ServerBeach Blog

From left to right - Angela Ramirez - Manager of Client Loyalty, Allison - Customer Service, and Amy - Billing Department.

Employees of the ServerBeach San Antonio division partied it up and got their game on at Dave and Buster’s last Thursday to celebrate the ServerBeach 10,000 server milestone. Ted Smith, Vice President of Operations was able to join in on the fun while visiting San Antonio. We had food, drinks, gaming competition and ServerBeach Trivia. Congrats to Team #4 for winning the gaming competition. Jim Bair, DC Ops Technician and previous customer to ServerBeach, won the ServerBeach Trivia with only missing five answers out of 21. Congrats Jim! Some of the trivia questions related back to the beginning days of ServerBeach, such as:

1. What is the name of the person who founded ServerBeach?
2. What year was ServerBeach founded?
3. What was the name of building where the first ServerBeach datacenter and office were located?
4. What was the name of the first ServerBeach server?

All of the employees sported some cool limited edition 10,000 t-shirts (see pic). The purpose of this event was to recognize a huge accomplishment for ServerBeach and for the PEER 1 company. When PEER 1 acquired ServerBeach 3.5 years ago, SeverBeach had approximately 4,500 servers. We have now more than doubled our server count and tripled in revenue growth. This couldn’t have been done without the hard work from employees all across the PEER 1 organization.

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A couple of weeks ago, someone got hassled by airport security - they couldn’t make sense of his MacBook Air. Because the MacBook Air does not look like your every day laptop, it grabs the interest of security personnel, according to the TSA’s Blogger Bob. Why? Its solid state drive. Which means any notebook with a SSD could cause a delay for you if you’re traveling.

Blogger Bob states -

We were able to get our hands on a MacBook Air and run it through the X-ray in our lab. My suspicions were correct. The MacBook does look completely different than your typical laptop or DVD player. I can’t get into specifics of course, but there were a couple of areas on the X-ray that could pique some interest for TSOs.

Read more of his blog post here.

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.

Since March 13, customers of two large Internet providers, Cogent Communications Group Inc. and TeliaSonera AB are unable to contact each other through the Internet, unless they have backup connections from other companies.

This means, for instance, that some U.S. Web sites hosted by Cogent customers are inaccessible to surfers in the Nordic countries, where Sweden-based TeliaSonera is the largest telecommunications operator. It’s like Cogent and TeliaSonera customers are on different Internets.

“Basically, parts of the Internet can’t talk to each other,” said Earl Zmijewski, general Manager of the Internet data division at Renesys Corp., which keeps track of how carriers route traffic over the Internet.

It’s not the first time this has happened: Now and then, Internet companies indulge in what Zmijewski calls playing “chicken.” If they’re fighting over a contract, they disconnect each other, and wait to see who blinks first. The number of irate customers each company faces will probably determine who does.

Check out the full story here.

A new kind of flash memory technology with potentially greater capacity and durability, lower power requirements, and the same design as flash NAND is primed to challenge today’s solid-state disk products. Fremont, Calif.-based Nanochip Inc. said it has made breakthroughs in its array-based memory research that will enable it to deliver working prototypes to potential manufacturing partners next year. Three investors, including Intel Capital, recently put $14 million into the company, which has been developing the technology since its founding in 1996.

“It’s a technology that doesn’t depend on Moore’s Law,” says Gordon Knight, CEO of Nanochip. “This technology should go at least 10 generations.”

Read more about this technology at ComputerWorld.

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.

ServerBeach, Blue Flavor, and Raincity Studios are proud to present the 3rd annual South by Northwest (SXNW) Geek Fest Party at the Iron Cactus in downtown Austin, TX. This is one of the hottest events during SXSW. There will be plenty of free drinks and cool people to meet. Over 1,700 people showed up last year with line ups out the door. Come early and meet the Beach crew. We’ll also have a booth at SXSW Interactive and will be giving out plenty of Beach swag.

About Iron Cactus: a Southwestern style grille and Margarita Bar. They pride themselves on presenting authentic Southwestern cuisine, gleaning recipes and ingredients from Southern Mexico to Utah. Plus, Iron Cactus features more than 80 Tequilas and is considered in the top 10 best Tequila bar in the world.

Venue: Iron Cactus, 606 Trinity Street at 6th Ave, Austin, Texas 73301

For more details about this event, including maps, comments, and other attendees, visit the event page by clicking here. We hope to see you there!