Recently, the state’s Governor’s office brought news that Facebook is already prepping a second facility in the area, even though the first was just recently completed.

Besides assisting Facebook’s expansion as a social networking giant, construction of an additional facility is welcome news to one particular aspect of the state: the economy.

Commenting on the matter in a press release, Facebook Data Center Manager George Henry stated, “We believe the expanding operations and continued construction activities will have a positive impact on Rutherford County’s economy.”

Exactly what does it mean for the state’s economy? According to the release, the site’s development has provided work for over 1,500 people. Additionally, there are thirty permanent jobs at the completed facility. So, continued development means continued jobs.

North Carolina Governor Bev Berdue expressed delight regarding the announcement, stating, “Facebook continues to be a ‘friend’ to North Carolina.”

The Governor was expected to tour the recently completed facility today.

The second facility at the site is expected to be nearly identical to the first. Building number one, which was recently completed, measures 300,000 square feet and was announced late last year. Besides having a data center presence in North Carolina, Facebook also has a facility in Prineville, Oregon.

Meanwhile, Facebook has provided plenty of news lately regarding actual changes to its social network. In the recent past, Facebook has partnered with communication service Skype and updated its user privacy settings. The company is also expected to soon unveil a new profile layout called Timelines (However, the feature has been delayed due to a legal battle with a company that goes by the same name).

Recently, hacking group Anonymous vowed to bring down the official website of the New York Stock Exchange.

Threats by the group were recently made through YouTube videos.

According to a report by ABC News, Anonymous specifically stated, “Many people refuse to accept that Operation Invade Wall Street is a reality. … I am here to clarify that factions of Anonymous are going with the operation. Other factions are opposing it.”

Recently, Wall Street has seen massive protests in reaction to what some people see as unfair practices by corporations at a time when the global economy faces economic uncertainty.

Anonymous is one of the world’s most recognizable hacking groups. In the past, Anonymous has targeted PayPal and government sites belonging to Turkey, Brazil, and more.

Basing its breaches off political motivations, the group often takes part in a movement often referred to in the hacker community as “antisec.”

Meanwhile, threats from hackers aren’t the only thing that the New York Stock Exchange has had to deal with lately. Just yesterday, the company faced a small fire at its Mahwa, New Jersey data center. The matter resulted in delayed communications for over 50 users on the NYSE’s network.

With clients in over 100 countries, SpamExperts has specialized in providing professional email security solutions for ISPs and webhosts, with more than 1.2 million filtered domains and close to 50 million protected inboxes worldwide. The services SpamExperts offers addres internet security issues for users by stopping spam, viruses, and the related malware threats and phishing attempts.

“As a result of the implementation of the SpamExperts’ solution, our administrators dedicate less time on tuning and adjusting our own spam filters” says Artur, Director of AfriHost. “These time-savings can now be dedicated to our core processes and that is delivering Pure Internet Joy to all our clients thanks to SpamExperts which makes internet definitely simply spam free”.

“We’re excited by the opportunity to partner with one of the biggest webhost in Africa” said Sam Rekema, CEO of SpamExperts. “We know that the goal of AfriHost is to be more than just a company that provides Hosting and ADSL connectivity as they also want to offer added valued services to get the best customer satisfaction. Hence, we are happy that we can contribute to this goal by providing an efficient and quick way to deploy our email security solution for AfriHost and its customers. We hope that our joint partnership with Afrihost will be one to last for many more years”.

About SpamExperts

SpamExperts delivers managed email security in the cloud or on premises, tailored for webhosts: Incoming -, outgoing email filtering, and email archiving. Reduce churn, increase revenue, be 100% secure! Full API & standard integration and automation plugins for cPanel, Parallels products, DirectAdmin; Redundant, synchronized, and scalable; 4-Tier controlpanel; multi-level branding options; 24/7 support & SLAs; Fast release cycles and frequent updates! For more information about Spamexperts visit: www.spamexperts.com

About AfriHost

Afrihost is a South African hosting company that is focused on delighting their clients with ‘Pure Internet Joy’. Afrihost was founded in August 2000 on the premise that it could deliver a web hosting service superior to that provided by the industry at that time. For eleven years, Afrihost has focused on delivering world class hosting solutions and runs services in South Africa, the USA and Australia.

Thomas told the audience that although Enkompass is considered a stable, mature, and feature-packed product that is capable of enterprise- and production-level hosting, sales and distribution have not met expectations.

“All options for moving this product mainstream were considered, but ultimately the decision was made to move Enkompass to a no-cost control panel,” Thomas said.

With major concepts such as unlimited reselling, robust APIs, familiar interfaces, and multi-server technology, Enkompass was, and is, the most powerful Windows shared hosting product on the market. Coupled with familiar automation processed and Microsoft technologies, Enkompass has the ability to become the next de facto Windows control panel for web hosting providers.

Following a final release in Q4 of 2011, major feature development will slow, but our teams will continue to fix bugs and hot patches.

cPanel, Inc, remains healthy, strong, and focused on delivering mainstream hosting automation solutions. As part of the efforts in making Enkompass free of charge, cPanel will free internal resources, teams, and increase development hours on this product and other projects.

For more information on cPanel, please visit: http://www.cpanel.net/

He stressed the benefits and challenges of the new domains for the Middle East, and cited the region’s technological know-how as a factor that would encourage the innovation and consumer choice the program is expected to generate.

Beckstrom delivered the keynote address to the Global Leaders Summit, an exclusive meeting of regional leaders, at Gitex, the region’s premier technology conference, in Dubai.

‘You can apply for new gTLDs in Arabic, Chinese or other scripts,” he said. “This is the first time in history that it is possible to apply for new generic top-level domains in internationalized domain scripts. So it means you could apply for terms in Arabic – not only a company name or brand or a city name, but any other word or generic term,” he continued.

Comparing the creation of the new gTLD program to the development of Dubai as a commercial centre, Beckstrom said, “When you open up standards in technology, when you create rules of law, it fosters and allows innovation that none of us can imagine.

“People ask me: what’s going to happen to the domain name system now that you are opening up new gTLDs? And the answer is: we don’t know. The innovation will come from very unlikely directions.”

“Opening up the right of the dot,” in Latin script addresses to “dot almost anything” is being undertaken with great care to ensure the security and stability of the Internet’s domain name system, which is “job number one for us,” he stated.

Beckstrom highlighted the complexity of the application process and the need for applicants to be prepared to face substantial obstacles. “Running a top-level domain is not like buying a second-level domain,” he noted. “You’re actually running a piece of critical [Internet] infrastructure for the world. It’s got to be running 24/7, reliably, and for years and years and years.”

He stressed that a successful application would require “significant technology expertise or a relationship with a party that will give you that expertise”, as well as the significant financial wherewithal necessary to operate an Internet registry.

Beckstrom also corrected a common misconception about the new generic top-level domain program, explaining that organizations running one of the new domains will not be required to sell Internet domain names publicly.

He noted that dot emerat, the internationalized domain name (IDN) of the United Arab Emirates, was one of the world’s first IDNs.

The application window for new gTLDs opens on 12 January 2012 and closes on 12 April. In May, ICANN will publish the list of all domain names that have been applied for.

To learn more about the gTLD program go here: http://newgtlds.icann.org/applicants/faqs/faqs-en

To view a brief video (6-minutes), which explains the new gTLD program, go here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AybZsS3NmFo

About ICANN:

ICANN’s mission is to ensure a stable, secure and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer – a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn’t have one global Internet. ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers. ICANN doesn’t control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn’t deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the Internet’s naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet. For more information please visit: http://www.icann.org.

cPanel powers the web hosting industry with its point-and-click software that automates the provisioning and management of websites.  The tens of millions of website owners who host their websites with cPanel’s hundreds of hosting partners use cPanel’s easy-to-use interface to manage every aspect of their websites. The bundling of Attracta adds the ability to easily manage their search engine presence with point-and-click SEO Tools.

As the Internet matures, and more businesses have websites, two things are happening:  the web hosting industry is getting more competitive, and it’s getting harder for website owners to make their sites stand out.  Attracta’s SEO Tools help solve both of these problems through giving webhosts a way to be more competitive by providing their customers with the tools to more effectively promote their websites.

Attracta is the world’s largest SEO service.  Over one million websites use the Attracta suite of tools to increase their traffic search traffic.

Attracta’s Free SEO Tools include:

• 1,000 page XML Sitemap Submission to Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask
• Google Blacklist Check
• Link Building Tools
• Social Networking Tools
• SEO Tips and Tutorials

Website owners who want more traffic can upgrade to paid plans that include automated SEO Tools and XML Sitemap submission, along with guaranteed listings in up to 100 of the world’s top search engines.

“Attracta is the first and so far the only third party software ever to be bundled in cPanel” said Aaron Philips, cPanel VP of Operations.  “Every site needs traffic, and since Attracta’s XML Sitemap technology has proven to work well for our customers, it only made sense to include it as a core feature of our control panel software”.

“cPanel is the world’s most popular Web Hosting automation.  When two industry leaders join forces the market benefits by having greater access to technology that helps both websites owners and web hosts become more successful” said Troy McCasland, VP of Business Development for Attracta.

About Attracta:

Founded in 2009 by a team of successful Internet entrepreneurs in Napa, CA, Attracta develops innovative search engine visibility technology that helps customers of all sizes build search engine traffic. With over one million websites using its services, Attracta has quickly become the world’s most popular Search Engine Optimization provider. The company sells its services directly, and through a channel of web hosts, web designers and search industry agencies. For more information, visit http://www.Attracta.com or call 888-317-3994.

About cPanel:

Since 1997, cPanel has been a leading innovator and developer of control panel software for the web hosting industry. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, cPanel builds software that allows web host professional to transform standalone servers into fully automated point-and-click web hosting platforms. cPanel licensed software allows owners of servers and websites, along with resellers and developers, to optimize their technical resources and replace tedious shell-oriented tasks with dynamic, intuitive web- based interfaces. For more information, visit http://www.cPanel.com

Don’t forget, as always, if you refer a new customer to us we’ll kick back 3 months of free hosting on whatever plan you currently have as a thank you!