Month: December 2009

Downtime for Major Sites Caused By DNS Issues

Some of the web’s most well-known websites experienced sluggishness and downtime Wednesday night due to troubles with DNS services. The problem was most pronounced at UltraDNS, which reported that its performance issues were done by an electronic attack.
The list of sites experiencing problems included Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services and Walmart.com. DNS is short for the domain name system, which serves as a roadmap allowing users to find web sites. Domain registries like VeriSign provide centralized web lookups through a network of data centers, while commercial DNS service providers like UltraDNS offer additional tools to manage traffic.
UltraDNS told CNet that it was hit by a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) targeting its west coast infrastructure at data centers in San Jose and Palo Alto. A DDoS attack targets a site or provider with large volumes of traffic in an attempt to overwhelm its ability to serve content.
That logjam at UltraDNS caused ripples across the Internet, causing uptime problems for several major service providers.
“We can confirm some customers in the West Coast are experiencing issues with resolving DNS,” Amazon Web Services reported. The issue was resolved by 6:40 p.m. and affected Amazon’s EC2 compute service, S3 storage and CloudFront content delivery network, Pacific time.
“Due to a global DNS outage, all services at salesforce.com were affected,” Salesforce reported on its status dashboard. ”We are closely working with our providers to get more details and to isolate the nature of the problem.”
The outages marked the third time this year that DDoS attacks on DNS providers had disrupted service for customers:
  • Hundreds of thousands of web sites were slowed for hours on Jan. 23 when Network Solutions’ DNS servers were hit by a DDoS. The company described the incident as a “very large scale” attack.
  • UltraDNS blamed an April 1 outage on a DDoS, but said the issue affected a small subset of its customers.
Successful attacks on dns providers are not unprecedented, but these services are designed to be resilient. VeriSign has deployed new infrastructure in a $100 million upgrade at multiple data centers, with a goal of expanding its capacity to handle more than 4 trillion DNS requests per day by 2010.

Lunarpages Web Hosting Selects Latisys’ SAS70 Compliant HD Colocation and Managed Services

Lunarpages web hosting provider selected Latisys Irvine data center for its ability to give outsourced, scalable IT infrastructure management services to comply with the company’s growing needs, which is driven by customer growth as well as broader use of high-density applications.
 
“We consider our data center partner to be a critical part of the Lunarpages team, which is why we invest in only the best,” said George Natzic, chief operating officer at Lunarpages, in a statement.
 
“By turning to Latisys, our customers will benefit from a SAS70 compliant infrastructure and continuous uptime,” Natzic added. “At the same time, we have assurance and peace of mind that our IT environment is secure.”
 
Don Goodwin, executive vice president of Latisys said, “Because Lunarpages prides itself on offering customers uncompromised security, management, pricing, and services, selecting a data center partner that enabled the firm to execute on this mission was paramount.”
 
Latisys multiple high-density SAS70 Type II certified data centers across the United States, they can offers scalable outsourced IT infrastructure management solutions to customers, company officials added. 
 
Two month ago, Latisys announced it joined Microsoft (News – Alert)Software + Services Incubation Center Program, TMCnet reported.
 
The Microsoft Incubation Center Program is designed to help independent service vendors to easily face the commercial, financial, and technical challenges that they face while adding a service-based delivery application to their business offerings. Microsoft brings together leading independent software vendors with hosting providers, through this program.
 
In another major development Latisys announced that AboveNet, a leading provider of high bandwidth connectivity solutions, has implemented dedicated, diverse routing over two physically separate paths between Latisys’ data center in Irvine, California and AboveNet’s Los Angeles backbone network.
 
This implementation provides Latisys with a private, high bandwidth fiber connectivity running over these paths. This network will also provide Latisys fewer ‘hops’ or connection points to offer low latency service for their customers’ mission-critical applications, company officials stated.

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GoDaddy Domain & Hosting Provider Offers Business Incorporation Services

GoDaddy a domain registrar and web hosting provider announced, They are now offering incorporation services, which gives businesses a easy and cost-effective way to incorporate a business.

This services will simplifies the process of transitioning a business into a corporation or LLC. To make use of the service, clients can log into the their accounts to answer the requiered questions.

Then GoDaddy will file the papers on their behalf and send the incorporation documents in a few weeks.

All applications are reviewed by experienced professionals to make sure it is submitted correctly and accurately.

As a large portion of GoDaddy’s clients are a small and medium businesses, this service certainly seems like a logical value-added service for GoDaddy customers.

“If you haven’t incorporated your businesses, you’re leaving yourself and your family open to unnecessary risk,” says Bob Parsons, Go Daddy CEO and founder. “Go Daddy wanted to help make the whole incorporation process affordable and painless, which is why we’re offering Incorporation Services.”

There are two levels for this service. The Economy plan priced at $99, plus state fees, and includes everything that is needed to incorporate a business and the Deluxe plan that cost $279, plus state fees, this includes also a Federal Employer Identification Number, an additional six Months of Registered Agent Service, and expedited shipping.

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