Thursday, April 10, 2008

Data Center Security Study Released, by Neverfail

April 10, 2008 - According to a new study released by Osterman Research and sponsored by security solutions company, Neverfail, over 50 percent of the participants report they are consolidating all email servers into a single data center in one geographic location.

The report indicates that, even amidst today's enlightened business environments, many companies are still leaving their data centers open to severe risk. Yet less than 1 percent says they are protecting these systems with redundant servers in case of disaster -- leaving most at risk of losing data and severely compromising their business.

Encouragingly, the report also found that two-thirds of these companies consider disaster recovery and business continuity an important or critical driver for the adoption of virtualization technology, second only to reducing hardware costs. Regardless of the data center environment, the ubiquity of email use to communicate and exchange business-critical content makes it one of the most important business applications -- one that simply can not go down.

Other interesting facts from the survey and other recent Osterman Research surveys:
-- Nearly three out of five organizations consider enabling continuous operations as an important or critical driver for adopting virtualization. -- However, most decision makers do not understand virtualization well enough to make sound decisions about its adoption. -- Messaging system reliability/uptime is a serious problem for one in five organizations, impacting millions of users in the workplace. Despite this, 3 out of 4 respondents did not see messaging as an important part of their virtualization project. These companies, therefore, must look to alternative technologies to provide business continuity and disaster recovery.

Michael Osterman, President of Osterman Research noted, ''We were quite surprised to find so many businesses relying on 'luck' and still thinking about next steps when considering business continuity for their most important applications. It was no surprise that more than half of respondents are planning to put together a virtual environment to address the problem. But what was interesting was the lack of understanding of virtualization amongst the decision makers. It is clear that where a company is building out their business continuity plans there is a need for better integration and understanding of virtualization to deliver continuous availability to prevent any type of business interruption.''

Andrew Barnes, Senior Vice President of corporate development at Neverfail remarked, ''Virtualization is experiencing rapid market growth because of its ability to improve efficiency in data centers through cost savings and resource management. It is good to see that virtualization vendors are now waking companies up to the urgent need for business continuity and disaster recovery. Clearly though there is some way to go for companies to understand how virtualization can be best implemented to protect critical parts of the business.''

With global experience in delivering continuous availability solutions for mission critical applications, Neverfail has experience across physical and virtual infrastructures. As well as protecting critical applications such as email and mobility platforms, Neverfail protects VMware VirtualCenter which sits at the heart of the market leading virtualization platform.

VMware VirtualCenter provides centralized monitoring, remote management, and rapid provisioning capabilities, and serves as the control point for valuable services such as VMware VMotion, Site Recovery Manager and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). This functionality yields significant benefits including increased efficiency and flexibility -- provided that VMware VirtualCenter Server can be accessed by an IT administrator. Neverfail for VMware VirtualCenter ensures that IT administrators will not lose access to the features provided by VMware VirtualCenter despite IT interruptions ranging from component failure to external interruptions.

Mr. Barnes added, ''Neverfail customers today blend physical and virtual environments to minimize the time to protect their most critical applications as part of their business continuity and recovery plans. Using virtualization technology in conjunction with Neverfail provides the maximum level of application availability and accelerates the value of virtualization to deliver continuous availability.''

For a copy of the ''Messaging Virtualization Market Trends 2008-2011'' by Osterman Research, please visit www.neverfailgroup.com or contact Neverfail at info@us.neverfailgroup.com.

In addition to protecting virtualized environments, Neverfail also offers solutions for a wide range of Windows-based applications including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, File Server and IIS, as well as RIM BlackBerr and IBM Lotus Domino. Neverfail's products can be implemented in physical and virtual environments and over a LAN or WAN which offers businesses the ability to locate their secondary server in the next room or across the globe. Neverfail's virtualized offerings are now available through more than 850 channel partners and distributors or direct.

Neverfail is a global software company providing data protection, high availability, and disaster recovery solutions focused on keeping users productive. Neverfail's software solutions enable users to remain continuously connected to the live software application irrespective of hardware, software, operating system, or network failures. Neverfail's mission of eliminating application downtime for the end user delivers the assurance of business continuity, removes the commercial and IT management costs associated with system downtime and enables the more productive use of IT resources.

THEHOSTINGNEWS.COM

Web Hosting Provider, Eleven2 Hosting, Expands Corporate Management Team

April 10, 2008 - Eleven2 Hosting company, has expanded its corporate management team, through an appointment of a new Customer Service Director, Cory Beavers, a hosting industry veteran.

Mr. Beavers began his career at Yahoo! Web Hosting and was most recently employed by HostGator Web Hosting. Rodney Giles, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Eleven2 noted, ''Cory's focus will be on increasing the level of support our customers experience here at Eleven2. With Cory's previous experience at Yahoo! Web Hosting and HostGator Web Hosting, he brings the experience, knowledge, and dedication needed to take our customer support to the next level.''

Cory's daily tasks include developing and implementing training programs for customer support advocates, enhancing response times on support requests, and improving the quality of responses to customers from the Eleven2 Hosting staff.

Mr. Giles added, ''Cory's leadership in these areas will help attract customers wanting top-notch customer service at every point of service, from pre-sales to ongoing support, something rarely seen in the hosting industry. When our customers are happy, our retention rates increase and customers start spreading the word about the quality of our hosting and support services.''

In addition to adding a new customer service director, Eleven2 has plans to extend their development team to keep up with the expansion of their upcoming hosting products and services.

Customers can interact with the Eleven2 Hosting team through the company's VIP platform, a user-friendly control panel for managing billing information, support requests, daily website maintenance, and email.

Recently, Eleven 2 debuted the launch of its iPhone Email Anti-Spam solution, featuring new enhancements to protect iPhone user inboxes and screen out 99.9% of spam emails. The custom-built spam protection combines anti-spam hardware appliances and in-house designed software to filter spam for iPhone email users, improving their user experience and lightening the load on Eleven2 servers. With total sales recently reaching one million, the number of users relying on the iPhone as their primary device for accessing mobile email continues to grow. Spam has the potential to be a major issue in clogging iPhone email inboxes.

Eleven2 has enabled a anti-spam scan engine which uses a layered approach to increase ''kill'' rates while at the same time keeping false positives to an absolute minimum. Spam emails are identified through spam signature files and updated rules which are designed around actual identified spam, doing away with guessing and leading to extremely low false positives. Other enhancements include IMAP configurations which were heavily tweaked, redundant inbound mail servers and automated outbound IP address switching to prevent blocked sending of emails.
Eleven2 is looking to roll out additional future enhancements focused on iPhone users in the near future.

Eleven2 Hosting was formed back in early 2004 between two frustrated web developers who simply couldn't find good hosting options on the Internet. With currently more than 60,000 web sites and years of experience, Eleven2 has become a world-class hosting provider that is here to stay. Eleven2 built and maintains its own state-of-the-art data-center facility and has continuously re-invented itself through the development of their own in-house automated support system.

THEHOSTINGNEWS.COM

Dedicated Web Hosting Company, UK2, Reports First Quarter Earnings

April 10, 2008 - British web hosting company, UK-2 Group, Ltd., has released its first quarter results, indicating its most significant ever, since the domain name registration highs of the early 2000's.

In addition, the excellent growth seen by the company is in the higher revenue and profit areas of shared and dedicated hosting, not just domain names.

Ditlev Bredahl, Managing Director / CEO of UK2 noted, ''We are extremely pleased with our Quarter 1 results, which are not only above target but the best we've seen in several years. The results are testament to the hard work and commitment of all the staff at UK2, and prove that we are capable of delivering customers with exceptional and great value hosting services.''

UK2.net has been a significant player in the British and European hosting markets since 1998, and is the founder brand of the UK-2 Group. UK2.net underwent a large organisational and strategic restructure in 2006, so to take advantage of the increase in popularity of hosting services and associated growth in the hosting market. The company has significantly increased customer numbers since then, and continues to challenge the other leading hosting brands.

Earlier this year, the company acquired clients from US host Stargate and midPhase Services Inc.'s Shared and Virtual Private Server businesses. UK-2 Group has been a significant player in the British and European hosting markets for many years, and recently underwent a large restructure, making important organizational changes in readiness for customer growth plans and challenging the bigger hosting brands. UK-2 is one of the largest domain registrars in the UK having registered over 1 million domain names.

UK-2 Group intends to continue operation of midPhase's various brands, including: midPhase.com, ANHosting.com and Autica.com, due to its successful approach and market leadership to date. UK2 will not integrate midPhase into any existing UK-2 Group brand. This means there will be no impact on existing midPhase customers in terms of products, services, prices and support. UK-2 does not plan to migrate servers and has chosen to collocate the existing midPhase servers with SingleHop, Inc., a company owned and operated by Zak Boca and Dan Ushman.

midPhase Services, Inc. is a privately held web hosting and Internet services company founded in 2003 and based out of Chicago. midPhase provides budget, shared, advanced and other types of web hosting services to a wide range of clients ranging from small business to individuals. By providing a robust technological base and reasonable pricing, midPhase is able to offer customers an unbeatable value. midPhase is able to distinguish itself from countless other providers by offering an incredible value to our customers. This combination of advanced products and affordability has helped midPhase retain a record-breaking growth pattern, faster than the industry average every month since inception. Unlike most web-hosting providers, midPhase owns all of the hardware it uses. midPhase does not rent or lease servers.

UK-2 Group, a major player in the hosting industry since the late nineties, provides domain name registration and web hosting services to many customers through its family of hosting brands - UK2.net, US2.net, midPhase Services, AN Hosting, Autica and Resell.biz. The group operates its services out of several multi million pound data centres and are committed to providing reliable, secure and great value products and services underpinned with excellent support. UK2-Group is also a major shareholder in the merged Redbus Interhouse and Telecity Group, the leading European data centre provider.

THEHOSTINGNEWS.COM

Server Intellect, Web Hosting Provider, Debuts Affiliate Partner Program

April 10, 2008 - Provider of advanced Windows-based Microsoft Certified, shared, virtual private server (VPS) and dedicated web hosting solutions, Server Intellect, has unveiled its Affiliate Partner Program, designed to allow partners to earn commissions for referring purchasing customers.

The Affiliate Program, custom developed by the company's in-house development team, touts many impressive features such as drill down sales reporting to analyze details of each sale including Referring URL, IP Address and Browser UserAgent, complete sales and click statistics with historical reports, campaign management with page specific redirects and extended length 365 day cookie tracking.

The Server Intellect Affiliate Program also boasts a highly impressive collection of hosted graphics to promote Server Intellect coupled with an HTML Link Generation system allowing for easy Copy and Paste code with link and campaign codes already imbedded.

Eric Pratt, President and CEO of Server Intellect noted, ''Server Intellect has spent years building our world recognized brand and we have a solid reputation for high quality web hosting services. By capitalizing on our strong reputation and competitive pricing, Affiliate Partners can now reap the rewards of our years of hard work. Whether you are an experienced webmaster with resource sites, a development firm with clients who are in need of web hosting services or someone who simply knows others that may be interested in our products; you can now earn a substantial income by partnering with Server Intellect.''

Affiliate Partners can earn up to $75.00 by simply referring purchasing customers to the Server Intellect website. Affiliates have the option of receiving a check payment each month or Server Intellect service credit.

Mr. Pratt concluded, ''For years our customers and independent web promoters have been asking to partner with Server Intellect, and I am very proud to finally offer this opportunity to the world. This is an incredible development for our entire team and I am highly confident in the long-term success of this new program.''

In March, Server Intellect debuted Microsoft Windows Server 2008 on its entire line of managed Windows dedicated servers. Windows Server 2008 was released by Microsoft just last week. Server Intellect has become one of the first Windows Web hosts and Microsoft Gold Certified Partners to offer Windows Server 2008 (formerly codename Longhorn) on its dedicated servers. The updated operating system represents the most substantial upgrade of the Windows Server product line since Windows 2000 was released eight years ago.

The new operating system includes many upgrades and additions to web, security and virtualization technologies, including the newly implemented Hyper-V. The operating system also includes major expansions to Active Directory, Terminal Services, and introduces the long-awaited Windows PowerShell.

Windows Server 2008 is available in multiple editions to support the varying server needs of businesses of all sizes. Server Intellect will offer two main versions of Windows Server 2008, the Web Edition and Datacenter Edition. The web addition is offered on all dedicated servers at no additional charge, and the Datacenter Edition starts at $50/monthly. A full listing of differences between the two versions is available on Server Intellect's web site.

A subsidiary of Client Intellect, Inc., Server Intellect is a provider of advanced Windows-based Shared, VPS, Application, and Dedicated Web hosting solutions. The company was founded in 2003 and is located in Orlando, Florida.

THEHOSTINGNEWS.COM