September 24, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- This week's biggest Web hosting industry news was undoubtedly the minor disaster in Baltimore and the Major disaster that resulted for Web hosting company Alabanza and its clients. For Alabanza resellers, the hours-long outage might as well have been the only news on Monday, and likely for the rest of the week.

In the early hours of Monday morning, an underground fire in the neighborhood of Alabanza's downtown Baltimore data center caused flames to shoot from a manhole near City Hall. Firefighters quickly extinguished the fire, but damage to the electrical grid caused a loss of power to nearby traffic lights. City electrical workers reportedly shut off power to some buildings in the area, including Alabanza's data center and shutting down the company's network, which remained offline for upwards of 10 hours. The outage came one year, almost to the day, after a similar fire knocked Alabanza's network offline.

While the fire knocked Alabanza's network offline, it also seemed to impact the company's telephone lines, which were inaccessible for most of the day, leaving customers to wonder what was happening to their service. In his Thursday feature, Jay Lyman explored how Web hosts turned to the Internet discussion boards for information on the state of Alabanza's network, and even representatives from Alabanza were able to use the forums to communicate status to customers.

While the fire was an out-of-the-ordinary source of concern, Web hosts also continued to deal with more commonplace threats this week, as security experts prepared for the expected arrival of a virus or worm based on a new exploit that affects Microsoft software.

Late last week, Netcraft reported that code had been published online that claimed to partially exploit a weakness in the way certain Microsoft software products, including the Office suite and most versions of Internet Explorer, deal with JPEG images. The simple proof-of-concept exploit would crash computers running unpatched versions of Windows XP, which could lead to the remote execution of code.

The major concern was not so much the relatively minor impact of the code, but the inevitable release of more sophisticated code that could quickly develop into a more serious virus or worm threat.

On Friday, Netcraft reported that exploits continued to emerge for the JPEG vulnerability, prompting security experts to make preparations for a coming virus or worm attack. An exploit published Thursday morning to the Full Disclosure mailing list can reportedly create an administrator-level account on a Windows machine, while another exploit can execute code remotely. Some security software has already been updated to identify the malicious JPEGs.

While some Web hosts dealt with downtime, or with the potential for future problems, this week's Web hosting news wasn't all disaster related. Several Web hosts announced this week that they had launched new services, or made significant additions to their existing services.

On Monday, Rackspace Managed Hosting announced that it had released a new offering specifically tailored for application service providers, Intensive Hosting for ASPs. The company says the new solution makes it the first hosting provider to offer a custom specifically designed for companies that want to offer their software products using the software-as-a-service model.

Also on Monday, security solutions provider GeoTrust announced that Internet Service Provider EarthLink had chosen GeoTrust as supplier of SSL certificates for its Web hosting and e-commerce customers. EarthLink said SSL security had become a necessity for anybody doing business on the Internet, including small businesses and online retailers, and that it would work with GeoTrust to make it easy and affordable for Earthlink customers to secure SSL Certificates.

And on Thursday, Linux-based Web host WebFusion announced that it had introduced a new Windows-based Web hosting platform in an effort to provide its customers with a more comprehensive shared hosting offering. The company's Windows platform includes support for ASP.Net and SQL Server, as well as free antivirus and anti-spam tools, and a control panel environment.

Unmistakably this week's biggest Web hosting story was the Alabanza outage, though its impact on the company's reputation, or its relationship with customers has yet to become completely clear. There will certainly be more to hear about the incident, especially with Alabanza's users conference scheduled to take place next week in Baltimore.