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Businesses now able to submit proposals or bid at auction to secure unique web addresses, says registry operator NeuStar.

NeuStar, Inc., a provider of services that enable trusted communication across networks, applications, and enterprises around the world, today announced that it has received an approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to make one- and two-character .BIZ domain names (such as www.i.biz, www.my.biz and www.3.biz) available to the public.

In a phased rollout, the company claims that it will now make these domain names available to the global business community through a Request for Proposal (RFP) process, followed by an offering at auction of those domains not allocated to RFP respondents. It avers that it will begin accepting RFP responses for the 36 one character letters and numbers on June 1, 2009, with a response deadline of July 30, 2009. Once the one-character RFP round is concluded, it claims that it will proceed to an auction phase for those names and will begin accepting RFP responses for the two-character domains. Proceeds from the auction of the remaining one- and two-character domains will be used to further promote the .BIZ brand for the benefit of all .BIZ domain users, it says.

“The decision by ICANN to approve NeuStar’s one- and two-character marketing effort within the .BIZ domain represents an important opportunity for the .BIZ registry to generate greater brand recognition in today’s TLD marketplace, particularly among the global business community,” said Tim Switzer, NeuStar’s vice president of Registry Services. “Through the initial RFP round, we will identify the candidates who present plans that best exemplify innovation, creativity, brand recognition and financial commitment.”

“The hyper-competitive domain name sector is far from commoditized, with some bits of DNS real estate having far greater values than others,” said Daniel Golding, vice president and research director at Tier1 Research. “It isn’t very often that precious one and two-letter domain names become available. Tier1 anticipates heavy demand among content providers, software-as-a-service vendors, entertainment and social networking companies, retailers, and numerous others.”

WordPress, one of the most popular of our free Value Applications that come with each of our hosting plans has released the second beta of version 2.8. This was announced on the WordPress blog just one week after the initial beta release. Being still in beta it is not recommended to use it in a production blog and it will only be available for upgrading at Hosting Direct 24 after thorough testing.

The most significant changes in the new version are in widget management and in the installation of themes. From now on it will be possible to browse and install new themes like a plugin without leaving the backend of your blog.

For a full list of new features click here.

Podgorica, Montenegro – The .ME Registry announced its popular ccTLD extension has hit 250,000 domains registered. Montenegro’s .ME Registry has seen significant growth since it launched the domain extension worldwide just over one year ago. In fact, .ME, which is currently for sale at Hosting Direct 24, is the fastest growing new ccTLD.

Many in the online marketing community believe .ME’s popularity directly correlates to the domain’s branding power. “Dot-ME is extremely suitable for consumer brands,” notes Mark Kychma of Brands-and-Jingles, a marketing firm based in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Ukraine. His company owns hundreds of .ME domains. “Try to forget brands like Hotels4.Me, Pizza4.Me and Tickets4.Me… there is a 99 percent chance you will not,” adds Kychma. “Tell your friends about Love.Me, Fancy.Me, Unlock.Me and they will remember them for ages.”

The power of the right domain name combined with a .ME extension is astounding. YouAnd.Me, an explosively popular online dating service, launched just three months ago. According to the site’s founder, Steve Sikes, YouAnd.Me already has close to 50,000 members and is currently ranked among the top 90,000 Web sites in the world. Sikes is a big proponent of .ME domains. “Dot-ME domain extensions just seem to mesh with the direction of the Web,” stated Sikes recently. “They are more personalized and provide more user-generated content.”

“This is the kind of reaction we always knew we would elicit with dot-ME,” states Predrag Lesic, executive director of the .ME Registry. “Dot-ME has become an Internet phenomenon.”

Social networks are a popular way of how people communicate these days and collect information on the Web. Elgg is an open source platform to create a social network to bring together people for all kinds of interaction, be it for academic purposes or for exchanging views on their favorite pets. It offers blogging, networking, community, news feeds and file sharing just like any commercial social network like Facebook or MySpace. The main difference is the degree of control each user has over their content. Each profile item, blog post, or uploaded file can be assigned its own access restrictions—from fully public to readable only by a particular group or individual.

Elgg is an easy way to create your own fully customized, hosted social network for your business, organization, or group of friends. The open source approach provides for numerous plug-ins with nearly unlimited extensions. Elgg was originally started in 2004 by Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh, who subsequently founded Curverider to provide Elgg-related services.

Each Elgg site can take advantage of granular RSS, Open Social, OpenID (client and server), FOAF, an extensible RESTful API with results in JSON, serialised PHP or XML, alternate views on a site which allow for easily creating rich mobile applications and powerful event, plugin and widget APIs. The Elgg comprehensive activity stream keeps users updated. Their own actions and the actions of their friends across the site appear in the activity stream. Users can choose to get notifications about friends’ activity. Notifications are sent by a variety of methods including internal messaging and email.

Beyond closed groups of friends and colleagues Elgg has also a powerful handle for businesses. For example, you can enhance your e-commerce website with a social networking facility to connect directly to your customers. By creating online communities for your products you can strengthen your brand and significantly increase customer loyalty and revenues.

Elgg Features

• Blogging – Share your ideas with others.
• File Repository – Elgg includes a storage system compatible with a variety of file formats.
• Tagging – Content tags make it easy to locate users with similar interests.
• Customizable & Extensible – Elgg includes a variety of themes and an assortment of plugins.
• Multiple Views – Allows for traditional web browser views as well as mobile applications and embeddable widgets.
• User Controls – Closely manage your network’s privacy settings.
• XML-RPC – Use external blogging software to create a post for your Elgg website.
• User Profile – Link to other users and/or resources through your profile.
• Content Syndication – RSS, FOAF & XFN.

At Hosting Direct 24 Elgg comes as free addition to all Linux hosting plans alongside many other great offerings at absolutely no cost.

A recent report released by the Anti-Phishing Work Group (APWG) found that the .INFO domain has the lowest exposure to phishing attacks among all generic top-level Internet domains (gTLDs). Afilias, a provider of registry services, made it public that a new Global Phishing Survey conducted during the second half of 2008 revealed that .INFO had the lowest phishing rates and the lowest average attack duration among the gTLDs measured.

“The .INFO registry is at the forefront of protecting Internet users from online identity theft across the world,” said Greg Aaron, Director of Key Account Management and Domain Security at Afilias, and a co-author of the study. “In January 2008, Afilias implemented a vigorous anti-phishing program working closely with .INFO registrars. We are pleased that the hard work of the .INFO anti-phishing team and dedicated registrars have propelled .INFO to the top spot for safety from phishing.”

Afilias says that the Global Phishing Survey analyzes the APWG phishing attack repository and other data sources comprising a comprehensive archive of phishing activity. It reports 56,959 phishing attacks worldwide in the second half of 2008, hosted on 30,454 unique domain names. Phishing took place on domain names in 170 top-level domains (TLDs). The company further states that according to the report, a phishing rate is a standard measure of the number of detected phishing web sites for every 10,000 domains registered, and indicates the prevalence of phishing in a top-level domain. It adds that attack duration measures the amount of time a phishing web site remains online – the longer one stays online, the more unsuspecting users may fall victim to the criminals.

“Identity theft and fraud are important issues for anyone who goes online, and criminals are using vulnerable top-level domains and registrars to steal identities and money,” said Ram Mohan, Executive Vice President and CTO of Afilias. “The new data demonstrates the effectiveness of active, self-regulated domain name anti-abuse programs in improving the safety of Internet users against those who steal from them.”

Ever since we included support for Ruby on Rails in our Linux hosting plans we’ve been asked by non-techies what it’s all about. Even if you may not be aware of it you’ve probably already come across it while using an application built with it, maybe most notably Twitter.

Ruby as such is a programming language combining syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features and was initially developed and designed by Yukihiro Matsumoto from Japan. Ruby on Rails again is a web application framework based on the Ruby language. It is intended to speed up web development by re-using existing code structures and to allow some sort of “out-of-the-box” programming.

Ruby on Rails has now become popular among developers because it uses the latest web development technology and is said to be suitable to create applications of any scope. At the same time it is still simple and easy to use. Ruby on Rails was created by David Heinemeier Hansson while working on a web-based project management tool called Basecamp. For more information on the Rails project you can visit its homepage here.

Linux or Windows? This question rages often like a religious battle between dedicated followers of each operating system. At Hosting Direct 24 our primary concern is offering our customers the security, stability and performance you expect from a first-class web hosting operation. As our customers enjoy the same uptime guarantee, backup routines and advanced maintenance at exactly the same great price no matter what system they choose we will have a closer look of what really suits your needs. Personal preferences apart, the choice for Linux hosting or Windows hosting largely depends on what you want to do with your site.

Programming Languages and Databases

If you limit yourself to  static web pages in pure HTML you are fine with both systems. However, if you are planning for a dynamic site with interactive pages you’ll have to employ some kind of programming language as well as one or more databases. Such programming languages for the web include Perl, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, Python, Java, ColdFusion, Ruby etc. Common databases are MySQL, MS Access and MS SQL. PHP and ASP are considered the most popular languages and here comes the first differentiation: PHP is open source and thus more associated with Linux, while ASP is a Microsoft product. The same is true for MySQL and MS Access, respectively. When you’re all out for ASP pages or MS databases your obvious choice is Windows.

Applications

If you are not so much into programming and want to use one or the other (or all, for that matter) of our vast offering of free value applications there are also some choices to make beforehand. While popular applications like Wordpress, Joomla or zenCart are included in both our Linux and Windows packages, others like Elgg or dasBlog require one or the other.

Summary

In conclusion the most obvious choices between the two operating systems are as follows:

Linux

Your website uses

• Open source databases like MySQL
• Pages coded in CGI, Perl, PHP, Ruby
• Pages with XML

Windows

Your website uses

• Microsoft Access or SQL databases
• Pages coded in ASP or ASP.NET
• VB/C# tools for development

With the abundance of web hosting plans it is often difficult for novices to make the right choice. This article describes the most common types of web hosting.

Shared Hosting

An economical way to host anything from personal websites to large-scale web presentations. Shared hosting means that many websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. Each site though has its own space to keep it separate from other sites. The site owners share only the costs of server maintenance. Depending on individual needs shared hosting plans differ in the provided space and bandwidth. Having a big number of media files will increase the need for space while intense traffic will require more bandwidth.

Dedicated Servers

Dedicated Servers are entirely leased by an individual client and not shared with anybody else. The hosted website has its own resources and works much faster and more efficiently. This type of dedicated hosting suits organizations who run large websites with vast amounts of traffic. Assisted Plans can be provided to help clients managing their server(s). There are usually ready-to-go-plans and custom configurations available.

Virtual Dedicated Servers

Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS), also called virtual private servers (VPS), are bridging the gap between shared hosting and dedicated servers. In this type of hosting a website resides in its own partition which appears as a server in itself. The website still has its own resources as it would have with a physical server. This allows clients to run large websites with a similar amount of control but at a lower cost.

Ever since its start last year the .ME domain had a special appeal to individuals and businesses alike. Originally the TLD of the tiny state of Montenegro it has seen a surge of interest worldwide.

“Being widely used as a call-to-action business domain and for personal fun as well, dot-ME has established itself as one of the leading ccTLDs available around the world,” says Predrag Lesic, chief executive officer of the .ME Registry.

The .ME domain also has great appeal to domain traders with many keyword-rich names still available. So anyone who is interested in either a highly personal online appearance or a promising investment should look for our limited-time sale of .ME domains for only $12.99. Included are all the free features that Hosting Direct 24 is famed for.