Netfirms recognized as One of Canada's Fastest Growing Companies

Web hosting provider, Netfirms, has been recognized as one of Canada's fastest-growing companies by PROFIT earlier this week.

With a growth rate of over 800% in the past five years, Netfirms placed 71 in the 19th annual PROFIT 100 ranking of Canada's Fastest-Growing Companies.

"It is a tremendous honour to be recognized for the second year in a row by PROFIT 100," commented Thomas Savundra, President of Netfirms, Inc. "An unwavering commitment to our customers through technical leadership, product innovation, and customer service excellence continues to reward us with remarkable growth."

Mr. Savundra continued, "Of course it is the hard work and dedication of our employees that really made this happen. I would like to thank every member of our team, as well as our loyal customers who have gotten us to where we are today."

Netfirms, Inc., founded in 1998, provides web hosting solutions and technology to successful small and medium-sized businesses, home office, entrepreneurs and individuals worldwide. Netfirms hosts over 1,000,000 websites, with offices in the U.S. and Canada.

Vistapages launches new webmail system

Vistapages (vistapages.com) recently announced that RoundCube, an open source webmail solution (roundcube.net) is being included as part of its' service.

Vistapages says the addition will be bundled with HordeMail and Squirrelmail for webmail offerings. The software will provide customers with the full functionality they would expect from an email client, including MIME Support, address book, folder manipulation and message filters & more.

"RoundCube is a super cool Web mail interface compared to SquirrelMail" says Kaumil Patel, President of Vistapages. "With all the cool drag and drop, multiple select and no-reload features powered by Ajax, I thought it would be a great value-added service to our customers."

Based in Toronto, Canada, Vistapages says it offers a low cost Web hosting solution for small-to-medium sized businesses as well as virtual private server, dedicated and colocation services. To read more please visit our Vistapages Reviews page.

The Planet upgrades datacenters infrastructure

The Planet, a privately held dedicated hosting company, yesterday announced plans for a $3 million investment in new backup generators for its six data centers.

As part of its initial investment, The Planet has added two new high-performance Cummins generators to its Dallas data center portfolio for increased backup capacity and redundancy. In the event of a utility failure, the Dallas data center can run for 3.5 days without refueling, and even longer if required with its fuel-delivery contracts. The new generators will be installed across all of The Planet's data centers, claims the company.

"In our business, the quality of our IT infrastructure sets the stage for how we support our customers' businesses," said Chairman and CEO Douglas J. Erwin. "Uptime is critical to business operations, and we understand the important role we play in maintaining the IT infrastructure backbone for our more than 22,000 customers. The Planet continues to make significant investments that support the more than 45,000 dedicated servers housed across six world-class data centers so that our customers have access to state-of-the-art facilities."

A number of web hosting providers with reviews listed at Hostjury utilize The Planet as their primary facility to offer web hosting from. Hostgator has utilized The Planet for several years now while Site5 has just recently moved their operation there.

The Planet is the 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. By offering the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class support, backed by state-of-the-art facilities and unmatched network connectivity, The Planet helps turn information technology into a powerful competitive advantage that enables customers to successfully grow their businesses.

3500+ Dreamhost accounts exploited!

According to an e-mail sent out to many Dreamhost clientele earlier today there have been over 3,500+ hosting accounts exploited at Dreamhost.

The suspected entry point into the accounts was most likely password sniffing however there are many other rumors surrounding the event.

This exploit quickly followed a recent exploit of IPowerWeb that resulted in the defacement of over 35% of the IPowerWeb clientbase. Earlier this year exploits affected Hostgator & many other large providers whose systems were rooted.

A copy of the e-mail sent out by the dreamhost team is below:

From: DreamHost Security Team
Subject: URGENT: FTP Account Security Concerns…
This email is regarding a potential security concern related to your ‘XXXX’ FTP account.

We have detected what appears to be the exploit of a number of accounts belonging to DreamHost customers, and it appears that your account was one of those affected.

We’re still working to determine how this occurred, but it appears that a 3rd party found a way to obtain the password information associated with approximately 3,500 separate FTP accounts and has used that information to append data to the index files of customer sites using automated scripts (primarily for search engine optimization purposes).

Our records indicate that only roughly 20% of the accounts accessed - less than 0.15% of the total accounts that we host - actually had any changes made to them. Most accounts were untouched.

We ask that you do the following as soon as possible:

  • Immediately change your FTP password, as well as that of any other accounts that may share the same password. We recommend the use of passwords containing 8 or more random letters and numbers. You may change your FTP password from the web panel (”Users” section, “Manage Users” sub-section).
  • Review your hosted accounts/sites and ensure that nothing has been uploaded or changed that you did not do yourself. Many of the unauthorized logins did not result in changes at all (the intruder logged in, obtained a directory listing and quickly logged back out) but to be sure you should carefully review the full contents of your account.

Again, only about 20% of the exploited accounts showed any modifications, and of those the only known changes have been to site index documents (ie. ‘index.php’, ‘index.html’, etc - though we recommend looking for other changes as well).

It appears that the same intruder also attempted to gain direct access to our internal customer information database, but this was thwarted by protections we have in place to prevent such access. Similarly, we have seen no indication that the intruder accessed other customer account services such as email or MySQL databases.

In the last 24 hours we have made numerous significant behind-the- scenes changes to improve internal security, including the discovery and patching to prevent a handful of possible exploits.

We will, of course, continue to investigate the source of this particular security breach and keep customers apprised of what we find. Once we learn more, we will be sure to post updates as they become available to our status weblog: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/

Thank you for your patience. If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know.

Tour of the Hostgator Lair

Today we'll take a small tour of the latest & greatest in the new Hostgator location. In late 2006 the company moved from warm, gorgeous Boca Raton, Florida to big bad Texas. The new office is over twenty three thousand square feet larger than the previous location.

After the move the company grew exponentially and expanded it's support team by over 100%. Here's a few pictures of the office courtesy of the new Hostgator blog.


The building is located in Downtown houston & the local animal control team is handling all cases of escaped gators properly..

More pictures..


Host Gator is a provider of shared, dedicated and reseller web hosting services focused on the consumer and small business markets. Founded in 2002, Host Gator has become a leader in reseller hosting, assisting over 11,000 businesses become web hosting companies. Host Gator has offices in Boca Raton, Florida and its data center operations are co-located out of The Planet's facility in Dallas, Texas, enabling it to access Tier-1 backbone providers such as UUNet, Sprint, Level 3, Global Crossing, Verio and AT and T. HostGator's shared hosting plans are supported by HostGator's 24/7/365 phone support, and comes with a 99.9% uptime and 30-daymoney-back guarantee.