Why is the Silicon Valley less desirable than before? It’s not. The matter can be traced back to one thing: money. Not only are data centers more expensive to construct and run in California, but capital-strapped developers are being given financial incentives to build elsewhere.

Most notably, President Obama’s stimulus plan is spawning a flurry of data center construction in northern Virginia, an economically depressed area. At least two companies, DuPont and Terremark, have halted plans for Silicon Valley facilities and moved their dollars to the East Coast.

Virginia isn’t the only state experiencing a silicon boom. Yahoo is currently building a large data center in North Carolina, and New Jersey recently became home to a Wall Street server facility.

It’s no surprise that as America’s computing needs grow, data center construction will continue to be more diversified than in the past– especially when there is an incentive involved.

Photo | Flickr

The winning bidder was Divyank Turakhia, who paid £946,137 ($1.4 million USD) for the name. Turakhia is a technology entrepreneur who own a number of premium domains and start-ups.

As you can see, domain auctions are serious business. Most are done online, but it’s not uncommon to see the most valuable names sold at events like T.R.A.F.F.I.C.

High as it may seem, the buyer got a great deal. Hollywood.mobi fetched £9,699, or $16,000 USD, at a 2008 auction. Hollywood.ca went for £8,214 ($13,550 USD) a year earlier in 2007, while in 2006, Hollywood.co.uk sold for £10,570 ($17,438 USD). Even Hollywood.co.in, an Indian domain, sold for £4,243 ($7,000 USD) that same year!

I think Hollywood.us should have sold for more because while the extension isn’t as good as .com or .net, .us is the ccTTD of the United States. While .uk is the most valuable ccTLD, Hollywood isn’t in the UK. Bidders apparently either didn’t care about or didn’t realize the geographical significance of the extension they were bidding on.

Source | The Domains

In a press release riddled with broken English and grammatical errors, the company responded to the shutdown.

Triple Fiber blasted the FTC for shutting down all its servers without prior notification and went on to declare its innocence, claiming it “never provided any services for illegal businesses intentionally.” It offered to help with the investigation, but added there was no evidence to convict it of wrongdoing.

Our company has always been willing to assist authorities in their investigations. Accusing the provider in illegal actions made by its customers is not the way out and will not solve anything. It causing more damage to law-abiding customers than helps successfully fighting cyber criminals.

The company also stated that the evidence the FTC collected against it, including instant message logs of sales pitches to spammers and hackers, “can not be the evidence of [3FN] complicity.”

Triple Fiber Network said millions of dollars have been lost so far by the shutdown. It claims to be doing everything in its power to recover customer accounts, but has not revealed in what manner it is doing so and what, if any, progress has been made.

Photo: Flickr

The company, Triple Fiber Network, hosted some 15,000 websites at a data center in San Jose, California. The sites were taken offline Tuesday after the FTC told its bandwidth provider to stop routing the host’s traffic.

Triple Fiber allegedly hosted all sorts of illegal content, including malware and child pornography. “Anything bad on the Internet, they were involved in it,” FTC Chairman Jonathan Leibowitz said. “We’re very proud, because in one fell swoop we’ve gone after a big facilitator of some of the utterly worst conduct.”

The FTC stated:

[Triple Fiber Network] hosts very little legitimate content and vast quantities of illegal, malicious, and harmful content, including child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, trojans, phishing related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other Web-based scams, and pornography featuring violence, bestiality, and incest.

The black market provider also hosted the control servers for one of the world’s largest botnets, “Cutwail.” According to the government agency, the host marketed itself to overseas criminals by placing ads in the “darkest corners of the Internet.”

Most of the host’s personnel work overseas. In a message to customers, Three Fiber promised to be back up within days in another location. Meanwhile, some of its customers have already found other hosts and have placed their illegal content back online.

Source: Washington Post
Photo: Flickr