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WorldWide Access, also known as WWA, was an Internet Service Provider based in Chicago, Illinois. WorldWide Access was the service name of the company, which was called Computing Engineers, Inc.
WorldWide Access operated from 1993 until 1998, when it was acquired by Verio. At that time, WWA was located on the nineteenth floor of the Civic Opera Building at 20 N. Wacker Dr., where it had moved from the seventh floor six months earlier.
WorldWide Access offered typical ISP accounts of the era, including terminal dial-up into BSD/OS UNIX shell systems, SLIP, and PPP; web hosting; UUCP and mail hosting; DNS registration and hosting; and leased-line circuits. The company also offered tech support for Macintosh computers, which was somewhat of a rarity at the time. WorldWide Access focused its sales efforts on signup up corporate clients but the company also served thousands of residential customers. The company focused heavily on customer service excellence and was considered to be one of the better ISP operations in the Chicago area. [ citation needed ]
WWA was one of the first ISPs in the Chicago area to capitalize on virtual web hosting, by custom-coding virtual hosting into the NCSA httpd webserver before it was a core part of the product. This service was called MagicServer (another service mark of the corporation). The MagicServer version of httpd worked around some of the problems that plagued other implementations, such as the number of open file descriptors on the system, but had issues of its own which led to its eventual abandonment in favor of the standard built-in Apache virtual hosting.[ citation needed ]
MagicServer hosts originally also ran on the BSD/OS shell servers, but were relocated to Sun SPARC hosts running Solaris in 1996. These were tako and anago, and later gari and soba were added.[ citation needed ]
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WorldWide Access was ultimately only one of several Chicago-based small Internet providers, which, in the end, were nearly all swallowed up by larger providers. WWA was the first to be sold, to Verio, in April 1998.
Of the major local providers, only Ripco remained unsold, and it still operates independently as of 2017.
In telecommunication, provisioning involves the process of preparing and equipping a network to allow it to provide new services to its users. In National Security/Emergency Preparedness telecommunications services, "provisioning" equates to "initiation" and includes altering the state of an existing priority service or capability.
Inktomi Corporation was a company that provided software for Internet service providers (ISPs). It was incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Foster City, California, United States. Customers included Microsoft, HotBot, Amazon.com, eBay, and Walmart.
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privately owned.
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing web hosting services are sometimes called web hosts.
Squid is a caching and forwarding HTTP web proxy. It has a wide variety of uses, including speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests, caching World Wide Web (WWW), Domain Name System (DNS), and other computer network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources, and aiding security by filtering traffic. Although used for mainly HTTP and File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Squid includes limited support for several other protocols including Internet Gopher, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), Transport Layer Security (TLS), and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). Squid does not support the SOCKS protocol, unlike Privoxy, with which Squid can be used in order to provide SOCKS support.
An online service provider (OSP) can, for example, be an Internet service provider, an email provider, a news provider (press), an entertainment provider, a search engine, an e-commerce site, an online banking site, a health site, an official government site, social media, a wiki, or a Usenet newsgroup.
iiNet Limited is an Australian internet service provider and telecommunications company that sells NBN plans, 4G and 5G Home Wireless Internet and services on its ULTRA Broadband Cable, FTTB and VDSL2 networks. It also sells mobile phone sim-only plans using the Vodafone network.
Verio is a global web hosting provider headquartered in the United States. Incorporated in 1996 in Denver, Colorado, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Communications, which acquired the company in 2000. Verio was formed from a consolidation of over 200 smaller Internet service providers (ISPs) and web hosting services.
ClarkNet was an Internet service provider (ISP) located in Ellicott City, Maryland that began operation in April 1993. It was the first ISP local to the Baltimore area and the second ISP native to Maryland. Operations ceased during 2003.
Trespass to chattels is a tort whereby the infringing party has intentionally interfered with another person's lawful possession of a chattel. The interference can be any physical contact with the chattel in a quantifiable way, or any dispossession of the chattel. As opposed to the greater wrong of conversion, trespass to chattels is argued to be actionable per se.
NETCOM On-Line Communication Services, Inc. was an Internet service provider headquartered in San Jose, California.
A dedicated hosting service, dedicated server, or managed hosting service is a type of Internet hosting in which the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone else. This is more flexible than shared hosting, as organizations have full control over the server(s), including choice of operating system, hardware, etc.
A shared web hosting service is a web hosting service where many websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. The overall cost of server maintenance is spread over many customers. By using shared hosting, the website will share a physical server with one or more other websites.
ATMnet was a regional Internet service provider (ISP) located in San Diego, California, United States. It was formed in 1994 and operated until its purchase by Verio in November 1997 as part of the latter's national roll-up of regional ISPs.
Speakeasy, Inc. was a broadband internet service provider and voice over IP carrier based in Seattle, Washington, United States. Their terms of service described liberal usage policies for home users allowing subscribers to run any number of servers and allowing them to resell their connectivity to others through a service called "NetShare". They received press coverage for their support of Linux and BSD-derivative operating systems, and were reportedly the first provider to offer a customized version of Mozilla Firefox to customers, in January 2005. The company was acquired by MegaPath Corporation in 2010. MegaPath in turn was acquired by Fusion Connect, which retired the Speakeasy brand.
Hostway is a global web hosting and technology infrastructure company headquartered in Austin, Texas, United States. It provides hosting services to individuals, small to medium-sized businesses, and large corporations with web sites, databases, business applications, and managed web hosting. Hostway Services Inc. merged with Hosting.com in January 2019. The merged company rebranded to Ntirety in September 2019.
BT Wholesale and Ventures was a division of United Kingdom telecommunications company BT Group that provided voice, broadband, data, hosted communication, managed network and IT services to communications providers (CPs) in Great Britain. It was merged with BT's Business and Public Sector division to form BT Enterprise in October 2018.
EarthLink is an American Internet service provider.
Linode, LLC was an American cloud hosting provider that focused on providing Linux-based virtual machines, cloud infrastructure, and managed services.
Super Dimension Fortress is a non-profit public access UNIX shell provider on the Internet. It has been in continual operation since 1987 as a non-profit social club. The name is derived from the Japanese anime series Super Dimension Fortress Macross; the original SDF server was a Bulletin board system created by Ted Uhlemann for fellow Japanese anime fans. From its BBS roots, which have been well documented as part of the BBS: The Documentary project, SDF has grown into a feature-rich provider serving members around the world.