regardless of the processor technology or operating systems used. Because the firewall is independent it does not affect the performance of the server’s processor.

The mGuard Smart unites the advantages of hardware and software-based security concepts in a single component. All the security functions are integrated into the self-contained, fully independent mGuard platform. For this reason, it is not necessary to reconfigure the server being protected, nor do drivers or additional software need to be installed. The firewall performs much better and is more reliable than the typical shared or PCI based firewall. ServerBeach will offer the firewall at $99 per month with a $50 setup fee, and it is available on Category 3 and 5 servers within the San Antonio data center.

ServerBeach, a PEER 1 company, specializes in self-managed hosting for businesses of all sizes around North America and the world, and is based in San Antonio Texas. PEER 1 is an online IT infrastructure provider, for more than 9,000 customers. Serving a variety of industries, PEER 1 offers solutions that grow through every stage of web commerce, regardless of company size, and ensures customers’ online presence is always fast, always available. PEER 1 delivers highly scalable dedicated hosting and co-location solutions in addition to self-managed hosting by ServerBeach. Since 1999, PEER 1 has grown to include data centers and network points of presence in 17 major cities across North America and Europe. The company’s headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada and the stock is traded on the TSX Venture exchange under the symbol PIX.

To learn more about the offering, please visit: http://serverbeach.com/servers/specialoffers_firewalls.php.

For more information about ServerBeach, please visit: www.serverbeach.com.

Fort Worth, Texas-based Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (bnsf.com) filed the suit against Web hosting provider Network54 (network54.com) to identify the individuals who posted the articles on the message forum.

The lawsuit also names two John Does, who posted two parody news articles on the Network54 message board poking fun at controversial railroad union issues.

However, Public Citizen says that BNSF has no right to demand the Web host to disclose the identities of the individuals who posted the comments just because it finds the content offensive. Public Citizen is representing Network54, along with local counsel David Broiles of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.

The Washington, D.C.-based Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that represents consumer advocacy issues, including the consumer’s right to seek justice in the courts.

The group also told the Texas court that it has no jurisdiction in the matter because Network54 is a California company and has no offices, employees or any other physical presence in Texas.

“Apparently the people who run this railroad need a refresher course in American civics, particularly the part where they discuss the First Amendment and freedom of speech,” says Paul Alan Levy, an attorney for Public Citizen. “This is just another example of a company trying to use the courts to censor and intimidate its critics.”

The Network54 forums’ terms of use clearly states that the Web host is not responsible for the accuracy or legitimacy of items posted on its site, the group added.

The Web host’s terms of use section reads: “Network54 is not responsible for any problems that may occur from reading or using content posted on Network54, as they are the exclusive responsibility of two parties: the user who posted it and the Resource owner who permitted it to be posted.”

Lefora provides no limit on the amount of posts or members in a forum. A free forum can be created in just a few clicks. There are no downloads and nothing to set up. Lefora free forums are fully customizable, organizers can choose from different themes or create their own. The forums support community moderation where members can thumb posts up and down.

Organizers can have content from the start. To kick start their free forum hosting, organizers can pull in news articles, blog posts, and photos from around the web on topics of their choosing. Lefora free forum hosting also provides RSS feeds of all forum posts. Members can check activity such as new members and new posts, anywhere.

Forums are promoted by fostering community. Lefora’s automatic newsletters, notifications, and cross forum advertising drive people to newly created forums. Lefora also sends email notifications so members get notified of responses to osts.

Other options available in the new free forum hosting service by Lefora:

• Multimedia – Embed photos and videos with ease, just copy and paste.
• Threaded Comments – Makes for easier to follow and deeper topics of conversation.
• Social Forums – Member profiles generated from the topics they participate in.
• Hottest Topics – Balance popularity and freshness, to bring members the hottest topics in the forum.
• Forum Search – Actually find content within forum. Traditionally forums are known for their lackluster search.
• Unread Message Tracking – Quickly see what is new since the last visit.
• WYSIWYG – (What You See Is What You Get) Rich Text Editors display formatting changes as they’re typed, just like MS Word.

Lefora is a new free forum hosting provider based out of San Francisco, CA. Lefora works hard to ensure both forum admins and members have the best experience possible. The service is fast, reliable, and secure. Lefora makes it easy to start and keep conversations going.

To learn more, please visit: www.lefora.com/free_forum.

Level 1 PCI DSS Certified Service Provider! DataPipe delivers the best network & support; top tier data centers; New York metro, Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai. DataPipe – Personal Touch, Global Reach.

This agreement which Momentum calls “the first of its kind” for the company, enables it to offer its complete line of data centre services directly through the partner’s national sales organization, which is comprised of 150 employees. These services include colocation, dedicated servers, fully managed IT services, remote monitoring and automated data back-up.

“We are confident that this agreement will allow Momentum to reach significantly more of those mid-sized organizations who can benefit most from our data center service offerings,” says Phil DeLeon, president of Momentum. “In addition, we believe a partnership with the Canadian arm of one of the world’s largest technology resellers validates our overall strategy to market out data center services through a channel centric, go-to-market model.”

The company recently acquired a 20,000 square foot data center facility with over 8,000 square feet of highly secure and reliable raised floor in Toronto, Canada.

Momentum provides a range of website outsourcing and hosting services, including managed dedicated hosting, colocation and data backup. The company has over 200 industry certifications from leading organizations such as Microsoft, IBM, HP, Sun, Citrix, VMware, Redhat, Symantec and Cisco.

IronPort Systems is a business unit of Cisco Systems and a leading provider of enterprise spam, virus and spyware protection. According to IronPort, global spam volumes have doubled this year to 120 billion messages daily.

Richard Batelaan, Chief Operating Officer for Cbeyond noted, ”Cbeyond handles millions of emails an hour for our customers. Over 97 percent is spam that is never delivered to their email inbox. The global explosion of spam traffic demands diligence and investment in proven, reliable, anti-spam technology. We are confident that the steps we have taken will enable us to continue to provide our customers with the high quality of service they expect from Cbeyond.”

IronPort’s Anti-Spam solution is a multi-layered spam defense that provides the most secure protection. It addresses a full range of known threats including spam, phishing, and zombie attacks, as well as hard-to-detect low volume, short-lived email threats. In addition, IronPort Anti-Spam identifies new and evolving blended threats such as spam attacks distributing malicious content through a download URL or an executable file or script.

In response to the increase in spam volume, Cbeyond has taken aggressive steps to further protect its network and to mitigate the impact of spam on its customer base. In addition to upgrading its spam filtering technology to Cisco’s IronPort solution, the Company has increased its hardware capacity to manage any unexpected peaks generated by spam offenders. Cbeyond has also been proactively communicating to its customers on ways to protect their businesses against spam attacks.

Cbeyond, Inc. is an IP-based managed services provider that delivers integrated packages of communications and IT services to more than 35,000 small businesses in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles and San Diego. Cbeyond offers more than 30 applications including local and long-distance voice, broadband Internet, mobile, BlackBerry, broadband laptop access, voicemail, email, web hosting, fax-to-email, data backup, file-sharing and virtual private networking. Cbeyond manages the services over a private, 100-percent Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) facilities-based network.

To learn more about Cbeyond, please visit: www.cbeyond.net.

Yahoo!’s support of OpenSocial and role as a founding member of the new foundation are landmarks for the rapidly growing specification which will now offer developers the potential to connect with more than 500 million people worldwide.

The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.

Wade Chambers, Vice President – Platforms, Yahoo! noted, ”Yahoo! believes in supporting community-driven industry specifications and expects that OpenSocial will fuel innovation and make the web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions of users. Our support builds on similar efforts with the OpenID community and will expand the opportunity for developers and publishers to benefit from an open and increasingly social web.”

Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management, Google remarked, ”OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning. The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”

The OpenSocial Foundation website will serve as the portal for the community to find all information about OpenSocial and the foundation as they evolve. Developers and website owners can now visit www.opensocial.org for the latest specifications, links to other resources, and the opportunity to get involved.

Engineers from Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google will continue to work together and with the OpenSocial community to further advance the specification through the new foundation, continuing several core elements of OpenSocial since its announcement by Google, MySpace, and many others in November 2007:

• all specifications are available under a Creative Commons copyright license
• public community involvement shapes the specification’s direction
• an open source reference implementation called Shindig is being created and developed as a project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator, available at http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/

OpenSocial addresses an emerging problem for developers who are eagerly building applications people can enjoy with their friends: before OpenSocial, if a developer built a favorite photos application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site. OpenSocial tackles this problem at its technology roots, providing common ‘plumbing’ that lets social applications run on many different websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the websites. The result is a vast distribution platform for social applications, whether they are for sharing photos or playing games or arranging real-world meetings or any number of other activities – everything is more fun, interesting, and useful when users can involve their friends and contacts.

Millions of people around the world are beginning to see the benefits of the OpenSocial platform as new features appear on their favorite social networks. MySpace launched the MySpace Developer Platform, which uses the OpenSocial APIs, and began rolling out applications to its users. orkut has also started making OpenSocial applications available to its users, and hi5 will do so at the end of March.

Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, XING, and others. In time, OpenSocial will unlock more powerful and pervasive social capabilities across the entire web, as developers’ applications can easily reach users across any of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use.

Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo! is focused on powering its communities of users, advertisers, publishers, and developers by creating indispensable experiences built on trust. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

For more information about the OpenSocial Foundation, please visit: www.opensocial.org.

To learn more about Yahoo!, please visit: www.yahoo.com.

The Web host specializes in providing hosting solutions for eZ Publish, an open source enterprise content management developed by eZ Systems (ez.no). The new San Francisco office launch coincides with the opening of a new eZ Systems North American office opening in Chicago, Illinois.

WebDeal is also opening a state-of-the-art data center in San Jose, California, enabling the company to cater to a new market. The company says it will be focusing mainly on eZ Publish solutions and hosting plans ranging from shared premium hosting to fully managed dedicated servers and clusters.

“We are very excited that WebDeal is bringing its considerable expertise with eZ Publish hosting to the North American market,” says Graham Tillotson, managing director of eZ Systems North America. “Most of our customers choose to host their eZ Publish solutions, and WebDeal has the unique combination of proven hosting experience and deep knowledge of the eZ Publish content management system.”

This expansion into the US follows WebDeal’s recent openings of offices in Oslo, Norway and London, UK. The new US division will enable WebDeal to get closer to partners and customers within North America, as well as extend its global reach.

The demo included a cluster of technologies working together to create an OSGi-based mobile application. The new Cloudsmith Web service is designed to make it easy to find, publish and consume ”virtual distributions” of open source and other software components.

The speakers developed the demo application as a service bundle for deployment on OSGi-enabled Bug Labs and Google Android mobile devices. They will use Cloudsmith to publish and consume the OSGi bundles comprising the application and as an assembly mechanism for separate software distributions and software development kits. Xdrive will be used as an infrastructure provider for the Eclipse Spaces publishing service for newly developed components.

Also at EclipseCon, Bug Labs were in the Cloudsmith CloudLounge in the lobby of the mezzanine level of the convention center. Bug Labs is hosting BUG+Hack, with prizes offered for the best BUG applications.

Cloudsmith, Inc. provides web services developers use to create and share software from a global cloud of components. The Cloudsmith virtual distro service streamlines the assembly of open source and other software components across multiple sources into products that can be easily shared within communities of collaborators. The Cloudsmith virtual mapping service aggregates the efforts of developer communities in creating and maintaining new products from the component cloud. Cloudsmith was formed in 2006 and is led by experienced technology entrepreneurs. The company is a strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation.

EclipseCon 2008 includes technical sessions, open source projects, BOFs, and parties, among other networking opportunities. Also included are IBM and Blackberry Developer Days, the OSGi DevCon and an OMG Symposium, with over 300 tutorials and technical sessions, hundreds of experts, and other activities.

To learn more about EclipseCon, please visit: www.eclipsecon.org/2008.

For more information about Cloudsmith, please visit: www.cloudsmith.com.