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.

Reddit An outage at Amazon’s popular Web hosting service has led to Web-wide outages at such popular sites as Quora, Foursquare and Reddit.

ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed IDN ccTLD string for Yemen. Details of the successful evaluation are provided here: icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track/string-evaluation-completion-y-en.htm#ye . The IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) ccTLD Fast Track Process was approved by the ICANN Board at its annual meeting in Seoul, South Korea on 30 October 2009

Go Daddy’s CEO Bob Parsons posted a video of him killing an elephant. Now his rivals are trying to poach his customers. By Geoff Williams, contributing writer April 14, 2011: 3:29 PM ET NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Small web hosting firms are trying to poach customers from industry leader Go Daddy, which continues to suffer fallout after its CEO posted a video showing him kill an African elephant .

Small web hosting firms are trying to poach customers from industry leader Go Daddy, which continues to suffer fallout after its CEO posted a video showing him kill an African elephant. A number of companies have recently launched campaigns to snare customers — with HostPapa being the latest — and some have seen a boost in their revenues because of it

Telnic Limited the registry operator for the .tel top level domain (TLD), today announced that its regional partner TelChina and  China  Mobile  one  of  the  world’s  largest  mobile  phone companies,  have  entered  into  a  strategic  relationship  to  develop  Mobile‐Pay  services  on  the  .tel platform.  Lucy  Wang,  CEO  of  TelChina,  said:  “As  .tel  combines  advantages  of  both  the  Internet  and telecommunications, it will be able to provide an efficient and integrated communications platform for customers  of  China  Mobile  in  the  future.  The  engagement  levels  of  .tel  owners  will  also  bring  new vitality to Mobile‐Pay, attracting more people to use their mobile phones in making payments, which in turn will increase revenues for operators.” Project  development  will  be  divided  into  several  phases.  The  first  phase  is  expected  to  be  live  in early May,  which  will  enable  China  Mobile  customers  to  purchase  and  renew  their  .tel  names  via  a Mobile-Pay  portal  using  their  mobile  devices.  Following  the  implementation  of  the  mobile  payment solution, users will also be able to use their China Mobile credits to pay in part or full for their .tel names later this year. Mr.

[news release] In light of the recent disasters that have devastated Japan, .ORG, The Public Interest Registry (PIR) today announced a plan to waive renewal fees for Japanese domain name holders who are unable to renew their .ORG domain names. Together with PIR, more than 15 participating Registrars have committed to automatically renew for one year at no cost the .ORG domain names that would unintentionally expire due to the inability of the owner in Japan to re-up their registration.  Affected names will include those with expiration dates within the March 11 – June 11, 2011 period.

An image of The Benaroya Company’s South Hill North Data Center (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) –- The Benaroya Company ( www.benaroya.com ) announced on Tuesday that its South Hill North Data Center ( http://www.southhilldatacenter.com/SouthDataCenter.aspx ) in Puyallup, Washington has earned the Gold Certification from the US Green Building Council’s LEED program ( www.usgbc.org/LEED ) for the design, construction and operation of energy efficient buildings. The facility joins only a handful of data centers around the country to earn the upper-tier certification, including IBM’s Raleigh, North Carolina data center , Sabey Data Centers’ Intergate.Columbia facility in East Wenatchee, Washington , and eBay’s flagship data center in Salt Lake City . South Hill’s commissioned data center delivers 56,605 square feet of raised floor space, robust critical infrastructure scalable up to 260 watts per square foot, uninterruptable low cost power and energy efficiency for extremely low total operating cost.  Additionally, South Hill utilizes clean energy in the form of wind and hydroelectric power.  “South Hill Data Center is very attractive both fiscally and environmentally,” says Larry Benaroya  of The Benaroya Company, which developed and owns South Hill

An image of The Benaroya Company’s South Hill North Data Center (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) –- The Benaroya Company ( www.benaroya.com ) announced on Tuesday that its South Hill North Data Center ( http://www.southhilldatacenter.com/SouthDataCenter.aspx ) in Puyallup, Washington has earned the Gold Certification from the US Green Building Council’s LEED program ( www.usgbc.org/LEED ) for the design, construction and operation of energy efficient buildings. The facility joins only a handful of data centers around the country to earn the upper-tier certification, including IBM’s Raleigh, North Carolina data center , Sabey Data Centers’ Intergate.Columbia facility in East Wenatchee, Washington , and eBay’s flagship data center in Salt Lake City .

Dot VN,has recently announced that its partner ,the Vietnam Internet Network Information Center (VNNIC) agreed to help the Laotian Internet Network Information Center (LANIC) to reclaim and relaunch the Laos ccTLD .LA .