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.

See more pictures

You read correctly! Get a Free PEER 1 Sandbox Server!

PEER 1 and Microsoft are offering 50 sandbox servers (valued at $1,000 each) free for 30 days, packed full with the very latest MS development software for you to work with. This is a limited time offer and available to qualified applicants only. To become eligible for this rare opportunity, please fill out the online application. If you are selected, a PEER 1 representative will contact you directly with details on accessing your server.

SANDBOX SERVER SPECS:

* 2 x Intel Xeon 5320 Quad-core CPU
* 2 GB RAM
* 1 x 250GB HD

Each sandbox server includes:

PLATFORM

* IIS 6
* .ASP.NET 2.0
* .NET 2.0

* PHP 5.0
* Silverlight
* SQL Server Standard

EXPRESSION TOOLS

* Expression Blend
* Expression Web
* Expression Design

VISUAL STUDIO EXPRESS EDITIONS

* Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
* Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
* Visual C# 2005 Express Edition

As a bonus, we are also giving away the following to each Sandbox user that establishes a new Microsoft dedicated hosting account with PEER 1 at the end of their sandbox server trial period:

* Microsoft Expression Web (valued at $299) - a professional design tool to create modern, standards-based sites that deliver superior quality on the Web.

* FREE Microsoft Training (valued at $1099) - A free one year online subscription for Microsoft® Expression Studio & Microsoft® ASP.NET training delivered by Total Training™.

Included in Your Subscription:

o Total Training™ for Microsoft® Expression Studio - 27 hours: Watch and learn as we show you how to take your creative possibilities to a new level using the professional design tools and innovative technologies in the Expression Studio.
o Total Training™ for Microsoft ASP.NET - 23 hours: These training videos will get you up to speed quickly, exploring all of the key features of AJAX and Building Web Applications, and then guide you to mastery level with advanced topics and techniques.

Check out the full details here!

Walmart has been selling Linux computers for quite a few years now at a pretty reasonable price. Now, they’re taking orders online for a new system they’re offering called the Green gPC, made by Everex of Taiwan designed for low power consumption. They’re offering it at $199.00. They say it’ll be available in approximately 600 stores as well as online.

According to a news article I read this morning, “The variant of Linux on the gPC is called gOS and is derived from the popular Ubuntu variant. It’s heavily oriented toward Google’s Web sites and online applications, like YouTube, Gmail and the company’s word processing program, all of which can be used only when the computer is connected to a broadband line.”

Another article describes this as a Google-friendly PC, but to me it sounds like it may be the first GooglePC. People have been talking about Google trying to edge in on Microsoft territory with their online applications, but they don’t have any penetration in the market for PC hardware. Today, you can buy a $200.00 PC that doesn’t need to have software on it to be useful. It’s a realization of Google’s ubiquitous computing.

Hmm…Google stock over $700.00 a share, Google phone coming out soon. Coincidence?

ServerBeach is giving out iPod Nano’s to our new and existing customers when you order servers* throughout the month of October! Order a new server and enjoy listening to your favorite MP3’s while administering your server, setting up your websites, or just coding and scripting!

**Order a server with a value of $75-$159/mo, receive a free iPod Shuffle. *

**Order a server with a value of $160-$249/mo, receive a free 4GB iPod Nano. *

**Order a server with a value of $250+/mo, receive a free 8GB iPod Nano. *

Coupon code IPOD07.

* Orders must be placed using coupon code IPOD07. Failure to use this code will result in a regular order being placed without the iPod Nano promotion.

* Customer must commit to 6 months of service to qualify.

* Offer limited to one per account.

If you have any questions regarding this October promotion, please call us at 1-800-741-9939. You can also e-mail us at the following addresses:

Existing customers: upgrades(AT)serverbeach(NOSPAM).com.
New customers: sales(AT)serverbeach(NOSPAM).com.

PEER 1 and ServerBeach has been exhibiting at the Game Developers Conferences(GDC) in San Francisco the past few years. This year, we headed out to the GDC in Austin, Texas, just one hour up the road from ServerBeach HQ in San Antonio. We sent our local crew to the show to bring “Latency Kills” to the masses. Free T-shirts, crazy tattoos and 1GB thumb-drives. Fantastic show! We ran into quite a few clients along with some future ones. See more photos

Big money blogger John Chow, owner of TheTechZone.com was spotted eating a bowl of pork chop with macaroni at Kam Do in our “Latency Kills” shirt. John’s blog receives 300k to 400k pages views per month, and provides fantastically useful information in converting your traffic into currency. Some great investment and income tax savings tips too. Thanks Ed. Some swag coming your way.

A unique benefit with ServerBeach is that you can choose which of one our three data centers to run your self-managed servers from, at no additional charge. Our data center locations in Herndon VA, San Antonio TX, and Los Angeles CA, offer you excellent geographical diversity - east coast, central US and west coast. Pick the one closest to your online customers for greater performance. Also, try our broadband speed test for each location and test the upload and download speeds from your connection.

Now you can do a broadband speed test directly from the Beach site for any of our three data centers: Los Angeles CA, San Antonio TX, and Herndon VA. The broadband speed test utility developed by Audit My PC allows you to test the upload and download speed of your Internet connection to our data center locations.