ServerBeach had two pipes, one for redundancy, and YouTube was using one and a half of them, with rest of its customers limited to just half of the one left. ServerBeach had a great plan, $129 month for unlimited data. “They weren’t necessarily prepared for a service like YouTube.”
He’s right. We weren’t quite ready for their explosive growth, but found a way to manage. We captured our sentiments in this tongue-in-cheek video send off to the YouTube gang (who btw, loved it!) after they moved their last servers from the Beach over to Google.
I had the opportunity to attend the Dallas WordCamp 2008 this past weekend. Aside from the drive from San Antonio to Dallas, the weekend was great. Cold, but great. WordCamps brings the largest gathering of WordPress bloggers, podcasters, designers, programmers and aficionados to teach, learn, eat, drink and generally have fun with one another.
In the opening segment on Saturday March 29th, Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and founding developer of WordPress spoke about WordPress 2.5 and the changes that were made from previous versions. The poor man just had his wisdom teeth removed and was in a little pain that day, but he was a trooper! While he spoke, he displayed the changes in WordPress 2.5 on the big screens. A couple of changes included a new Dashboard (many people learned of WordCamp 2008 through the Dashboard widget), new Gallery Features - upload feature: set thumbnail sizes, proportions of pictures, extracts all photo information from your digital camera (date, time, pixels, camera type), comments in 2.5 - editing has been completely re-designed, cookies are now encrypted and a couple more added security features.
The Mayor also popped in for a few minutes to thank everyone for coming, that was a pleasant visit.
Lunch was catered in from Rudy’s BBQ, thanks to Find My Host who funded it. It was the perfect opportunity to mingle with other bloggers, podcasters, and the like.
The majority of the event, we sat and listened to bloggers and podcasters speak about tips and tricks, how to drive traffic, security, and best practices. These people have done their homework. I was really taken in by some of the tips they were giving, things that had never crossed my mind. Did you know that Google Analytics only tracks people who have Javascript turned on? If someone has Javascript turned off (I generally do), they’re not being tracked - skewed numbers, not good.
After Saturday’s event, many people got together afterwards for a night out and had a great time. Sunday was a jam packed day full of a lot of Q&A and the weekend in general was a very good learning experience for all bloggers and podcasters. John P. moderated the panel and asked very real questions that companies face when looking at building a blog presence. Why should businesses have a blog? What if my employees post something bad? What if my customers post something bad? These are questions that companies have to take into account when making a decision to have a blog - just as ServerBeach did. One of the panel members, Liz Strauss, was dead on when she said, “a blog can turn the faceless company into real humans you can relate to.”
All in all, it was a great event. The city of Frisco, TX allowed WordCamp to use their city council chambers. Many thanks to those who made this possible and I look forward to attending many more in the future.
ServerBeach is now home from the SXSW events. We attended the Interactive Festival on Sunday and remained there until yesterday. We had such a great time and had the opportunity to meet many of our customers and learn more about their business, while they had the opportunity to get to know some of our employees.
Monday night, March 10th ServerBeach co-sponsored the South by Northwest (SXNW) Geek Fest Party at the Iron Cactus in downtown Austin and wow was it an awesome night! There were so many people lined up outside waiting to get in we opened the doors early so we could get the party started and enjoy the rest of the night (well…night through early morning!).
We’ll definitely be looking forward to doing this again next year! You can view pictures of the events here.
Peer 1 hosted its first “PEER 1 Social” at the Elevate Lounge in Los Angeles, California last Thursday evening. Having a diverse geographic footprint across North America gives us an opportunity to meet clients face to face. Something that isn’t very common in the hosting industry today.
Our goal is to have these Peer 1 Social events on a quarterly basis allowing us a chance to mingle with clients and merely say “thank you for your business.” It is a “no frills,” casual environment with good drinks,
food and most importantly, real people. This quarter is Los Angeles, next quarter we might be stopping by near you! Keep an eye on your e-mails!
According to a “Sanity Check” article on TechRepublic this morning, the dependence of business on technology will continue to accelerate 2008, but not all of the trends are happy ones. They’ve created a list of which tech trends to keep an eye on during 2008 and how they will impact business and IT — for better and for worse.
1. Enterprise IT budgets will shrink in the U.S.
2. Utility computing will start a new wave of IT outsourcing
3. Mobile Internet will change the way people work
4. Green IT will gain legal momentum
5. Unified communications will unlock the business value of VoIP
6. Businesses will continue to avoid Windows Vista
7. WAN caching will save bandwidth and speed up remote users
8. Demand will grow for alternative form factor computers
I’m sure some of you have been watching or listening to videos, podcasts, or whatnot of events that are taking place at CES. I’ve kept up with a little here and there and today I came across this.
I was surprised to see this actually. To turn a TV off here or there, OK..have your fun. But to do this during a vendors presentation? I think it was taken a bit too far.
According to Gizmodo, “they couldn’t help it”. WHAT?
“we pretty much couldn’t help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn’t stop. (And Panasonic, you’re so lucky that 150-incher didn’t have an active IR port.) It was too much fun, but watching this video, we realize it probably made some people’s jobs harder, and I don’t agree with that (Especially Motorola). We’re sorry.”
To Gizmodo’s credit, at least they posted a public apology. But is that enough?
ServerBeach attended the Blog World & New Media Expo last week in Las Vegas Nevada. It was an awesome experience for the employees that attended and we learned quite a bit from the bloggers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners.
Our very own Product Engineering Manager, Joe Rodriguez did a presentation with Barry from WordPress discussing how WordPress is able to handle the traffic it receives as well as the scalability and reliability from the ServerBeach side. I didn’t get a chance to speak to Barry until the last day we were there and it’s been a while since I had seen him back in our old ‘working side by side’ days but having the chance to talk to him was awesome. He’s doing wonders with his work and I’m very much impressed and proud to know him!
It’s been a few years since I last visited Las Vegas and man has it changed. Joe and I had so many plans to do this and that but by the end of the days work we were too tired to do anything but eat! We did walk around the strip for a while when we first arrived waiting to check into our hotels, but quickly realized how tired we were after getting up early to catch the flight out there.
All in all it was a great experience for us and we look forward to attending next years Blog World & New Media Expo! View all of our pictures taken from the conference here.
The Blog World & New Media Expo will be taking place from November 7th through 9th in Las Vegas, Nevada and it’s going to be an awesome time for anyone who’s interested in blogging and podcasting. Many speakers and exhibitors have signed up and I can’t wait to get there and see, learn, and experience all that’s happening. Some of the exhibitors that are attending are (this is not a complete list):
I’m really looking forward to hearing a lot of the speakers there and going to a few seminars. Being a just getting started blogger, both personally and professionally this should be a really great experience. Some of the speakers will include:
Chris Ballard - a Senior Writer for Sports Illustrated ESPN.
Scott Bourne - the co-founder and principal of Podango Productions.
Thomas Frey - the Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute
John C. Havens - Vice President of Business Development at BlogTalkRadio
Peter Hirshberg - Chairman of the Executive Committee & CMO, Technorati Inc.
Tris Hussey - the Chief Technology Partner at One By One Media, and also blogs for b5 media
Rick Klau - the Strategic Partner Development at Google
And again, so many more..
Joe Rodriguez, the Product Engineering manager for ServerBeach, a PEER 1 company (who is also a close friend and co-worker) will be doing a presentation with Barry from WordPress.
For those of you attending… I’ll see you there!
