I have always been a huge fan of website mascots, they are not just great marketing tool, but also a fantastic way for people to relate to their provider, plus for us, it’s a fun way to express ideas by utilizing the mascot, you can create cartoons, explanatory graphics, etc .. much nicer than plain text and a chart.
With that in mind, we decided to create one for VPS.NET .. here is it’s story.
We had this idea of a nice design representing the VPS Cloud, an array of nodes (Hypervisors & Data) being worked on by little men, such a construction site .. that idea was fun, but quickly we realized that was the wrong message, a “construction site” might lead people to perceive the cloud as still “under construction” .. there fore, an “unfinished” product… not the message we wish to relay.
While we all know that we will always be working on the VPS Cloud, to create new features and improve on it’s specs, we wanted a more mature image, so instead of a construction site with little men, we went for a finished VPS Cloud type setup with little robots maintaining it. 
The next task was, what kind of robot ?, since the VPS Cloud is an omnidirectional object, the robot will need to move in all 3 axis (X,Y,Z), so we did away with legs and gave him a propulsion system that allows him to hover and fly anywhere, second, since he needs to receive data in real time from the Cloud Control, he got an antenna, and last, due to the complexity of tasks and maintenance he must perform, a tool-belt and flexible arms were added …
This was the first sketch of the mascot on the white board (proud to say I did it myself.. hehe):
We where quite pleased with it, so the go ahead was given for Everaldo (outstanding Brazilian artist who is working here in the UK office with us on this and other projects)to clean it up and vectorize it .. and in no time, he had a final design that blew us all away:
What do you guys/gals think ? we quite love it, and the best part is we dont believe we are plagiarizing anybody else, also, the idea will be we will have multiple color and configurations of the robot for different tasks.
We are now trying to come up with a name for this one, as he will be the default mascot, so please, if you have any suggestions, do post them here
No suggestions ? :p
floccu -> from “cirrus floccus”, a type of cloud; from latin which means “cluster”. Ain’t it cool?. Greetings!.
Name him Dan!
Nube. Clouds are nubes in Spanish, but I reckon Nube sounds techy and cool in English, or noob, same sound, even looks and sounds like lube, “well oiled”.
Instead of newbie, a Nuby, a more experienced, but not yet fully trained Nube.
It can be a verb too, nubed… “Just gonna nube that server”. A Nube could spawn Nublets, or nuboids to go fix stuff… If a server dies, and gets fixed, it coud be said to have been “nubbed”. “Nubing”, fixing stuff in less than 60 seconds…
uNube, self-managed, Nubed, managed server, ta-da!
Enough! I think I’m putting too much though into this!
hehe, that was a great one Andy
someone suggested to call him “404″ – I liked that idea
Dave. I always like the name Dave.
Or Hal..
Maybe it’s me but I can’t think of ‘dave’ without the League of Gentleman “Hello Dave!” going round in my head. I think this could cause trouble in the office…
Google “Hello Dave” if you’re curious to see what I’m on about ..
Zinky
Jiggabyte
I’d like to call him Vee.
His full name could be Vee-Pee-Ess, shortened to Vee of course
‘fix-it’ like in batteries not included :]
How about naming it Yoyo?
veepsy
or veepse
He has an eerie resemblance to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_the_Paranoid_Android
You think he looks like Marvin ?… I dont see it :p
Well, I do. He’s… a robot :-p He could be Marvin’s geeky nephew.
wibble
Yookaytoo (UK2) might be okay and at least it’s gender neutral (I note in all your blurb, not surprisingly, perhaps, you have decided that your mascot is to be male!)
I like the name Vee-Pee-Ess. Original. It was nice to read how it all came together. Thanks!
Noelle, funny you mention the gender, we where discussing it a few days back how we wish to incorporate a few female versions into our robots
We have the “standard” grey robot as listed here as the main character, but we decided to actually grow the mascots into a small community of different people, we have manager robots, help robots, slacker robots ..
We have tested a few sketches with female versions, but have not “yet” perfected them, but you can be sure they will be some
How about just plain “Victor” which represents ‘V’ in the phonetic alphabet. When his girlfiriend arrives she could be “Victoria”.