May 9, 2012 — Web hosting company UnitedLayer announced on Wednesday it has made a considerable amount of investments in data centers, its employees, processes, and research and development to improve its cloud computing services.

May 9, 2012 — Cloud computing provider Amazon Web Services announced on Tuesday that it has added more features for Windows developers with Amazon RDS for SQL server and .NET support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

May 9, 2012 — Web hosting company PEER 1 Hosting announced last week it has named Gaye Andrews its new head of customer service in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

May 9, 2012 — Open source software provider Red Hat outlined the roadmap for its OpenShift platform-as-a-service on Wednesday. As part of its plans, Red Hat will extend OpenShift PaaS to allow enterprise to use both DevOps operational models and traditional application management.

May 9, 2012 — Cloud infrastructure as a service provider CloudSigma announced at Interop Las Vegas on Tuesday it has launched SigSTORE, a SLA-backed distributed SSD storage solution, for its public cloud IaaS offering.

May 9, 2012 — Web hosting provider Rackspace announced its first quarter results in an earnings call on Monday afternoon, and while analysts were disappointed with the results, it is clear that Rackspace is banking on its cloud investments like OpenStack to ramp up future revenues.

ICANN is targeting 22 May as the intended reopening date for the TLD Application System. ICANN anticipates the system remaining open for five business days and close on 30 May. This takes account of the 28 May Memorial Day holiday in the United States. ICANN took TAS offline on 12 April days before it was scheduled to close following a technical glitch that may have allowed some users to see some file names and user names of other users. To date ICANN has seen no evidence that any TAS user intentionally did anything wrong in order to be able to see other users’ information. In the latest announcement by Akram Atallah , ICANN’s COO, it is noted the large majority of users are unaffected by the glitch. But ICANN will continue to review the extensive database of system logs and system traffic, and any new and relevant information that emerges from this analysis will be shared with applicants in a timely way. Even as late as yesterday, 7 May 2012, ICANN’s packet-level research uncovered a new set of instances (in addition to those previously announced) where another applicant might have viewed a set of system-generated file names. It is possible that further analysis will also show that some of the parties that we have notified were not affected, but notice was provided out of an abundance of caution. It is expected there will be over 2300 applications for TLDs by the time applications close. While no date has been given for when applications will be revealed, given ICANN’s original timeframe of 18 days from applications close to the “big reveal”, it would be expected that the TLDs applied for will be revealed sometime around 18 June or shortly thereafter. And given the ICANN meeting in Prague commences on 24 June, it could even happen then.

Publishing house HUB Uitgevers has appointed SIDN, the registry for .NL, to provide back-end registry services for the new top-level domain (TLD) .AMSTERDAM. Amsterdam’s municipal authority asked HUB Uitgevers to operate the Dutch capital’s TLD after careful market research. The expectation is that the new TLD will come on line in 2013. Pre-registration is possible at puntamsterdam.nl and dotamsterdam.nl from 7 May. “Naturally we are very pleased that Amsterdam and HUB have chosen SIDN to handle the technical realisation of .AMSTERDAM,” said Roelof Meijer, SIDN’s CEO. “With nearly five million registered .NL domain names, we have vast experience with all aspects of domain name registration. We expect new TLDs such as .AMSTERDAM to change the internet landscape. Clearly, therefore, we want to be involved in this development.”

May 8, 2012 — Web hosting provider Connectria announced on Tuesday that it will expand in Dallas through a CyrusOne data center.

May 8, 2012 — The shared hosting market hasn’t been a hot topic in the hosting business for years. But while other areas have seen more rapid growth, the shared market is still out there, still consistently producing revenue for a large number of hosting providers.