August 17, 2011 — Cloud hosting provider Amazon Web Services announced on Tuesday that it has launched AWS GovCloud, designed to enable US government agencies to move sensitive workloads to the cloud while meeting regulatory and compliance requirements. AWS says its new region offers the same level of security as other AWS regions and supports AWS security controls like HIPAA, FISMA, FIPS 140-2, SAS 70, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS Level 1.

Google has acquired the domain name g.co that will only link to official Google products and services. The domain name acquisition in itself is not much news, but it is further evidence that premium domain names are very important in a company’s branding. “The shorter a URL, the easier it is to share and remember,” writes Gary Briggs, Google VP of Consumer Marketing . “The downside is, you often can’t tell what website you’re going to be redirected to. We’ll only use g.co to send you to webpages that are owned by Google, and only we can create g.co shortcuts. That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.” It is likely Google paid well into seven figures for the domain name with Domain Incite reporting that they believe the starting price for single character domains believed to be $1.5 million. Other high profile .CO acquisitions include Overstock paying $350,000 for o.co, which it uses to rebrand the company internationally, while Amazon bought a.co, z.co, k.co and cloud.co. Additionally, Twitter acquired t.co for its URL shortening service. Google will continue to use goo.gl as their public URL shortener that anyone will still be able to shorten URLs across the web. The acquisition is also a coup for the .CO ccTLD and will help boost awareness of .CO that now has over one million registrations in less than a year.

In case you’ve been wondering why you can’t get to some of your favorite places, here’s a note that currently appears at the popular site milesplit.com:

By Kirk Ladendorf AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Published: 6:59 p.m. Friday, April 22, 2011 Austin companies ranging from online service providers to a local travel agency felt the sting of a major outage at an Amazon.com data center in Virginia on Thursday and Friday. The effects of the service interruption were widespread because Amazon is a major provider of data center hosting for the fast-emerging market of cloud computing services. That meant thousands of smaller companies were depending on Amazon to run their website operations, store their business data and even keep track of their email service.

April 22, 2011 by Darren Allan Yesterday, a number of sites went down as something at Amazon’s cloud computing centre in North Virginia went pop. The BBC reports that the major outage left a large number of major websites unavailable for considerable chunks of yesterday

The web-hosting unit of Amazon.com Inc. experienced technical problems today that affected operations for companies that use the service. Among  those reporting problems were mobile check-in specialist Foursquare and HootSuite, a web brand management service affiliated with Twitter

A screen shot of Greenpeace`s Dirty Energy report page (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) –- Environmental organization Greenpeace ( www.greenpeace.org ) announced on Thursday it has released a new study that highlights the rapidly growing environmental footprint of the online world and evaluates both good and bad energy choices made by top IT companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and Yahoo!. Titled “How Dirty is Your Data?,” the report details the large amount of electricity required to power cloud offerings