This week Hosting.com launches our first managed IP transport product – Intersite Cross Connect (ICC). ICC allows customers with installations at multiple Hosting.com IDCs to build private connectivity with guaranteed bandwidth between those installations over Hosting.com’s MPLS backbone.

The impetus for this product was twofold:

1. To support customers with high-volume or time-sensitive replication requirements
2. To support customers with latency or jitter sensitive applications

The ICC product is based on a feature called MPLS Circuit Cross Connect that is supported on the Juniper EX series switches. In essence, the Circuit Cross Connect emulates a traditional leased line service like a T1 or DS3 with a fraction of the provisioning time, and far more flexible capacity. Whereas traditional telco services can take 30-45 days for provisioning, Hosting.com can provision new ICC services and adjust capacity on existing ICC installations in as little as 48 hours.

ICC services are terminated on Juniper EX series switches. Hosting.com has been using EX series switches in access and customer aggregation roles since Juniper introduced them in 2008. Presently ICC services are available to customers in Hosting.com’s Newark, Denver, and Louisville facilities with plans to expand the service to San Francisco and Irvine in 2011.

In a previous posting, we mentioned that we would continue to provide new demos of our Customer Portal as we release new features as well as circle back on previous releases. Below are two of our newest Customer Portal demos. Please visit our portal demo page to view all of our demos currently available.

Setting Build Contacts

At Hosting.com we give you the opportunity to set build contacts each time you have a new solution provisioned. Two types of contacts are currently available, the Administrative Contact, and the Technical Contact. The same person who can provide technical clarification on a virtual or dedicated machine builds is not always the same person that can make purchasing and upgrade decisions. This feature in the customer portal will ensure any questions or clarifications go to the right person.

Server Replication

With server replication after you replicated environment has been provisioned you will have full control of failover, replication status, and can even get a health check on your environment. This is an important tool for all businesses to ensure that you are “Always On”. This is all available in one easy to use module in the Hosting.com customer portal.

Hosting.com is happy to announce the availability to upload customer-created virtual machines in the form of OVFs via our customer portal. This approach to virtual machine deployment allows you to configure a server, install software, and adjust your applications locally before deploying it into our cloud. OVF-formatted virtual machines can be exported from a variety of VMware products, including ESX, ESXi, VMware Workstation, and VMware Server. Once these have been exported, they can be deployed into our Cloud Enterprise environment multiple times.

Why OVF?

OVF, or Open Virtualization Format, is a standard adopted by most of the virtualization providers on the market, including VMware, Microsoft, and Xen. In addition to providing the disk images for a virtual machine, it also provides an XML-based description for how the virtual machine should be configured. This allows us to review it for possible compatibility issues as well as guide you toward the right resource selections for the server.

OVF Upload in the customer portal broadens the types of virtual machines we can import. VMDK uploads (our alternate method) works great for ESX-to-ESX migrations, but disks from other VMware products need to go through a conversion process before they can be imported. The OVF creation and import process is the same for all supported VMware products, making importing your VMs a very simple process.

How Does It Work?

The OVF process starts with uploading the OVF and related files into our environment with FTP or our FileCatalyst web applet. We then read the OVF to determine the suggested system requirements and present the option to customize your resources further. Once you’ve made your resource selection, we kick off the OVF deployment in the datacenter of your choice. You’ll be notified via email when your cloud enterprise VM has been fully configured and deployed. Take a look at our video demonstration below or visit Hosting.com’s Customer Portal and upload your virtual machine today.

We wanted to take a moment and provide an update on our Customer Portal Demos. The number of Customer Portal Demos has more than doubled this week. We now have 19 videos on features and functionality of http://customer.hosting.com.

The Hosting.com Customer Portal provides an enormous amount of visibility and control to our customers. In the coming weeks and months you will see the portal evolving and shaping itself into the greatest tool that our customers have for interacting with their environment at Hosting.com. From ordering and expanding NAS storage to updating the operating system of your server, and even cloning, parking, and restarting virtual machines you can do it all at in the portal.

As we continue to release new features and functionality to the Customer Portal I would encourage you to visit our Portal Demos to keep up on the latest.

This month Hosting.com proudly introduces a managed Dedicated Load Balancing service enabled by the Coyote Point Equalizer E350 GX platform.  It is now easier and more affordable than ever to have reliable, responsive, and efficient load balancing for your web servers.

Dedicated Load Balancing allows you to distribute traffic across two or more servers (physical… virtual… doesn’t matter to us!) to maximize your computing resources, avoid overload, increase response time, improve uptime of your application, and scale to support your growth—all managed and monitored 24×7x365.

Not only is Managed Dedicated Load Balancing from Hosting.com a fraction of the cost of traditional dedicated load balancing hardware such as F5, you can save money with SSL offloading directly on the Equalizer.  Doing so saves you money by reducing the quantity of SSL certificates on your servers and processing power on those servers.

Additionally, as your business grows, so do your physical and/or virtual servers…so does Dedicated Load Balancing.  Adding additional servers to the routing engine takes minutes and requires no additional capital investment.  And, if one of your servers is down for any reason, it will be automatically taken out of routing to make sure your customers can always access your application.

Read more about our Load Balancing service , Dedicated Load Balancing case study , or contact us to discuss how load balancing can benefit your infrastructure.

To enhance our customers’ utilization, interaction and comfort with our customer portal we have created a video repository of instructional and informational videos.  This repository will continue to grow and offer more and more information for our customers on the features and functionality found at https://customer.hosting.com.  We want to equip our customers with the necessary tools needed to get the most out of their experience at hosting.com.  Providing the tool (Our Customer Portal) and the instructions (Customer Portal Demos) will result in more satisfied, informed, and self-reliant customers.

Please keep an eye on www.hosting.com/portaldemos in the coming weeks for additional customer portal demos.

We are pleased to announce the official availability of Advanced Backups to our Data Storage and Protection suite of managed services.  With the addition of Advanced Backups, we can now offer customers both bare-metal restores (Standard Backup) and off-site backups (Advanced) as a supported product.

This also provides our customers with the ability to utilize our Hosting.com customer portal to perform those restores, which has been a major request over recent months.  If you are interested in learning more about our Advanced Backup product, I’d encourage you to visit the landing page for this product that also includes a video demo, which can be found by visiting this page.