ServerBeach Blog

We’ve reached the 10,000 servers mark! This is a big milestone for ServerBeach and we want to thank you for helping us get here! Below is part of the official press release that went out late yesterday:

The company has reached this milestone through its dedication to providing the kind of control and flexibility that customers expect, in order to grow their businesses and web presence.

“We are very proud to reach this landmark with our strong customer loyalty and support,” said Fabio Banducci, president and CEO of PEER 1. “This milestone also reflects the company’s continuous growth in the very competitive self-managed hosting arena. We strongly believe this has been accomplished in part because ServerBeach has maintained its commitment to go above and beyond what other self-managed hosting companies provide, with much needed resources and support that help our customers succeed.”

Unlike competitors, where service often ends once the server is connected, ServerBeach is focused on providing its customers with continued support as their businesses grow. ServerBeach offers 24/7/365 customer service and automation tools that make self-managed hosting as simple as possible.

Automation tools include Rapid Reboot(TM) and Rapid Rescue(TM), which are powerful self-management tools optimized in-house by ServerBeach and available to customers free of charge. Rapid Reboot(TM) enables customers to restart their web servers instantly and on-demand, without having to wait on a technician to reboot them. Rapid Rescue(TM) is one-of-a-kind, allowing customers to rescue their dedicated servers from potentially fatal errors without waiting for assistance from an onsite technician.

Strategically located across the U.S., in California, Texas and Virginia, ServerBeach takes advantage of the high performance, fully redundant PEER 1 network, with 15 state-of-the-art data centers in 12
cities and 20 network points-of-presence across North America and Europe. Customers can expect reliable service, minimal latency, disaster recovery, and geographic diversity.

“I tried and quit several hosting vendors before discovering ServerBeach,” said Mike Mitchell, CIO at Winnovate.com. “I’ve used ServerBeach almost exclusively for over 4 years now and am very happy with their pricing, reliability, and support. Finally, a web hosting company I can count on!”

According to A List Apart, “sign-up forms must die“. Now, when I read that my first thought was - I agree. I find myself often going to a website just to browse around or read an article but find that I cannot do so without filling out a sign-up form. What does that prompt me to do? It makes me move on to the next website and browse elsewhere.

To quote the author of this website -

I’ll just come out and say this: sign-up forms must die. In the introduction to this book I described the process of stumbling upon or being recommended to a web service. You arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form.

We can do better. In fact, I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step.

I certainly agree with the above quote. I agree that showing a potential customer or visitor what services you have to offer, if nothing more than a sample, will entice them more to stick around if interested and be more than willing to fill out a brief form to sign up.

The article, “Sign Up Forms Must Die” is a very interesting read. The view is mainly from a user standpoint and does not really discuss the views or impacts from a business perspective. One comment (#10) in the discussion forum from the article makes a very good point from a company perspective -

I notice that you are giving opinions from the user perspective only and thought I could give a company perspective on this. A web application I created a couple of years ago (www.ausrackid.com) went through this thought process. Ausrack ID allows IT pros to configure 19” racking systems in a visual way, save print out the results, and get quotes from the company I work for. I chose having no sign up until the user decides they want to save, at which point you are asked for username and email address, if they want a quote for items they get asked for more details. This is quite a way through the process. I was advised to put in a signup process at the front end to allow us to collect information on the users which we could potential use for emailing info. I resisted this at the time, and still do today. However, for the first year, the site was getting significant traffic, and significant usage, but very few people were saving their design, or asking for a quote. As the site needs to fund itself, it was very difficult to justify it’s existence at this stage, and the whole project was almost pulled. I think the moral of the story is that your user details have a value, and giving those to a website you use may be the only way they can stay afloat. Think of YouTube, they can justify their existence by the data provided by the number of users. That is why Google bought them. At the smaller scale my advice would be if they ask for it, and you want to use the service, give them your details, it might just help them survive in a competitive world.

Great point. So how do you create the ultimate user experience, get the data you need to remain competitive, and create a win-win for all?

Read the full article here and share your thoughts.

Microsoft Corp. yesterday warned of a critical vulnerability that affects users of Word running on Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 SP1 — several weeks after one security company first reported an exploit and a day after a second vendor confirmed ongoing attacks. In an advisory posted Friday, Microsoft acknowledged “public reports of very limited, targeted attacks” that exploit a bug in the Microsoft Jet Database Engine, a Windows component that provides data access to applications including Microsoft Access and Visual Basic.

According to Symantec Corp., however, the attacks Microsoft described used malicious Word 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007 documents, which in turn call up the vulnerable Jet .dll (Dynamic Link Library file).

For further infrormation on this, head on over to ComputerWorld and read the full story. You can find the Microsoft Security Advisory here.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt will detail the company’s plans for Google-izing the health care industry at a health care trade show on Thursday morning, starting with a consumer destination site called Google Health. Schmidt is scheduled to give the morning keynote speech at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2008 annual conference here and will outline Google’s vision on tackling the next Internet frontier of medical data. The move, rumored for a few years, makes sense, given how much people use the Web to get health information and how much they spend on medicines and health care.

Google Health is being previewed at the company booth and gives a glimpse of what consumers participating in a trial in Cleveland will experience–a clean and simple interface where people can get to their health information in one place, share it with others, and search for information and care providers. Google Health will be available for anyone with a Google account to use later this year, said Missy Krasner, product marketing manager for Health Team Google.

Read the full story here.

Earlier on this month I posted about a promotion here at ServerBeach with a few details. Today, I’d like to share the press release that went out today that includes full details of our “Sandbox Servers” -

Developers explore and test a suite of Microsoft design and management tools within a secure, dedicated environment

VANCOUVER, BC – February 26, 2008 – PEER 1 Network Enterprises, Inc. (TSX-V: PIX), a leading provider of online IT infrastructure, has partnered with Microsoft to offer 50 free developer sandbox servers for a 30-day trial. Web developers now have a chance to work with full control on a collection of Microsoft website development applications in a dedicated server environment.

“We are pleased to offer this great program that meets the needs of developers who want to explore new applications and ensure that they work well before exposing them in a production environment,” said Robert Miggins, vice president of business development for PEER 1. “With the sandbox servers we give developers the platform and tools they require to build applications, test, and deploy, all with a seamless experience.”

The 30-day free period is a unique opportunity for web developers and agencies to explore both the internal and external aspects of testing and developing a website and other online applications using some of the latest Microsoft software that has been pre-loaded into the sandbox server and is connected into PEER 1’s extensive online network infrastructure.

“This program is a good opportunity for developers in any field,” said John Zanni, director of hosting for the Microsoft Communications Sector. “Working together in a more collaborative and supportive environment enables developers to build better applications and compatible offerings, which can better meet customer needs and increase both business and customer revenue.”

The developer sandbox supports IIS 6, .ASP.NET 2.0 and PHP 5 and provides the following design and management tools:

* Microsoft® Expression® Studio: Expression Studio includes Expression Blend, Expression Web, and Expression Design - The professional design tools and innovative technologies in Expression Studio give you the flexibility and freedom to bring your vision to reality.

* Microsoft Visual Studio Express Editions: Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition and Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition – This is the ideal tool for productively building object-oriented applications for Windows on the .NET Framework.

* Microsoft Silverlight – A cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web.

* Microsoft SQL Server Standard 2005 – This tool contains features that will help your team develop data applications in a fraction of the time, helping to drive data to the corners of your business.

Microsoft and PEER 1 invite developers to apply to participate in the sandbox. Once approved developers gain free root access to a server set up in PEER 1’s San Antonio data center for 30 days with no contract and no obligation.

***As a bonus, developers who decide to order a server from PEER 1 at the end of the free sandbox server period will receive a Microsoft tool package, including Microsoft Expression Web ($299 value), Microsoft Expression Studio and Microsoft ASP.NET training ($1099 value), at no additional cost.***

Visit http://www.peer1.com/hosting/sandbox.php for more information.

About PEER 1
PEER 1, a leading online IT infrastructure provider, believes in the limitless opportunity of the Internet and the business growth and continuity it provides for its more than 9,000 customers. PEER 1 delivers highly scalable managed hosting and co-location solutions to ensure customers’ online presence is always fast, always available. Since 1999, PEER 1 has grown to include data centers and network points of presence in 17 major cities across North America and Europe. Serving a variety of companies, PEER 1 offers solutions that grow through every stage of web commerce, regardless of company size. The company’s headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada and the stock is traded on the TSX Venture exchange under the symbol PIX.

For more information visit: http://www.peer1.com.

“Sometimes being a web-developer is just damn hard.” Says a writer from Smashing Magazine. Those of you who are tasked with web development certainly understand that statement.

How often do you find coding is responsible for slowing down your workflow? How many of you spend sleepless nights with pizza and coffee laying around the laptop? The reason says this writer: “with a number of incompatibility issues and quite creative rendering engines it sometimes takes too much time to find a workaround for some problem without addressing browsers with quirky hacks. And that’s where ready-to-use solutions developed by other designers come in handy.”

About a year ago, Smashing Magazine published “53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without“. This year, they’ve published a follow up, “50 new CSS-techniques, ideas and ready-to-use solutions for effective coding.” Many of you already know some of these techniques, but I recommend checking out the article. There may be some techniques that you’re just not aware of that just might help you out.

Happy coding!

It seems that Microsoft began feeding Windows Vista users last week updates to prep PCs for next month’s release of Service Pack 1. These updates have crippled some machines, according to messages posted to the company’s support site.

Last Tuesday, Microsoft started sending Vista users two final prerequisite updates that are required before SP1 can be installed in March. The updates to the operating system’s install components were delivered via Windows Updates, which automatically downloaded and installed them on the majority of Vista machines. Looking at the feedback on the support site, it appears that users were quite unhappy and they have every right to be.

In many instances, users reported that the final update hung while displaying the message “Configuring Updates Step 3 of 3 - 0% Complete,” which was followed by a reboot of the PC. Which was followed by another reboot, and another. “[It] reboots ad infinitum,” said Frank Melk on the Microsoft support newsgroup. A smaller number reported a different problem: After the update, their computer refused to boot normally.

Trying to boot into Safe Mode did no good, users said; the reboot loop cranked up then as well. “I am unsure as to what to do, because entering Safe Mode gives the same screen,” Melk said. “Furthermore, I have no restore points saved, so going back to a known previous good config is no good either!”

Users are posting situations they’ve experienced:
“The first two restore points available to me failed,” noted another user, pegged as phazedoubt. “I had to go back 3 days before I found one that worked.”

Some users who posted messages to the same newsgroup said that they had managed to regain control of the computer by booting from their Vista install DVD, and selecting the “Restore from a previous restore point” option.

“Apparently, so Microsoft says, my machine was restarted thinking it had downloaded an update, but really the update hadn’t been downloaded,” said user bicksbah on the support newsgroup. “So, upon reboot, it couldn’t find the update and Vista kept trying to install it endlessly.”

Messages left on the newsgroup indicate that Microsoft is aware of the problem.

Mendacious machines controlled by hackers that reroute Internet traffic from infected computers to fraudulent Web sites are increasingly being used to launch attacks, according to a paper published this week by researchers with the Georgia Institute of Technology and Google Inc.

” The paper estimates roughly 68,000 servers on the Internet are returning malicious Domain Name System results, which means people with compromised computers are sometimes being directed to the wrong Web sites - and often have no idea.”

And often have no idea. That is what bothers me the most about users on the internet. Most harm done to users is because of of their own lack of knowledge as well as just not paying attention. There are ways to protect yourself, your systems and servers, it’s just taking the time out to learn, pay attention, and do it.

Read more about “servers that lie” here.