server e hosting

Chicago, Illinois - (The Hosting News) - March 31, 2008 - New dedicated servers are being offered through a partnership between on-demand, dedicated web hosting solutions firm, SoftLayer, and midPhase web hosting provider.

US web host midPhase Service, with SoftLayer Technologies, has launched a new range of midPhase dedicated servers, as an expansion of the midPhase portfolio to offer existing and new customers the complete web hosting line up.

Marc Bollinger, General Manager of midPhase noted, ”Everyone at midPhase has been working really hard to refresh our portfolio, to offer customers more robust and unique offerings. We think these new dedicated servers are a fantastic addition and will be very successful. We are also extremely happy to announce this unique partnership with SoftLayer which has already combined the strengths of both companies to bring a solid product to the table.”

The new dedicated servers use the latest server technology and offer customers a fantastic deal, with the entry level server starting at just $199 per month, with free set up. All dedicated servers come with the choice of Linux or Windows operating systems and control panels (including cPanel and Plesk), 24 / 7 support, include a whopping 10TB of bandwidth per month as standard, and free, unlimited SSLs.

Standardized dedicated hosting, service oriented architectures, infrastructure management systems, on-demand hosting solutions, remote management solutions, virtualized datacenter management, among other things.

SoftLayer offers customers world-class datacenter capabilities including the most advanced services, management convenience, and administration features ever assembled to manage the outsourced IT environment.

Earlier this month, SoftLayer expanded its data warehouse capacity, while improving its backend system performance with service oriented architecture (SOA), by adding an application layer processing cluster. The data warehouse expansion included the installation of multi-petabyte storage arrays from EqualLogix (now Dell) in its Dallas, Seattle, and, when launched, Washington D.C. facilities to serve as the backend data storage powering all of SoftLayer’s on-demand service offerings. Servers from SuperMicro provide the processing power for the new SOA infrastructure. Together, these improvements have been engaged to accelerate deployment of new features and increase performance for all SoftLayer customers (whether they use the SoftLayer Application Programming Interface (API) or the SoftLayer Portal to manage hosted IT infrastructure) and allow the company to maintain its leadership in bringing new products and services to market.

SoftLayer used industry-standard best-practices to create its SOA to deliver on the architectural style’s two fundamental concepts: - Enable a set of simple, ubiquitous, and open communication interfaces - Deliver data using an open schema (e.g. XML) through the interfaces SoftLayer’s SOA allows data to be captured, processed, and presented to users in a form chosen by the system administrator, delivering on the company’s commitment to give customers total control. The architecture is highly scalable, with the capacity to process millions of transactions per hour across thousands of physical and virtual servers, as well as with any number of related services.

midPhase Services provides budget, reseller, VPS, and dedicated hosting solutions to clients worldwide through its family of brands: midphase.com, anhosting.com, and autica.com. midPhase operates its services out of downtown Chicago in a state of the art Cimco datacenter. midPhase Services is part of the UK-2 Group, a major player in the hosting industry, for more information please visit www.uk2group.com.

Located in the INFOMART in Dallas, Texas, SoftLayer was formed in June 2005 by a team of industry executives seeking to deliver low cost next generation on-demand hosting services for the small to medium enterprise (SME). Utilizing proprietary software, coupled with the industry’s first network-within-a-network topology, the company delivers the power and control to securely manage IT environments while providing comprehensive scalability.

To learn more about the new midPhase dedicated servers, please visit: www.midphase.com/dedicated.

For more information about midPhase, please visit: www.midphase.com.

To learn more about SoftLayer, please visit: www.softlayer.com.

Vancouver, British Columbia - (The Hosting News) - March 31, 2008 - PEER 1 subsidiary specializing in self-managed hosting, ServerBeach, has released its self-managed firewalls to over 3,000 customers at its San Antonio data center.

Robert Miggins, Vice President of business development for PEER 1 noted, ”In keeping with the needs of our self-managed hosting customers, this product provides the highest security while being easy to install and manage. We know our customers, who come from a great variety of industries, and pride ourselves on offering the best and most affordable tools to support maximum business growth.”

The firewall product, mGuard Smart by Inominate, provides added security and is fully self-managed by customers via a web interface. This provides the kind of control and flexibility ServerBeach customers expect and can take full advantage of for their business or web presence. The mGuard Smart offers an extremely high degree of security and performance. It can be integrated anywhere both quickly and simply without modifications to the server, regardless of the processor technology or operating systems used. Because the firewall is independent it does not affect the performance of the server’s processor.

The mGuard Smart unites the advantages of hardware and software-based security concepts in a single component. All the security functions are integrated into the self-contained, fully independent mGuard platform. For this reason, it is not necessary to reconfigure the server being protected, nor do drivers or additional software need to be installed. The firewall performs much better and is more reliable than the typical shared or PCI based firewall. ServerBeach will offer the firewall at $99 per month with a $50 setup fee, and it is available on Category 3 and 5 servers within the San Antonio data center.

ServerBeach, a PEER 1 company, specializes in self-managed hosting for businesses of all sizes around North America and the world, and is based in San Antonio Texas. PEER 1 is an online IT infrastructure provider, for more than 9,000 customers. Serving a variety of industries, PEER 1 offers solutions that grow through every stage of web commerce, regardless of company size, and ensures customers’ online presence is always fast, always available. PEER 1 delivers highly scalable dedicated hosting and co-location solutions in addition to self-managed hosting by ServerBeach. Since 1999, PEER 1 has grown to include data centers and network points of presence in 17 major cities across North America and Europe. The company’s headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada and the stock is traded on the TSX Venture exchange under the symbol PIX.

To learn more about the offering, please visit: http://serverbeach.com/servers/specialoffers_firewalls.php.

For more information about ServerBeach, please visit: www.serverbeach.com.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands - (The Hosting News) - March 31, 2008 - International business hosting services firm, LeaseWeb, is set to restructure its global hosting network, with the acquisition of two Cisco CRS-1s.

The acquisition is designed to make LeaseWeb’s network infrastructure more hierarchical and scaleable and enables a bandwidth capacity increase to 1900 Gigabits per second (1.9 Terabits). The two CRS-1s (non-stop machines) will have a vital role in the new hosting network. In the near future, they will play a central part in connecting all data centers in LeaseWeb’s network to the outside world. LeaseWeb opted for two machines because this offers the ultimate uptime guarantee. It allows LeaseWeb to safeguard its service level agreements with customers to an even greater degree.

Con Zwinkels, the Managing Director of LeaseWeb noted, ”To date the volume of our data traffic has doubled or done better than that every year. If you calculate what this means for the future. Right now we have 80 Gigabits per second. It will be 160 a year from now. The required capacity will be 320 Gbps the year after that, and we will be close to 1.3 Terabits in a couple of years. We were unable to guarantee the growth potential with the current network structure., With the acquisition of the new Cisco CRS-1 platform, however, we can now realize that growth capacity. Moreover, the CRS-1s are ready for 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet from a technical perspective. So we will be able to use those standards as soon as they are available on the market.”

LeaseWeb customers currently use 80 Gigabits per second in bandwidth. The acquisition of two Cisco CRS-1s enables LeaseWeb to expand its hosting network to a capacity of 1900 Gbps (1.9 Terabits). The total investment for two of these Cisco machines is nearly 2.4 million US Dollars.

The CRS-1s are geographically separated in different data centers. The existing sixteen Catalyst 6500 switches will have to relinquish their central role and only transport the Internet traffic of customers internal to the hosting network. It makes LeaseWeb’s network more hierarchical with fewer cross-connections, which yields great benefits in terms of network management.

Coks Stoffer, the CEO of Cisco Netherlands remarked, ”I am happy that LeaseWeb, an internationally successful hosting provider, has opted for Cisco’s CRS-1. The demand for bandwidth is growing very quickly at LeaseWeb. The CRS-1 and the associated new network design for LeaseWeb will enable them to accommodate the predicted growth of their Internet traffic. As a result, LeaseWeb customers can be sure that the growth potential, in terms of bandwidth, will be huge in years to come.”

LeaseWeb is able to scale its bandwidth quickly and efficiently via telecom carriers and Internet exchanges. Its philosophy is to always maintain twice as much capacity as the customers are consuming. At present, the available capacity for customers is 160 Gbps.

LeaseWeb is an international supplier of hosting products and services that specializes in both Microsoft and Linux, and focuses primarily on the professional market. The company is among the top 30 hosting providers in the world and provides services such as web hosting, dedicated hosting, colocated hosting, VPS and streaming, as well as technical support. LeaseWeb owns a first-class Cisco-powered network offering a bandwidth of over 160 Gbps, which extends across five data centers in the Amsterdam region via the major telecom carriers. LeaseWeb is also present on internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Frankfurt, New York, Vienna , Stockholm, Warsaw, Zurich, Prague and Madrid. Founded in 1997, hosting provider LeaseWeb now manages 11,000 servers. Its customers include Starbucks, Hyves, Telegraaf Media Groep, Koninklijke Joh. Ensched, PricewaterhouseCoopers, AVRO, Direct Wonen, and Univ.

To learn more, please visit: www.leaseweb.com.

Denver, Colorado - (The Hosting News) - March 31, 2008 - Colocation and managed hosting solutions provider, ViaWest, has completed its acquisition of Dallas, Texas based provider of customized data center infrastructure space and managed network services, Dataside.

Roy Dimoff, Chairman and CEO, ViaWest noted, ”ViaWest has become a market leader in Colorado, Utah and Oregon by providing a wide range of mid-sized businesses with unparalleled support in addition to network, facility and solution sets that are second-to-none. Likewise, Dataside has built a tremendous reputation servicing mid-size and Fortune 1000 companies’ infrastructure space needs. We could not be more enthusiastic with the scale and market opportunities that this acquisition provides.”

The acquisition of Dataside expands ViaWest’s market presence to include data centers in Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Texas and Nevada. The increased ViaWest footprint includes four enterprise-class facilities in the Dallas area, with additional data centers in Austin and Plano, as well as Las Vegas, Nevada. With the Dataside acquisition, ViaWest’s annualized revenue will exceed $100 million by the fourth quarter of 2008.

ViaWest will introduce additional managed services into the Dataside facilities throughout the course of 2008 and 2009. Furthermore, ViaWest plans to immediately invest in the expansion of the existing facilities in Austin, Dallas, and Las Vegas in order to support the increasing demand for data center space.

James deVenny, President and CEO, Dataside remarked, ”ViaWest and Dataside is a perfect marriage as both companies have similar success stories and a well- earned reputation for the highest quality of customer service. We are very proud of what we created at Dataside, and we are extremely excited about the opportunities that the combined companies present.”

In support of the transaction, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo Foothill provided debt financing and Goldman Sachs, Quilvest and ViaWest’s existing investor group, led by Cowen Capital Partners, provided additional equity capital.

ViaWest’s managed hosting solution offers businesses a platform for maintaining mission-critical business applications. Its dedicated hosting team is comprised of experienced engineers who provide proactive troubleshooting and support. ViaWest provides colocation, managed hosting solutions and comprehensive services to mid-sized businesses. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, with additional Tier 1 data centers in Utah and Oregon, ViaWest offers technology infrastructure solutions and critical resources to support business needs. ViaWest currently serves thousands of customers nationwide including Frontier Airlines, the Denver Broncos, Exclusive Resorts and Chipotle. The company was named One of Denver’s Top Corporate Philanthropists and One of Colorado’s Top 10 Mid-size Best Companies to Work For.

For more information about ViaWest, please visit: www.viawest.net.

London, United Kingdom - The Hosting News) - March 28, 2008 - Co-location and dedicated server hosting specialist, Server City, is continuing its partnership with Midway Games Ltd, to provide its hosting infrastructure and Internet connectivity.

Midway is the UK arm of the legendary games publisher responsible for such games as Defender, Spy Hunter and Mortal Kombat. Server City will support the latest edition of the multi-award winning Unreal Tournament series, Unreal Tournament 3, on the PS3 platform.

Ricky Blaikie, Head of UK Sales, Server City noted, ”We are delighted that we once again have the opportunity to work with Midway Games to provide the hosting platform for the next edition in this popular series. With our infrastructure, support and internet connectivity, we believe we have the perfect environment for gaming companies to host their online services.”

Recent research shows that online gaming is growing at a faster rate than at any time in the past 15 years. With the advent of so-called ‘next-generation’ online gaming consoles, more people than ever are discovering the joys of online gaming, with other like-minded people, anywhere in the world.

Terry Riley, Senior European IT Manager, Midway Games Ltd added, ”Midway Games is very excited about the launch of Unreal Tournament 3 for the PLAYSTATION 3 platform. This is a fantastic game and we believe that working closely again with the team at Server City will ensure that the consumer receives an unparalleled online experience.”

Midway Games Inc. (NYSE:MWY), headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, with offices throughout the world, is a developer and publisher of interactive entertainment software for major videogame systems and personal computers.

Server City is a co-location and dedicated server hosting specialist based in the heart of London. Established in the late nineties and reborn in 2001 as part of a management buyout from the international multi-service provider, Jippii Group OYJ, Server City operates from fully featured, carrier class data centres. Privately funded, with no shareholders to satisfy, the focus is on providing quality of service while maintaining value for money in order to provide the end customer with the maximum return on investment.

For more information about Midway Games, please visit: www.midway.com.

To learn more about Server City, please visit: www.servercity.co.uk.

San Francisco, California - The Hosting News) - March 28, 2008 - Managed hosting and dedicated services firm, Frontpages Web Hosting Network (FWHN), has enhanced its offerings, to include new semi-dedicated hosting plans for Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.

Rob LaMear, President of Frontpages noted, ”Our goal is to offer clients the power of a dedicated SharePoint server without the big IT costs. With our semi-dedicated plans, WSS and MOSS solutions are available faster and at more affordable prices.”

Frontpages now features semi-dedicated SharePoint hosting plans to provide customers with increased SharePoint power, uptime, control and security, all at affordable prices. Six semi-dedicated hosting plans are available, three for WSS 3.0 and three for MOSS 2007. Semi-dedicated solutions start as low as $175 per month and can be ready in hours, not weeks.

FWHN provides managed web hosting services for SharePoint, Exchange, CRM and dedicated server solutions to customers around the world. As one of the largest independent, U.S.-owned, managed hosting providers today, they serve companies ranging from the Fortune 500 to the SME (small and medium-enterprise) market.

To learn more about FWHN, please visit: www.fpweb.net.

Santa Clara, California - (The Hosting News) - March 28, 2008 - The EclipseCon 2008 event in Santa Clara, California, recently featured technologists from Cloudsmith, AOL’s Xdrive virtual storage service and Bug Labs, producer of the customizable open source gadget toolkit.

The demo included a cluster of technologies working together to create an OSGi-based mobile application. The new Cloudsmith Web service is designed to make it easy to find, publish and consume ”virtual distributions” of open source and other software components.

The speakers developed the demo application as a service bundle for deployment on OSGi-enabled Bug Labs and Google Android mobile devices. They will use Cloudsmith to publish and consume the OSGi bundles comprising the application and as an assembly mechanism for separate software distributions and software development kits. Xdrive will be used as an infrastructure provider for the Eclipse Spaces publishing service for newly developed components.

Also at EclipseCon, Bug Labs were in the Cloudsmith CloudLounge in the lobby of the mezzanine level of the convention center. Bug Labs is hosting BUG+Hack, with prizes offered for the best BUG applications.

Cloudsmith, Inc. provides web services developers use to create and share software from a global cloud of components. The Cloudsmith virtual distro service streamlines the assembly of open source and other software components across multiple sources into products that can be easily shared within communities of collaborators. The Cloudsmith virtual mapping service aggregates the efforts of developer communities in creating and maintaining new products from the component cloud. Cloudsmith was formed in 2006 and is led by experienced technology entrepreneurs. The company is a strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation.

EclipseCon 2008 includes technical sessions, open source projects, BOFs, and parties, among other networking opportunities. Also included are IBM and Blackberry Developer Days, the OSGi DevCon and an OMG Symposium, with over 300 tutorials and technical sessions, hundreds of experts, and other activities.

To learn more about EclipseCon, please visit: www.eclipsecon.org/2008.

For more information about Cloudsmith, please visit: www.cloudsmith.com.

Atlanta, Georgia - (The Hosting News) - March 28, 2008 - Web hosting and managed integrated VoIP services provider, Cbeyond, has deployed the IronPort Anti-Spam technology, in an effort to handle the worldwide increase of spam messages.

IronPort Systems is a business unit of Cisco Systems and a leading provider of enterprise spam, virus and spyware protection. According to IronPort, global spam volumes have doubled this year to 120 billion messages daily.

Richard Batelaan, Chief Operating Officer for Cbeyond noted, ”Cbeyond handles millions of emails an hour for our customers. Over 97 percent is spam that is never delivered to their email inbox. The global explosion of spam traffic demands diligence and investment in proven, reliable, anti-spam technology. We are confident that the steps we have taken will enable us to continue to provide our customers with the high quality of service they expect from Cbeyond.”

IronPort’s Anti-Spam solution is a multi-layered spam defense that provides the most secure protection. It addresses a full range of known threats including spam, phishing, and zombie attacks, as well as hard-to-detect low volume, short-lived email threats. In addition, IronPort Anti-Spam identifies new and evolving blended threats such as spam attacks distributing malicious content through a download URL or an executable file or script.

In response to the increase in spam volume, Cbeyond has taken aggressive steps to further protect its network and to mitigate the impact of spam on its customer base. In addition to upgrading its spam filtering technology to Cisco’s IronPort solution, the Company has increased its hardware capacity to manage any unexpected peaks generated by spam offenders. Cbeyond has also been proactively communicating to its customers on ways to protect their businesses against spam attacks.

Cbeyond, Inc. is an IP-based managed services provider that delivers integrated packages of communications and IT services to more than 35,000 small businesses in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles and San Diego. Cbeyond offers more than 30 applications including local and long-distance voice, broadband Internet, mobile, BlackBerry, broadband laptop access, voicemail, email, web hosting, fax-to-email, data backup, file-sharing and virtual private networking. Cbeyond manages the services over a private, 100-percent Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) facilities-based network.

To learn more about Cbeyond, please visit: www.cbeyond.net.

San Francisco, California - (The Hosting News) - March 27, 2008 - Managed hosting provider, Contegix, has deployed Hyperic Inc.’s HQ Enterprise open source management system solution, across its entire infrastructure.

Contegix services a broad array of technology with rigorous service level agreements (SLAs). In the eight months since deployment, Hyperic HQ has become a strategic advantage forthe company, helping its customers go beyond keeping their systems up and running to actually improving application performance.

Matthew Porter, CEO of Contegix noted, ”We were immediately impressed with Hyperic’s Auto-Discovery feature. The product installed with the capability to immediately find and monitor more than 70 technologies, providing us with instant monitoring for the majority of our key applications - even those that spanned virtualized resources. Equally important to us was Hyperic’s high level of support. The team has been with us every step of the way- they’ve been a true partner.”

In the competitive managed hosting market, what sets Contegix apart is its customer service - the company offers all the needed equipment and infrastructure in addition to managing the data center and operating system. Customers get 24/7/365 access to Contegix’s Level Three engineers, a 30-minute hardware replacement SLA, and complete systems monitoring. Since its launch in 2003, Contegix’s reputation for excellence has helped it grow by 10 percent a month every month. Today, Contegix powers more than 37,000 managed resources.

To maintain its customer service record and meet its SLAs alongside its explosive growth, Contegix needed a solution that would give them a deeper understanding of its customers’ systems and enable them to solve problems fast. In the spring of 2007 they turned to Hyperic.

Hyperic HQ is designed to allow Contegix to manage its infrastructure from an application rather than hardware-centric view. Contegix managed applications can span a generous spectrum of technology and can include a moving set of physical and virtual components. Hyperic’s holistic perspective across technology enables the Contegix operations team to quickly identify and correctly diagnose application-level problems early, reducing the mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR) and helping them to beat their SLAs. Additionally, Contegix has given the majority of its staff access to Hyperic - from engineering and support all the way to sales.

Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic remarked, ”Contegix’s high customer service demands, diverse infrastructure and high growth rate, create one of the most difficult management challenges in the tech sector. Hyperic HQ was designed from the ground up to help customers like Contegix continue to meet the changing demands of their customers without wasting unnecessary resources to keep their IT infrastructure up and running.”

Hyperic’s ease-of-use, detail and historical metrics provide strategic benefits for Contegix. The company uses Hyperic HQ Enterprise to manage its internal infrastructure and using role-based access control extends visibility to its customers so that they too can use the data to improve their applications. By sharing access, Contegix proactively involves the customer to help monitor trends in their hosted applications and identify issues early. With customers for whom a minute of downtime translates into a loss of $10,000 dollars or more, this can mean significant savings.

Mr. Porter added, ”We never expected to give access to a systems monitoring tool to our sales team. But because Hyperic is so easy to use and gives sales a unique perspective into customer usage trends, it actually allows them to advise individual customers on how to modify their applications to more effectively accomplished business goals. Access to Hyperic has substantially raised an already high bar in customer satisfaction.”

Other key features of Hyperic HQ Enterprise include its task automation and sophisticated alerting capabilities, which have helped Contegix focus administrators on exceptions and solving problems by greatly streamlining management tasks. Since its deployment, these efficiencies have contributed to Contegix maintaining the same headcount of support staff despite accelerating growth. Contegix continues to expand its use of Hyperic and plans to extend its deployment to its third data center when it goes online in early 2008.

Contegix offers clients its Beyond Managed Hosting(TM) service, comprehensive management solutions on a simple, monthly fee plan. The solution includes a variety of managed services that range from setting up server hardware, installing the operating system, deploying the software in an optimal configuration to managing licensing, maintenance renewals and wide ranging support.

Hyperic provides open source web infrastructure management software that reduces the workload for operations teams at the world’s biggest web companies, including CNET Networks, hi5 Networks, Dice, Contegix, and more. Its award-winning Hyperic HQ software auto-discovers and updates asset inventory and allows operations teams to perform cross-platform monitoring, diagnostics and control from a remote, web-based console, helping them more quickly pinpoint, correct, and prevent problems at every major layer - including hardware, networks, virtualization and applications. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Hyperic is a private company funded by Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital.

To learn more about Contegix, please visit: http://contegix.com.

Renton, Washington- (The Hosting News) - March 27, 2008 - Server virtualization firm, Parallels, has entered into a merger acquisition of ModernGigabyte, the creators of the ModernBill automated billing system, while preparing for its Summit 2008.

Parallels will acquire all of the assets of ModernGigabyte, including products, services, intellectual property, and staff. ModernGigabyte products include: hosting and service provider billing system, ModernBill, real-time payment and credit card processing service, ModernAuthorize, automated delivery system for SSL cetificates, SSL Factory, automated domain registration service, ModernDNS, and real-time fraud checking service for online ordering, FraudGuardian. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Parallels plans to maintain the current pricing structure of the products.

ModernBill may be offered along with Plesk for a complete reseller package, for dedicated hosting providers. Parallels ISV partners that have deployed the Application Packaging Standard (APS), will have a ready to deliver solution, for hosting companies to sell products.

The latest version of ModernBill is hoped to be the ideal complement to the Parallels family of control panels including Plesk, Virtuozzo, Parallels Pro and Helm. Development will continue to be performed by our development team and support processes will remain in place to ensure no interruption to your existing business. The acquisition will provide access to a wider array of resources to maintain the product more efficiently and effectively over the long term.

In the near future, Plesk will be bundled with ModernBill by many of Parallels channel partners, to provide one of the most advanced control panel integrations produced to date.

Finally, Parallels is preparing for its Summit 2008, scheduled to take place in Washington DC from May 19-20, instead of its regular gathering in Louisville for its 4th Annual Hosting Workshop. Parallels will combine its resources to offer all of the traditional labs in the past, along with the new activities scheduled.

Parallels (formerly SWsoft) is a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software that optimizes computing for consumers, businesses, and service providers across all major hardware, operating systems, and virtualization platforms. Founded in 1999, Parallels is a fast-growing company with 900 employees in North America, Europe, and Asia.

To learn more about the Summit, please visit: www.parallels.com/summit.

For more information about Parallels, please visit: www.parallels.com.