Web Hosting Mergers and Acquisitions - February 2008

Laguna Niguel, CA -  Alentus Corporation acquired John Macleod’s AO Technologies’ Columbus Ohio Data Center. It is rumored that Alentus is picking up a company across the pond. AO provides high-end dedicated and streaming media services

Leeds, UK -  Masternaut Three X, acquired FibreCity for GBP 6 million ($12 million USD). Deal added 25,000 sq/ft data center.  The acquisition of FibreCity enables Masternaut Three X to provide more extended hosted back-office solutions.

Dallas, TX - Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. (NYSE: ACS)announced an agreement to acquire sds business services GmbH, a Germany-based provider of data center, infrastructure services, and application-related solutions from Waterland Private Equity Investments. ACS will pay approximately $67 million (euro 46 million), including the assumption of liabilities, to purchase sds. The acquisition is expected to close in March 2008 following regulatory approval.

Charlotte, NC - TITAN Technology Partners, a provider of hosted and managed industry solutions, acquired Singapore based ESP Consulting.  ESP operations is and managed services provider focused on delivering SAP solutions.

Belfast, Ireland - IUTV Media plc today acquired of Tibus, a leading Ireland web development company from Anderson Spratt Group Holdings for GBP 5 million ($10 million USD).

Chevy Chase, MD - Opus8 Inc. affiliate, Clear Day Acquisition Corp., has acquired a controlling interest in Lore Internet Systems. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.  Lore services includes, managed datacenter hosting and co-location. The acquisition has approximately doubled Pro Net's size and it is now providing shared and dedicated hosting for over 100,000 domains.

Sao Paulo, Brazil  - Universo Online S.A. (UOL) acquired the "clients" of web hosting company Digiweb  UOL is now the third-largest provider of web-hosting services company in Brazil. See my March 6, 2008 blog for additional information and comment.

Rochester, NY - Layer 8 acquired the Web hosting and information technology support services branch of DigiNex. RACD

Obviously not all inclusive - but from the NCC files.

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Drupal for online survey site

Hi All

I am thinking about creating an online survey site for a specific community (and some specific functionality). The typical interaction would be as follows:

1. Survey author creates a survey
2. and sends a permanent link to it and/or asks the site to send a one-time link to a set of email addresses
3. The link allows to answer the questions without logging in and in case of one-time link allows for it only once
4. Site performs some calculations and allows the survey author see the calculation results. E.g. "According to the current survey results, you should do X, but maybe also Y, the pattern tells, that Y is mostly perceived as X".

I know some PHP and did small modification to drupal modules in the past. Therefore, I believe I can implement the calculations part. I am unsure about the email sending, flexible survey formats and single-login links.

Is Drupal right for me? Any specific modules to have a look at?
If Drupal is not a good option, could you advice anything better for this case?

Thank you for you time
Artem.

P.S.
The result is going to be similar to SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang, but simpler, with the specific questionnaire format and specific calculations performed.

select statement for multiple databases (no replies)

Hi guys!

I would like to make a complex MySQL Select-Statement!

The Situation:

I have many databases with the same MySQL Structure (some tables with same keys etc).
All Databases have the same prefix (vb_)

I want to do a query on the table posts (vb_posts), existing in each database.

The Problem:
I want to have all posts, sorted by the date/time (column post_datetime) and I need all rows in one select. And I need to know some more columns and the database the row belongs to!

I don't know if there's a solution in just one query.

I also thought about making a query for each database and put it into an Array (The Script is PHP based). But I need a high performance solution and I don't know if Array's will affect the performance!

Presently I make an update of a new table every 15 minutes and get put all posts in there, but I don't think this is the best solution, isn't it?

I hope you can help me!

Greetz
Robert