Green Retrofitting: Corporate Responsibility That Makes Sense

Yesterday, I wrote about a new direction for ServInt’s social media outreach. Basically, I explained that a lot of companies, ServInt included, spend too much time talking about themselves and not enough time talking about their customers. I made a new rule saying that we’d talk more about you .

So, naturally, I’m going to kick that off by talking about us .

Earth Week 2010 is coming to a close and as such I thought it appropriate to reflect on a few of our specific accomplishments in green technology. In our more than 15 year history, we’ve been relatively silent trailblazers. We are pioneers in dedicated and VPS hosting and we were one of the first hosts to actively work on improving inefficient and environmentally troubling urban infrastructure. With that being said, there are some unique challenges that we face precisely because of our status as trailblazers.

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That’s Not All Folks!

ServInt LA was a huge undertaking, the time, energy, and resources required to replicate the very complex and efficient series of East Coast data centers in the West can’t be discounted. ServInt LA is a new milestone in the history of one of the best and most experienced webhosting companies in the world. I can’t express just how proud I am of everyone here and all the hard work they’ve done.

However, that’s not all that happened on November 10th. Our West Coast expansion in Los Angeles also enabled us to begin work on what we hope will be the foundation of an entirely new series of products and services that ServInt can embark on in the future.

So…What else is new?

I’m referring to two things specifically. The first is a new cross-country pipe that augments a network directly connecting all of our data centers with one another, both those in LA and our existing data centers in Virginia and the District of Columbia (ServInt DC). The second is a brand new control panel from our friends at Parallels that we are helping them launch, and it looks very compelling.

What does that mean for ServInt customers and potential clients? It means that soon, from an infrastructural standpoint, we’ll be prepared to launch a myriad of services designed to help you run your business more efficiently. Some of the projects we’re investigating are cross-country VPS back-ups, a form of near-realtime cross-country mirroring between servers, and a new take on the traditional cloud storage solution.

Our goal, in no uncertain terms, is to further prove that ServInt is the only host you’ll ever need.

Opening the door to the Newbies Among Us

On Tuesday, Parallels also released a brand new control panel, Parallels Small Business Panel, out into the wild. We have a long history of partnership with Parallels and are excited to be one of the very first providers to offer Small Business Panel.

The idea behind the product is simple, existing control panels are not novice-friendly. There’s a tremendous learning curve, but Small Business Panel is designed to have all of the power and flexibility of a traditional control panel such as cPanel or Parallels Plesk and remove as much unnecessary complexity as possible.

By using best use case scenarios and by hiding rarely used advanced settings, Small Business Panel is designed to make running a site considerably easier for those who aren’t used to the intricacies of a traditional control panel. It also incorporates a sophisticated user profile system that allows the webmaster to delegate certain tasks to certain users and keep sensitive access and information accessible to authorized users only.

I had the chance to check out a beta of Small Business Panel earlier this year and I came away impressed. While it’s still early in it’s lifespan, I’m happy we’ve included it as an entry level option to our other terrific control panel selections, namely cPanel and Plesk.

With that being said, we’d love to hear what you guys think? Talk to us in the comments, in our customer forums, on Twitter, or on Facebook!

VPS: 6 years On All 6 Cylinders

In all the hullabaloo of HostingCon events this week, I nearly forgot that yesterday was the 6-year anniversary of ServInt’s VPS offerings. Passing that landmark day there was fitting. A lot of the folks we partnered with to create our VPS products were there, particularly Parallels, and it’s an excellent reminder of just how far we’ve come as a provider as well as a company.

ServInt has always considered itself a managed hosting provider first, with the vehicles we actually use to deliver those services an important concern, but ultimately just a technological envelope. We learned very early on that the most important part of a company is its people and we’ve been really, really lucky since then with our efforts to attract great people. VPS technology, and more specifically Virtuozzo, has been very good to us and we’ve been able to create powerful, unique products that have evolved immensely over the years.

There are a lot of really great things happening in hosting right now. We now have viable, virtualized alternatives to dedicated servers such as our own SuperVPS line, pairing the speed and control expected from a dedicated box with the reliability and scalability of a VPS. Cloud is on the horizon in some form or another, promising new ways to deliver content and store data and with it will come a new wave of entrepreneurship and a pay-as-you-go business model that is fueling a new generation of startups and industry leaders. A lot of this hasn’t come to fruition but it will be great to be a part of this industry as we all figure it out.

6 years ago, we had no idea what the industry would hold for us. Who would have thought that an online bookstore would become one of the most progressive cloud storage companies in the world, or that a small Russian software development firm would build the technological backbone of our most popular product?

So in 2015, when we’re driving our flying cars to work and scarfing down Jetsons-style breakfast tablets, who knows what will be fueling the internet?

I for one, can’t wait to find out!