Aplus.Net web hosting announced that they have rolled out a number of good promotions to give their clients an advantage in this online competitive marketplace.

The Dedicated server promotion is to add a free hard disk upgrade if the order the 2x Xeon 2.4 Ghz or the 2x Xeon 2.8 GHz processors servers. These are two of their dedicated web hosting servers. This free extra storage unit is planned to maximize the value of their dedicated servers in the hosting industry.

Aplus.Net also announces the modification of ‘Refer a Friend’ program so that it includes all their shared web hosting plans. There will be a free one month award for every customer referred by an existing client, this apply for all shared web hosting plans starting from Basic personal plan to the ecommerce plan.

Nathan Denny, a Aplus.Net spokesman commented “We work hard to provide Aplus.Net customers with as much value as we possibly can,” also he added “A free extra hard drive not only adds crucial storage to our customers’ hosting platform, it also saves them hundreds of dollars each year. Given these somewhat uncertain economic times, that’s more important than ever.”

Layered Technologies a utility hosting services provider and 3Tera a utility computing platform developer announced that they will provide hundred grid-based servers to support Woopra real-time Web analytics platform.

Woopra has been experiencing a big market demand before its official launch. The Web analytics platform provides real-time stats delivered by a client-server application, and includes features like the ability to identify and chat with visitors of a site.

“The instant growth of Woopra is a perfect example of how grid solutions provide new capabilities for growth,” says Peter Nickolov, president and chief technology officer of 3Tera. “Scaling an online application, such as Woopra, can be enormously challenging. Being able to quickly deploy and operate on a highly available and scalable utility computing platform offers a unique business solution.”

Elie Khoury, Woopra’s chief information officer, says that the public feedback it has received since WordCamp has been phenomenal and the company is aggressively working to make its application available to as many as 100,000 websites within the next few weeks.

Layered Technologies says that with 3Tera’s AppLogic platform, it will be able to provide Woopra with grid computing solutions, enabling the company to package its entire application into a single, self-contained entity, but also give it the flexibility to scale back from a fraction of a CPU to hundreds of machines without any code modification.

“We are excited about the launch of Woopra and the fact that we will be hosting it on The Grid,” says Todd Abrams, chief operating officer and president of Layered Technologies. “With such high demand, we are working closely with Woopra to ensure that all of Layered Technologies’ clients can gain access to the application as quickly as possible.”

Windows web hosting provider easyCGI, now launching .NET 3.5 hosting for clients of with the shared web hosting plans. This upgrade enables present clients to benefit from all the new features in this updated version of .NET 3.5 Framework. With this and previous upgrades, easyCGI web hosting carried out great performance, compatibility and reliability.

The .NET 3.5 release builds on the features earlier added in .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0, so sites already built using the earlier versions should benefit from a seamless migration to 3.5 release. Expansions on previous .NET versions with ASP.NET AJAX, ability for Language Integrated Query (LINQ), and also a variety of many new developers’ tools, make it much easier and faster to build more complex applications using Windows. Visual Studio 2008, can also target .NET Framework 3.5 or previous versions.

-Features and tools of the new .NET 3.5 Framework release include:
-Auto-Host for self-hosted WCF services
-New product and item templates
-Ability to author services as a workflow
-Enhanced duplex/async messaging
-Support for all the new WS- services, such as WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-AtomicTransaction, and WS-Trust/WS-SecurityPolicy
-Better support for the growing variety of web protocols, formats and services

Ted Beckwith, VP of easyCGI said “Many of our customers stay in tune with the latest technologies, so we anticipated a large number of requests to upgrade to Framework 3.5,”, “Now, our customers have all the new features and tools of .NET Framework 3.5 to push boundaries in their developments.”

New dedicated servers are being offered through a partnership between on-demand, dedicated web hosting solutions firm, SoftLayer, and midPhase web hosting provider.

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

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.