Happy birthday to us: ServInt turns 16!

Ladies and gents, today is ServInt’s Sweet Sixteen!

It’s amazing to think how far this company has come. We’ve been through a lot, and we’ve seen our industry — as well as the Internet as a whole — change dramatically over the past decade and a half.

In just 16 years, the Internet has become the default way to do business. Even so, explaining the concept in plain English can be difficult. The Internet is, in a lot of ways, an incredibly abstract idea. It is quite literally everywhere all the time; that’s a paradigm that can be tough to condense in a sentence or two.

Last week, the video embedded below made the rounds across the Internet. It reminded me of how hard it can be — collectively I mean — to wrap our heads around an idea as vast as the Internet.

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Lessons Learned, Or How To Stop Worrying and Throw a Contest

Help us name our new training facility! Click here to submit a new name on our Facebook page! Read below for more information.

Earlier this week, we received a Cease and Desist letter from Kerstein, Coren & Lichtenstein LLP, a law firm representing The Learning Annex.

In a recent press release, we announced the doubling in size of our Managed Services Team and the opening of our new Network Operations Center. We also, however, mentioned the opening of a new training facility adjacent to the new NOC. This facility was designed to train new and existing employees on our MST’s KickStart team the latest and greatest web technologies that our clients use everyday. We dubbed this new facility the “learning annex” for two key reasons, because it was an annex of our existing campus, and because the newest members of our MST were going to learn stuff there.

We were unaware that there was a company doing business as The Learning Annex, and we will happily comply with their Cease and Desist letter by changing the name of our facility. It was, as the kids say, “our bad.”

ServInt respects intellectual property.  We ourselves have a powerful brand that we have to protect, and we certainly didn’t mean to infringe on any trademarks of any kind.

With that out of the way, let’s move onto the important stuff. When we decided to change the name of the facility, we first opened it up to our staff. What follows is a short list of ACTUAL name submissions for our facility:

• The Caffeine Lounge
• The Boom Boom Room
• The Learny Place
• The Holodeck
• The Ensmartening Room
• The Place Next to the Main Place Where We Teach You Stuff

While I might personally want to hear someone say “I got my KickStart in the Boom Boom Room!”, we thought we’d leave the final decision to our fans. So, without further ado…

We want YOU to name our new training facility/warehouse/whatever!

Click Here to go to ServInt’s Facebook page and submit a name for our new facility! If you haven’t ‘Liked’ ServInt on Facebook yet, you’ll see the sign up form up front and center. If you already ‘Like’ ServInt (and why wouldn’t you?) just click on the Signup Form Tab up top!

We’ll collect our favorites, put together a short poll, and give you the opportunity to vote on them! And don’t worry, we won’t spam you either.

The winning name will appear on a new series of T-Shirts highlighting our KickStart team and the new facility. The individual who proposed the winning name will receive a t-shirt, as well as some assorted ServInt swag and a big thank you from our team!

ServInt will also make a donation in your name to the Literacy Volunteers of America’s adult education services in the District of Columbia. The LVA is a non-profit organization serving Washington, D.C. They offer free tutoring to adults who seek to improve their literacy skills as well as English as a second language (ESL) courses for our growing immigrant community.

A few simple rules:

• The deadline for submissions is January 6th. We’ll have names up for a vote on January 10th.
• Please keep the names family-friendly and inoffensive, that means nothing racist, nothing sexist — and keep religion and politics out of it, please.
• The name cannot use any existing trademarks. Come on guys, we don’t need to deal with this twice.
• Be creative and have fun!

What are you waiting for? Let’s get started!

ServInt Has Your Golden Ticket! Get Ready for VaultPress on ServInt!

At ServInt, we have thousands of clients who rely on WordPress software to run their business. They’re attracted to its simplicity, its ubiquity, and the myriad of plugins available to scratch nearly any “feature-itch” imaginable. Plus, with our free nightly backups, they have a little extra peace of mind.

Well, that peace of mind just grew 11-fold.

Today, we’re proud to announce that ServInt is one of the exclusive launch partners for VaultPress, the incredible backup and security service developed by Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com. Automattic has granted us access to a “Golden Ticket Machine” enabling us to offer all of our clients who are using WordPress access to the VaultPress beta!

VaultPress is a continuous security and backup system that works in real-time to dynamically backup every post, tag, folder, and font change you can make in WordPress. It even picks up on things that WordPress doesn’t, such as files you’ve added via FTP.

VaultPress security monitoring scans uploads, plugins, and themes and alerts you when it detects potential security issues. VaultPress doesn’t just make one backup, either, it goes to 11. Combine that with ServInt’s backup system, and you have 12 distinct backups (though you lose out on the Spinal Tap reference). This level of redundancy virtually ensures you’ll have all your data, all the time.*

Installation? Easy. VaultPress installs just like any other WordPress plugin.

The cost? ServInt will be extending VaultPress’ beta discount to all interested clients, $15 a month for the Basic Level, $40 a month for the Premium Level.

What are you waiting for? Click here to go to ServInt’s Customer Portal and request a Golden Ticket now!

If you aren’t using WordPress, don’t worry. At ServInt, ALL of our VPS, SuperVPS, and Solo Series clients have access to our incremental backup system which offers daily backups for exactly ZERO dollars. Whether it’s your personal computer at home, the critical documents you have at work, or the website living comfortably on your server, backing up your data is an absolute necessity and at ServInt, we make it easy.

For the thousands of ServInt clients who rely on WordPress to run their business, well, now it’s even easier!

So get your Golden Ticket now!

*Unless there’s a robot uprising or zombie infection. ServInt and VaultPress
can’t really help you there.

Explaining ServInt’s New KickStart Team

When I started at ServInt more than six years ago, one of the first lessons I learned was just how critical first impressions were to the customer experience. ServInt’s new Kickstart Team, a division of our Managed Services Team, is committed to making hosting a website as painless a process as possible. Here’s a little background on who we are and why we do what we do.

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Sinking A Birdie With Sports by Brooks: A ServInt Success Story

Generally speaking, sports reporting tends to focus on stats, facts, and predictions.

Sure, there are always exceptions. There are plenty of human interest stories on doping and cheating; but tune into ESPN at any given hour and you’re more likely to get a breakdown of a particular team’s performance than you are the juicy gossip behind the stars themselves.

So its no surprise that Brooks Melchoir, the man behind SPORTSbyBROOKS, found a lucrative niche in sports gossip reporting.

Like all of us, professional athletes have complex motivations for doing what they do, they straddle a line between performing for themselves and performing for the adulation of fans. Because they are so often larger than life, the mistakes they make tend to be larger than life, too.

So, when SPORTSbyBROOKS broke the now infamous Tiger Woods story over Thanksgiving weekend in November of last year, his already incredibly popular site was in trouble.

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ServInt: We Support Our Local Police!

A few days ago, ServInt made a donation to the Fairfax County Police Department as a token of our appreciation for all of their hard work. ServInt’s founder, Reed Caldwell, is the son of a police officer and has made respect and admiration for all public servants a part of what ServInt is culturally.

Perhaps more than anything else, ServInt is and has always been a people-driven company. From our ongoing efforts (see here, here, and here) to help those affected by the earthquake in Haiti, to our environmental work to further minimize our effect on climate change, we’re a company that cares about people.

How do you help out in your community? Let us know in the comments, on our Facebook page, and on Twitter!

What Can Buzz Lightyear Teach Us About Backing Up?

If your data is your livelihood, watch this and learn about the time Toy Story 2 disappeared:

It’s a teaser for a longer story on the Toy Story 2 DVD, which I watched with my son this weekend. It starts:

“When making a film like Toy Story 2, we use a bunch of UNIX and Linux machines. On those kinds of machines there’s a command, RM*, that removes everything on the filesystem as fast as it can.”

“Somebody had run RM* on the drive where all the Toy Story 2 files were kept, and things just started to disappear.”

After the teaser, the story goes on to describe how their backups for the past two months had been corrupt, and that the work on the film from the past two years was just gone. Freaking out, they started putting together a plan to push the film back an entire year to try to keep from having to scrap it altogether.

But Galyn Susman, visual arts director at Pixar, came to the rescue. She had just had a baby, and in order to spend time with her newborn had set up a system she could work on from home. She brought with her a copy of the film. The ONLY copy of the film.

My wife calls this story a lesson about how cool new moms are. I say it’s a reminder that if your data is important you can never have enough backups.

Imagine that for moment. Imagine everything you had worked for, months even years worth of data, literally disappearing in front of you. This happens to countless people everyday and it really underscores the fragility of our data. A few unfortunate keystrokes and Pixar, one of the most respected and lucrative animation studios in the world, nearly lost a Golden Globe winning film to the ether.

At ServInt we back up our clients’ files for free, automatically, on every product we sell on our website. Our backup service is awesome – it is reliable and robust and I think it’s an Industry-leading service. But if anybody tells you that ANY backup is 100% reliable 100% of the time, call them a liar and run away from them immediately.

If your data is critical to your livelihood, you can NEVER have enough backups. Go ask Pixar. Then go watch Toy Story 2 or some other Pixar movie. They are all awesome – and at least one survived to be seen because of backups.

What Do ServInt Employees Do For “Kicks”?

The image to the left is of a ServInt-sponsored soccer team, complete with ServInt T-shirts. The lovely lady upfront and to the left is none other than ServInt’s own Leslie Molina, our Controller (a bigger picture is available at the bottom of this post).

A lot of folks have an image of webhosting companies being filled with well-caffeinated geeks 24/7.

That image, while surprisingly accurate, isn’t the whole picture. Sure, we have a game room in our Northern Virginia headquarters, complete with a well equipped Denon and Polk audio system, a Sony PS3, and a Nintendo Wii with comfy couches for vegging out. The game room gives the support staff based out of that location a place to relax and unwind when they need to take a break and it gives us a great location for birthdays, anniversaries, and many other excuses to eat cake.

But cake or not, ServInt has made employee wellness a prime initiative company-wide since its founding in 1995. In order to promote a healthy lifestyle (and to help work off said cake), ServInt even offers bonuses to employees who hit the gym consistently over the course of a year!

We also support activities outside of work that promote the wellness our staff, the soccer team pictured above and below is a fine example of that. Here are a couple more great pictures of ServInt’s sponsored soccer team prepping before a game.

Got any work-sponsored extracurricular activities that rival ours? Let us know in the comments, on Facebook, or on Twitter!

ServInt Clients – Tell Us Your Story!

Earlier this year, we ventured out to visit a few clients to learn more about their businesses and their presence online. We had a great time and had the privilege to see and hear some incredible stories in the process. From serial entrepreneurs working from home to businesses that have evolved into web companies after decades offline, these stories were inspiring and enlightening. We came away from the experience with an immense respect for all of those who devote their time to running a successful business online.

Well, we want to hear more!

Do you think your business has a story worth telling? Let us know! The most compelling stories will get a personal visit and an interview from one of us here at ServInt and exposure on ServInt.net, our Facebook page, Twitter, and of course right here on this blog!

Throughout this week, we’ll be posting a few of those stories right here on The ServInt Source so make sure to check it out!

Send us a quick email here describing what your business is, does, or aspires to do and you may be the next success story on ServInt.net!

Simple Station, Mediacore, and the Engine Behind Indie Music for Haiti

We at Simple Station are really excited to have partnered with ServInt and Asparagus Media on the Indie Music for Haiti (IMFH) project. It was an great opportunity for us to help the cause in a way that fit a core principle of our business: design for social impact.

In the first team meeting, it was clear we wanted to be able to start dialog around music and videos. Not only was it important to us to be able to post music and allow users to comment, but users should also be able to submit their own music for consideration. In order for the best content to float to the top, users need to be able to rate content, and the number times each song was played had to be tracked as well. To manage all this data would require a robust administrative back-end that was still simple and painless to use, so Fritz and his team at Asparagus Media could manage the whole operation without any trouble..

We chose to base the whole project around the MediaCore Open Source Audio/Video CMS. We built MediaCore over the last year, and have been using it in production for a number of different client projects. It’s got a really sleek and very configurable presentation to the user and, for administrators, it is pretty much a dream management tool. It is built on top of Python and uses the TurboGears2 and Pylons frameworks for the heavy lifting. We deployed it on a CentOS, Apache and MySQL stack in just an hour. We did have to spend some time in customizing the platform to allow Youtube and Vimeo URL’s to be submitted, but that was something that we had been wanting to do for a while, so it fit right in with our development schedule. The really fun part was customizing the whole thing to fit the visual theme our team wanted to promote.

From a design perspective we wanted to keep things pretty simple and minimal, while allowing the words and the music to do the talking. We chose a raw, hand-drawn typeface for the official logo, and selected a palette based on earth-tones to convey the grassroots feeling we were looking for. You’ll notice photos from the kind folks at Voice for Haiti in the background, which we posterized and worked in gently. One thing we really wanted to avoid was screaming at users, or conveying really graphical pictures of the gravity of the situation in Haiti. While we didn’t want to make light of the situation, we also didn’t want to twist any arms in forcing donations by putting people in desperate need on display. The mission of the site should speak to the need for donations, people know what happened in Haiti, and we hope that the design conveys a sense of peace and unity in a way other sites perhaps are missing. Imagine the concept of a site for Indie artists whose music is inspiring people to donate to people in need. Innovative concepts like this one should inspire and illumine thought, not depress it.

The whole project was officially launched last week. ServInt generously has provided the hosting, their team has been great to work with, and I can’t say enough good things about Fritz and his team over at Asparagus Media. Fritz single-handedly worked his way through a lot of the content issues on the site, and when we caught a few legal issues, he reached out to a few of his contacts and managed to get some great legal advice pulled together for the Terms of Service for free at the last moment. Great job all round and a resounding applause for the Indie Music for Haiti team.

Interested in using MediaCore for your project?

MediaCore is free and open source under the GPLv3 license! Try the demo and download the complete source.

We are planning a major release (0.8) with a vastly improved frontend, more flexible file management and improved accessibility for disabled users. The release is planned for mid-April, and if you’re interested you can sign up for email release notifications.

If you are a developer or designer feel free to get in touch with us, and we’d be happy to work with you in getting MediaCore rolling for you.

We’re also looking for volunteers to contribute to the MediaCore Open Source project. We are looking for help with marketing, promotion, and development. If you are interested please email jobs@simplestation.com.

Stuart Bowness is the Founder, Creative Director, and Lead Interface Designer for Simple Station.

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