The owners of the domain put up a message on the site promoting content creation and indicating that it will soon be opening up a hosting service “with backbone”. Discussing about how SOPA blackout day fades from view “but not from importance,” the message said:

Recent events and the pavlovian salivating of certain legislators upon hearing the fundraising dinner bell ringing from the Beverly Hills Hotel have certainly reminded us that the internet naming system is a serious choke point for any online enterprise. In selecting our partners we wanted to make sure we teamed up with a domain registrar and DNS host who had a history of treating third party requests skeptically, but respectfully. We wanted a partner who wouldn’t dissolve into incontinent fits and roll over on getting a call from United States Senator Joseph Lieberman’s office intern, for instance. We found that partner in Toronto based easyDNS. easyDNS has been providing clueful and spineful DNS and registry services since 1998. Their four-continent anycast DNS cluster fits the bill. Plus, easyDNS’ founder, Mark Jeftovic, is the essence of a spineful owner.

On a FAQ page, the new Righthaven.com says:

Righthaven, LLC is a United States based firm in the state of Nevada that amassed some notoriety for aggressively suing bloggers and internet forum commenters at the drop of a hat. In fact, they might fairly be counted among the “prolific litigants” we mentioned in our answer to the previous question.

Initially, we were merely casually interested observers in the legal wrangling that followed and eventually resulted in the auctioning off of the righthaven domain. Once we noticed that, however, we couldn’t resist acquiring it.

But anyway…we covered this yesterday, which led to the new Righthaven.com (going by the Twitter handle @righthavened) sending us the following tweets:

We’re not the only ones they’re having fun with. Here’s one referencing some coverage on TechDirt:

The humor continues on the new Righthaven.com blog, with a post defining “righthavened”. The definition goes:

right·havened, v.

1. trans. To turn the tables on.
2. To inflict total karmic defeat upon, especially by means of an opponent’s purported strengths.
3. To reclaim a maligning term and adopt it as a banner.
4. @righthavened; see: Twitter

For more background on why this amusing, peruse our past Righthaven coverage.

First, just read the message:

Most Revered Content Creator,

Righthaven.com

The aforementioned FAQ has a little nugget about Righthaven itself:

Righthaven, LLC is a United States based firm in the state of Nevada that amassed some notoriety for aggressively suing bloggers and internet forum commenters at the drop of a hat. In fact, they might fairly be counted among the “prolific litigants” we mentioned in our answer to the previous question.

Initially, we were merely casually interested observers in the legal wrangling that followed and eventually resulted in the auctioning off of the righthaven domain. Once we noticed that, however, we couldn’t resist acquiring it.

It will be interesting to see how the service unfolds on the site. And Righthaven’s response to it for that matter.

GoDaddy, on and off again supporter of SOPA, joined the other sites participating in the blackout today. The only issue is, where is it?

Can you see the blackout? I couldn’t see it at first. Then you can see at the very bottom left, in a cute little corner, a black box that says, “Go Daddy & many other Internet leaders oppose SOPA & PIPA.

Clicking on the link takes you to a support page with a brief explanation of their opposition that apparently only started when everybody else complained about it.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was with the U.S. House Judiciary Committee when an uproar erupted on the Internet. An overwhelming majority of the Internet community voiced strong opposition to SOPA legislation. Go Daddy joined to oppose SOPA.

On Jan. 16, U.S. Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) stopped action on SOPA.

Companion legislation, known as PIPA, is still up for debate in the U.S. Senate. Go Daddy opposes current PIPA legislation, as do many other major technology companies and users.

Do you think Go Daddy has done enough to voice their opposition to SOPA? Or is it just the “me too” mentality to avoid losing more domains?

This may work to get a lot of site-owners using Google products that they weren’t necessarily using before, and in theory could help their visibility, traffic, and revenue in the long run.

"Website owners generate more traffic to their websites by optimizing them using Webmaster Tools," says Google Search Group Product Manager Rajat Mukherjee. "They can engage their users with inline Web Elements, including maps, news, videos and conversations. Custom Search and Site Search provide Google-quality search on their websites for better user retention. AdSense helps website owners monetize their sites with relevant advertising. And besides providing these valuable services to millions of customers, hosting companies can also generate additional revenues through referral programs."

This also marks the first commercial control panel to offer Google Services for Websites, allowing the hosting companies to monetize the services, according to Parallels. "These significant updates enable shared hosting companies to generate new revenue streams and deliver better services to their small business customers," says Parallels President Jack Zubarev.

Google Services for Websites was announced last year. Other partners include DomainHost, GoDaddy, FatCow, Aplus.net, and about 15 others. Such partnerships provide hosting providers with a few bells and whistles to offer their customers.

Netcraft looks at the number of sites hosted on the different top servers. The following graph represents market share for top servers across all domains from August 1995 to October 2008:

Netcraft offers a more detailed look at the numbers of sites coming from different servers in this list. Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration compares NetCraft’s data to that of another Firm:

Now Domain Tools also tracks all the different web domain names registered on the Internet and their count puts the total number of active domains as 106 million.

This is different from the Netcraft survey as Domain Tools won’t count the sub-domains since they are all registered to the same owner (like Google’s blogspot) but may technically be a different website and hence adds to the Netcraft count.

I wonder how many of theses millions of sites are blogs. Of those, I wonder how many are still being updated. Those are some numbers that might fuel the debate about the life of blogs.

Google was found to be behind a total of 10.5 million sites in October.  Microsoft’s name was attached to 62.8 million, and Apache supported 91.9 million sites.

 Netcraft’s Webserver Stats

The space between these numbers then narrows a bit if you only look at what Netcraft considers "active" sites.  Google, Microsoft, and Apache are tied to 7.6 million, 25.6 million, and 33.3 million of them, respectively.  This gives Google a market share of 10.62 percent.

As for month-to-month changes, Netcraft found that after Apache, "Google shows the next largest growth and boosts its total by 411 thousand sites."

So for being in a very distant third place, Google’s in pretty good shape.  The company gave Stephen Shankland a tiny insight into its position by stating, "The Google Web server is a custom-built server that runs on Linux."

We wondered why our Sunday fix of webcomic Schlock Mercenary wasn’t available with the morning bacon and eggs. Only a static note saying their datacenter experienced a wall-leveling explosion appeared onscreen.

Later, Alan Gray of Newsblaze wrote in to confirm that detail about the problem at The Planet, where the incident occurred.

“It is now known that there was an explosion that knocked down three walls surrounding the electrical equipment room,” said Gray. “Luckily, there were no injuries.”

Center Networks posted a note from The Planet CEO Douglas Erwin, who described what happened:

Three walls of the electrical equipment room on the first floor blew several feet from their original position, and the underground cabling that powers the first floor of H1 was destroyed.

About 3,000 servers affected by the explosion may be in for some serious downtime. Erwin said “the damage there was far more extensive, and we have a bigger challenge” to get them running again.

The incident highlights the need for webmasters to have a disaster recovery plan in place for their sites. A situation like this doesn’t allow anyone to rewind to the past and prepare better; backups of data and access to installations of web application software should be available in a crisis in minutes or hours at worst, not days.

Rackspace took care of the formality of filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission ahead of the weekend, delivering their S-1 form to announce the intent to make a public offering.

Though the hosting company didn’t say at first what they hoped to raise, later reports pegged the number at $400 million. The method in which they raise it will look familiar.

TechCrunch followed up its initial break of the pending IPO in noting the format of the offering:

The underwriters are Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, and WR Hambrecht & Co. (the leading proponent of such IPO pricing). Pricing through an auction is designed to make sure the company raises the most money possible instead of giving up a first-day pop to investors who are allocated shares by the investment banks doing the deal.

Shares will still be allocated to such clients, but anyone who bids beforehand in the auction at or above the eventual IPO price will also get shares. All in all, it is a much more efficient way to price an IPO and more companies should do it.

The infusion of income should permit Rackspace to beef up the number and capacity of datacenters it can provide to clients. Their strategy likely contains elements of service offerings, based on its acquisition of Webmail.us (renamed as Mailtrust) and the deployment of a “hosting cloud” service called Mosso.

Big names like IBM and Amazon.com await the kind of competition Rackspace may attempt with its infusion of capital. $400 million may sound like a substantial sum, but Rackspace will want to avoid outgrowing demand, as has happened with other hosting services when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.

Wilders made a name for himself with fierce anti-Islam rhetoric. His film, running 15 minutes and called “Fitna,” has spurred more criticism of the politician, who already lives under guard due to death threats made in response to his views.

More of those views and the controversy that follows them has Dutch broadcasters unwilling to broadcast Fitna. Wilders’ plan to distribute it online hit a snag when his hosting company, Network Solutions, pulled the domain offline.

A notice at fitnathemovie.com says:

This site has been suspended while Network Solutions is investigating whether the site's content is in violation of the Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy. Network Solutions has received a number of complaints regarding this site that are under investigation.

Given the film’s sensitive subject matter, European unrest over a growing Islamic population, and past violence that included the murder of another Dutch filmmaker for making a film about Islam’s treatment of women, Network Solutions may decide to give Wilders a refund and spare itself the potential pushback from hosting Fitna.

Though a Reuters report said Wilders plans to get the movie into people’s hands by pressing copies of a DVD into them if needed, the politician probably feels he is being censored for his views. If other hosting sites reject his video, Wilders may be right to believe this.

By treating a recent billing cycle for DreamHost customers as if it ended in December 2008 rather than December 2007, the company billing clients for what may have been in excess of a collective $7.5 million dollars.

Jones explained in a DreamHost blog post how he manually ran the billing service for what he thought were dates last month. But in appending 2008 instead of 2007 to catch up on any missed billings, Jones nailed a swath of the firm’s customers.

Commentary at the status announcement of the problem ran the gamut of relief that the error was caught, to white-hot anger. Similar remarks appeared at Jones’ blog entry.

“A new service is running right now (in parallel on all the controllers) that fixes all those future charges, re-enables your account if it was erroneously suspended, and if your credit card was automatically rebilled, refunds the payment automatically. You don