Hosting.com will be one of the first hosting companies to offer SharePoint 2010 as a Virtual Appliance. The basic idea behind a Virtual Appliance is to be able to deliver software packages faster, better and cheaper. It is important to differentiate that a Virtual Appliance is not just a Virtual Machine, but rather, it is a software image with software stacked inside of a Virtual Machine. Similar to a physical machine, a Virtual Machine is just the platform for running an Operating System. It will launch out of our portal as an OVF deployment from Hosting.com’s Virtual Appliance Repository, and it also has RAM and CPU pre-configured.

By using the virtual appliance we have standardized the product and taken installation and basic configuration out of the hands of the user. This will increase reliability, reduce installation time and decrease the need for support. The customer essentially skips hardware and Operating System preparation, and hardware compatibility is usually not an issue. Within a few clicks and less than ten minutes, the Virtual Appliance can be used by the customer. Virtual Appliances represent the future groundwork for software deployment methods.

Please view this short video to get additional insight into the virtual appliance deployment and a look at SharePoint 2010.

Recently, InformationWeek writer John Soat wrote an article “Cloud 2.0 – Are We There Yet” and stated:

“To me, Cloud 2.0 is exemplified in one word: hybrid. Cloud computing will offer its most compelling advantages when organizations can combine private clouds and public clouds (XaaS) in IT architectures that stretch the definition of flexibility and agility.”

Over the last 12 months, Hosting.com has continued to brand itself as one of the hosting industry’s primary locations for companies looking to augment their existing infrastructure with hosted resources, build compliant, secure multi-platform hosting solutions, connect legacy servers and applications with robust, bleeding-edge cloud technologies, and utilize cloud services to connect, grow and complete their infrastructure needs – essentially, Hosting.com has become a home for hybrid hosting solutions.

For Hosting.com, Hybrid and Cloud 2.0 represent the user experience clients of all sizes expect from service providers.  We must move away from trying to sell the value of cloud (companies have already accepted that it can save them money and help them scale) or the fact that our infrastructure architecture is superior to our competitors;  rather,the discussion all cloud providers must have is on the functionality delivered through cloud, the augmentation of existing infrastructures and the seamless, integrated management portals the industry now demands.

Central to Hosting.com’s cloud functionality is movement – movement from one Hosting.com platform to another, movement between our datacenters (Server Replication),  movement from a client’s site or infrastructure (Colocation) to our cloud solutions for scalability, burst capacity and disaster recovery, movement of VMDK files from a client virtual machine to our own for parking and ultimately cloning, and the ability to seamlessly manage all of your solutions from our Customer Portal, one of the industry’s best, to quickly scale or flex infrastructure needs.

The Hosting.com Cloud truly sets the marketplace in motion – innovated, illustrated and instituted by our technical teams and backed by unparalleled support teams.

The market is ripe and craving a solution like Hosting.com has spent months testing, validating and completing.  To answer John’s question – “Yes, we are there NOW and our clients are realizing the benefits today!”  View the ClearSaleing case study as an example, look for Hosting.com at VMworld 2010 in booth 1608 and continue to pay close attention as Hosting.com continues to evolve the hybrid and cloud marketplaces!

Well, we’ve compiled a short history of free web hosting and prepared this infographic for your viewing pleasure. It’s amazing to see how things evolved from the birth to the recent death of Geocities.

And for your sharing pleasure, we’ve also included an copy-and-pastable embed code. We hope you enjoy…

<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.hosting.com/services/platform-services/dedicated"><img alt="History of Free Web Hosting" src="http://engineering.hosting.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/history-of-free-web-hosting.jpg"></a><br/><a href="http://www.hosting.com/services/platform-services/dedicated">Dedicated Hosting</a>

History of Free Web Hosting Infographic Embed Code

<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.hosting.com/services/platform-services/dedicated"><img alt="History of Free Web Hosting" src="http://engineering.hosting.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/history-of-free-web-hosting.jpg"></a><br/><a href="http://www.hosting.com/services/platform-services/dedicated">Dedicated Hosting</a>

The engineering team wanted to take a moment and provide a sneak peek for our upcoming Advanced Backup product. The service will be based on the EMC Avamar platform and is meant to be complementary to our existing backup solution based on R1Soft’s Righteous. The Advanced Backup service is not released as of yet.

Hosting.com understands the challenges of maintaining accurate, dependable backup and recovery processes to ensure you can recover in any event. Hosting.com’s Advanced Backup is a hosted backup and recovery service that provides reliable, efficient and secure protection of your company’s data, while reducing capital expenses associated with maintaining in-house backup solutions. It centralizes the backup and recovery of servers, network attached storage and virtual environments. Data is automatically backed up to a highly secure data center. Centralized administration and reporting of your company’s data is made available via Hosting.com’s portal.  Our intuitive interface makes data recovery simple, and our reports provide detailed status updates on all of your backup and recovery jobs.

Advanced Backup using EMC Avamar provides the following features and benefits:

Advanced Backup should not be considered a replacement for Hosting.com’s existing Standard Backup, as they are complimentary.  For example, although Advanced Backup can backup NAS volumes, it cannot perform bare-metal restores.  Each backup solution should be considered based upon the merits of each.

Australia

Australia’s Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy is pressing Google for more filtering power. Since 2008, the governing Australian Labor Party has proposed to “extend Internet censorship to a system of mandatory filtering of overseas websites which are, or potentially would be, “refused classification” (RC) in Australia”. This means that Internet Service Providers would be required to block any dodgy material entering the country from overseas.

The Great Aussie Firewall already blocks 1,370 sites according to the Sydney Morning Herald — mostly child pornography, excessive violence, instructions in crime or drug use and advocacy of terrorism. But it also touches a broader range of content such as sex fetishes and computer games not suitable for under 18s. Considering that the Australian ratings system doesn’t even have R18 categories for games, games available in the UK and the rest of the world are simply banned in Australia.

The Australian Classification Board has also put a ban on small breasts in adult material, claiming that material featuring small breasted women encourages pedophilia. According to Fiona Patten, Convener of the Australian Sex Party: “We are starting to see depictions of women in their late 20s being banned because they have an A cup size.”

Some pages from Wikileaks, a website that publishes leaked documents alleging government and corporate misconduct, were also added to the blacklist of websites which Australians are not allowed to look at.

Conroy also wants Google to censor YouTube, expressing his admiration for “Google’s role in suppressing controversial web content in countries like China and Thailand”. He is trying to use similar filtering to prevent Australians from viewing YouTube videos that break the RC content rules. Google warns however, that doing this would lead to the removal of many politically controversial but harmless YouTube clips and will not “voluntarily” comply with the government’s request.

Denmark

Censorship in Denmark is prohibited as per the Constitution § 77, however Internet censorship is another story. Two days after a list of URLs on Thailand’s Internet censorship blacklist were published on WikiLeaks.org, the contents of Denmark’s blacklist were also published. According to WikiLeaks, the list contains 3, 863 sites blocked by Danish ISPs participating in Denmark’s censorship scheme.  Back in 2006, one of Denmark’s largest ISPs, Tele2, was given a court injunction and told it must block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest bittorrent tracker.

Thailand

(image: source)

Thailand was guaranteed Freedom of Speech in the 1997 Constitution. However, censorship may still be imposed to preserve national security, maintain public order, protect public morals, and prevent criticism of the royal family and insults to Buddhism. The Royal Thai Police blocks approximately 32, 500 websites, by informally “requesting” blocking to Thailand’s 54 commercial and non-profit ISPs. ISPs who fail to comply are punitively sanctioned by the government in the form of bandwidth restriction or even loss of operating license.

Turkey

(image:source)
On Friday, September 18, 2009, access to popular social networks MySpace and Last.fm were blocked from Turkey, because of “intellectual property infringements” following a request by “Mu-yap”, the Turkish Phonographic Industry Society. But just about any complaint to a lower court seems to be able to get a website blocked, and it happens frequently with sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, Alibaba, Slide.com, and some WordPress blogs. In 2008, a Turkish court blocked access to YouTube because of clips allegedly insulting the country’s founding father. That same year, the number one Turkish atheist site, Ateizm.org was removed by the Turkish government twice. Ateizm.org was one of the busiest forums for the Turkish speaking online community over the Internet, getting over 1000 visitors a day.

China

(image:source)
Net censorship in China is one of the strictest in the world. China-based websites cannot link to overseas news websites or carry news from overseas media without separate approval. Their filtering systems are so advanced and complicated that they can block by keywords, phrases or even disable a user’s Internet access who happens to request a page with forbidden content. Considered dangerously powerful and highly repressive, China’s Internet police force is estimated at over 30,000. Many popular websites like Wikipedia, BBC, Yahoo, Google, Hotmail, Blogspot, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, webshots, imageshack, Technorati, Flickr and Tripod, among many others, have been blocked on various grounds (though only 3-4 of these sites have now been unblocked). A Harvard study found that at least 18,000 sites are inaccessible/blocked within mainland China.

Any unfavorable or litigious comments appearing on Internet forums, blogs, and major sites are usually erased within minutes. The PRC has also been known to monitor individuals’ internet access.

Iran

(image:source)
Iran also has one of the most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, which allows authorities to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale. The technology was developed with the assistance of European telecommunications giants, Siemens AG and Nokia Corp.
Iran has an estimated 23 million users and can track all online communication through a single location called the Telecommunication Infrastructure Co., (part of the government’s telecom monopoly). All of the country’s international links run through this company.

India

(image: source)
In 2006, the Government of India established a Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) which allows for the monitoring of all incoming and outgoing Internet traffic from India. India’s Information Technology Bill officially bans Internet porn, with prison sentences for up to five years.

Pakistan

Cyberterrorism is dealt with very severely in Pakistan. As of December 2008, President Asif Zadari ordered that cyberterrorism be punishable by death or life imprisonment.

These are only some of the many controversial cybersecurity measures underway.  Technology and law are at critical stages, and for now, cybersecurity is taking high precedence over the rights of netizens. But as John Gilmore (co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) states, “the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.” Essentially, the very nature of the Internet is to access and share information and the Internet community will always find a way to do so.

One of our valued partners recently wrote a blog entry that is a very pertinent use case for many of our current and prospective clients today. As mentioned in a previous engineering post, Hosting.com does offer a server replication service, which allows for business continuity in a managed dedicated or cloud based environment. Clients who are looking to fail over from one site to another without losing data or want to avoid a long service interruption to their customer base have embraced this technology. I’d invite you to read through the post by visiting this page and see if your cloud strategy aligns.

I wanted to make a quick post regarding some upcoming events we will be having in concert with VMware. Folks that should consider coming out include:

• Any VMware/Hosting.com clients
• VMware clients interested in extending/augmenting their datacenter to a service provider’s cloud for disaster recovery, scalability and test/dev environments
• VMware partners that want more information on how they can/should connect with vCloud service providers
• Those considering virtualizing their data center
• Companies who want/need a general understanding of cloud
• Those approaching a server or infrastructure refresh or consolidation. Learn how Redwood might impact your business
• Companies that want to reduce server capital expenses and management costs

On July 20th, we will be hosting an event in the Atlanta area with lunch provided at the Ravinia Club and Spa.

On July 22nd, I will be speaking in Chicago at Lloyd’s and we will also have free breakfast for everyone getting up early with us.

We would love to have you come out and join us if you are in either area. Obviously, I’m partial to our Chicago event and would love to see as many folks as possible (we all know breakfast is the most important meal of the day) – but I’m sure Jim will make a great presentation (over an equally delicious free lunch) in Atlanta.

Hope to see you there!

In the near future, Hosting.com will be rolling out a new managed patching service for our managed dedicated and cloud servers. This new process offers a number of great improvements over our previous patching processes – most of them translating directly to advantages for our customers. We are cognizant that our customer’s each have their own operational process and we will continue to introduce functionality that is flexible and can be integrated into such process.

Obviously, we can’t offer better or more patches than our competition. Rather, we’ve tried to improve our patching process by offering our customer more control, more choice, and more visibility. We’ve created a module for our Customer Portal that allows our customer to see what updates will be run on their server and which updates have already been applied (see below).

As you can see, not only is the name of the update to be applied displayed, but you receive a description of that update and the date the update became available to the server.

More Control
You may also notice the 2 thumbs-up/thumbs-down buttons on the left-hand side. This is the part where we’re giving our customers more control. Before being run on a server, all updates must go through an approval process. Our Security Center of Excellence is tasked with ensuring that each update is safe to run on servers before it can be applied. However, each customer has the ability to make their own choices about their patching. A customer may expressly approve an update that they are comfortable running on their server or they may exclude an update, even if it has been approved by our staff. Additionally, these approvals and exclusions can be applied differently on each server a customer has. So, if your database server shouldn’t receive a certain update, excluding it will not prevent your web server from getting it.

More Visibility
Visibility and tracking of security updates is becoming more and more important in business. Our portal will help with this too. In addition to showing what updates will be run in the next patching cycle, a customer can also see updates awaiting approval, updates that have been excluded by our security team as unsafe, and a historic view of all updates on the server.

Take a peek at how the functionality will look by visiting here

Last week we proudly announced the launch of our Cloud Private product. Simply, it is as a dedicated pool of resources (CPU, memory, storage, and network) for running your applications in a Cloud Environment. All of the same enterprise class infrastructure components that exist in our multi-tenant Cloud Enterprise offering are there in Cloud Private, except in a dedicated, managed environment.

Proven redundancies are built throughout the infrastructure, including redundant network paths to our core networks, HA firewalls, redundant network uplinks on each cloud node, HA cloud server nodes, and multipath fibre channel connections to SAN storage.

100% of the resources are dedicated and guaranteed to be there when you need them at all times, from CPU cycles to storage I/O. From a performance standpoint, the possibility your applications and VMs ever being in contention for resources with other tenants in the Cloud is eliminated. Therefore you don’t have to worry your peak traffic periods conflicting with high traffic periods of other tenants in the Cloud.

As Adam mentioned in the previous blog post, all of the great Cloud related portal enhancements his team has been working on have now been extended to Cloud Private environments. A few examples are:

- current and historical resource usage of your VMs
- self service rapid virtual machine deployments from our product catalog
- virtual machine snapshot management
- reconfiguration of virtual machine resources
- virtual machine power state management

You can now leverage all of these self service Cloud management portal features in a dedicated, Cloud Private environment. In addition to those features, you can monitor the consumption of resources from your dedicated resource pool so that you’ll have visibility and awareness of when it’s time to add or remove resources from your Cloud Private environment.

Scaling resources in Cloud Private offering is extremely flexible and typically does not require any service interruption. Additional CPU, memory, network, or storage resources can be added to your dedicated pool of resources as needed without having to take any production applications offline for maintenance. This offering can be geographically dispersed across multiple sites if desired and is fully compatible in a hybrid environment, such as the addition physical database servers or co-located purpose built hardware devices.

All components of the infrastructure, including the virtual machine OS and software, are fully supported in a managed offering. If at any time assistance is needed with managing any piece of this infrastructure, our support staff if there to help.

For more information about Cloud Private offering, please visit: http://hosting.com/cloudhosting/private/

This has been a crazy week at Hosting.com. We spent the early part of the week getting everything sorted out with the Newark cloud after a storage issue and things are moving as quickly as ever on the engineering side of the house. I’m pretty excited that we are starting to get the first modules for our portal developed by our groups internally and by our partners. The portal team has started the process of integrating these modules while we address a few bugs that have been reported by our staff and customer. The other major initiative underway is getting a private version of our Cloud Enterprise offering out the door. It looks like the settled product name will be Cloud Private and the idea is that you will have all the same functionality in the portal as a Cloud Enterprise customer – but have your resources provisioned on dedicated hardware nodes that only contain your Virtual Machines.

A few weeks ago now, I recorded a Customer Portal demo to give everyone a feeling for the Cloud functionality in our portal today. I turned it over to marketing and product management but I imagine they are still working it through their internal processes, so I wanted to get it out there in front of everyone here first.

I have some higher res versions that hopefully they’ll use when we get this formally posted to our site. As always – feedback welcome and I love hearing from our customers or prospective customers.