Are you the lucky owner of an exclusive and awesome VPS.NET robot? We’re looking to put together a compilation of the “robot army” doing what they’re best at; travelling the world, and making sure work is getting done!
You can either email the photos to terry@vps.net or tweet us with a picture of them. Credit will be given, so include your name and your twitter handle if you’d like some free promotion!
UK2Group has been around since 1998, making us practically a dinosaur in this industry. And while VPS.NET is one of the youngest members of the UK2Group portfolio, we’re one of the oldest and most well established cloud hosts. With that said, we work with new startups every day, helping them successfully launch their online presence. Even if we’re not a direct member of their team, it’s still a gratifying experience to see.
If you’re sitting on a hot new idea, why not start the process? Even if you’re not in a position to take the full commitment, it’s easy to start up as a side project. VPS.NET can register the domain, and from there you’re able to build an inexpensive website using something like Drupal or WordPress with our cloud hosting option.
While we know that starting a business certainly isn’t easy, there are many motivating factors to at least start the risk. In today’s economic climate, there’s really not much to lose. If you’re not happy where you, and your business gains a little traction, things could get much better for you. If you’re in a position with advancement opportunities or job hunting, the skills you learn from launching your new online business could be those same skills that a potential employer is looking for.
So, what do you have to lose? If you’re ready to take the risk, we’re here to help.
With 6 locations throughout the world, choosing the perfect one to house your VPS can be a little over whelming. We’ve chosen 6 geographically diverse locations that allow our customers to place their VPS in the location best fitting their site and their visitors. In total, VPS.NET offers you the ability to create a Cloud VPS in 3 locations in the United States, with Atlanta, Chicago and Salt Lake City. 2 in the Europe, with London and Amsterdam and 1 in Asia, in Tokyo, Japan. Each of these locations offer their own unique benefits. We’ll explain a bit more about each location.
Atlanta, Georgia – Our Atlanta data center, located at 34 Peachtree Drive, makes for a great location for your VPS, if you have visitors located throughout the United States and in South America. Our Atlanta VPS Servers are great, as they’re just one hop away from the largest exchange point for South American traffic, Miami, Florida, guarantees minimal latency and limited amount of hops required for traffic to reach its destination.
Chicago, Illinois - Our Cloud in the windy city is located at the Dupont Fabros Technology data center, in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, a suburb just outside of Chicago. Dupont Fabros Technology (DFT) is a publicly traded real estate investment company, that specializes in building and operating data centers throughout the world. Chicago is one of the main internet hubs throughout the United States and world. Being located in the central United States, Chicago makes for a great location for your Cloud VPS, if you have visitors located in the United States and Canada. Additionally, due to minimal latency to New York City, forex traders have experienced a great amount of success using our Chicago location for their VPS. A Chicago VPS Server is a great place for any SMB looking to launch their online presence.
Salt Lake City, Utah - Dubbed the “new Silicon Valley” Salt Lake City is the location of our final cloud in the United States. Located at the C7 Data center in Provo, Utah, Salt Lake City offers tremendous connectivity to the West Coast United States, Australia and New Zealand, while also being able to serve visitors located throughout Asia.
London, England - Located in London, England at the UK2Group (our parent company) data center, our London location is one of tremendous pride. With connectivity to LINX, the 3rd largest peering exchange point, London makes for powerful hosting presence throughout Europe and the East Coast United States. If your site has traffic from throughout the world, London is one of the places you could pick for your VPS.
Haarlem, Netherlands (Amsterdam) – Our Amsterdam cloud is located inside the Evoswitch data center, which features connectivity to AMS-IX, the 2nd largest exchange point in the world. Amsterdam makes for a great alternative to London, still having the powerful connectivity to allow for fast access times throughout Europe and the United States. Not only is our Amsterdam data center fast, but it’s also entirely carbon neutral!
Tokyo, Japan – Our cloud in Tokyo is our newest location, and is housed at the Equinix data center in Tokyo, Japan. Our Tokyo location makes us one of the first cloud hosting providers to have a location in Asia, without any kind of additional surcharge. Tokyo allows you to create a VPS that has extremely fast access times throughout all of Asia while also adequately serving visitors from other parts of the world.
All of our data centers repeatedly undergo thorough quality checks to assure that we’re using the best data centers available. If you’re still not sure which data center is best for you, you can try out our ping and speed test tool at www.cloudtestfiles.net. Alternatively, you can contact us and we’d be glad to help.
Geo Hosting, what is it? That’s been a common question, along with the usual, how does it help me? How much does it cost? Where will I see the benefits?
Geo hosting is the latest revolutionary product released from VPS.NET. It’s your data, being processed and hosted in multiple locations. Based off our own market research, at this time, VPS.NET is the only hosting provider to have a product like this. It’s pretty cool – so cool that Ditlev Bredahl, a close friend of VPS.NET’s, and top 100 technology influencer in Europe, called it “the holy grail of hosting.”
What does it do that is so revolutionary? Prior to VPS.NET’s Geo Hosting product, when someone wanted to host their site in multiple locations they needed to use a CDN, which VPS.NET also sells. However, this CDN was only able to distribute static files, such as javascript files, CSS files and images. It wasn’t able to process any data like MySQL or PHP. This meant that the processing power was limited, but also left you susceptible to downtime, especially for clients not using a cloud based web host.
Geo Hosting has truly made cloud hosting what it should be. With Geo Hosting your data is stored, distributed and processed in multiple locations, meaning your risk of failure is spread across up to 6 different locations. So in order for your site to go down, all 6 locations would have to go down. How often have you ever seen 6 different data centers go down at once? If ever? What Geo Hosting has done is taken cloud hosting reliability another step closer to 100% availability, while also further increasing the scaling capabilities.
Geo Hosting is currently in trial meaning it is available FREE of charge for the first month to customers. There are of course no commitments, and we hope everyone give’s it a shot – your visitors will definitely appreciate it!
Our new 24/7 USA based technical support team has gone live. The team has been working tickets for the past month, gaining experience, and preparing for today’s launch. The phone support team will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and staffed out of our Providence, Utah location. We’ll be monitoring support volumes and be making adjustments as necessary to ensure minimal wait times for our customers. Give a try - +1-877-829-2788
Last week we ran a promotion for our Twitter only followers, allowing them to get a VPS.NET robot free of charge. The promotion was overwhelmingly positive and we found ourselves completely out of stock of robots, yet wanting to run another promotion. They’re fun!
With a little motivation from our Twitter mafia, we decided we’d go all out this time. We’re going to give you a FREE node FOR LIFE! Even better, there’s no limit to the amount of participants. This means everyone is eligible, and able to win. It’s like at the carnival; a winner every time!
We couldn’t make this too easy – we do have to somehow fund future contests. That’s not to say we made it hard. To get a free lifetime node, you simply need to make a post about your experience with VPS.NET. It can be good, bad, or even ugly — we’ll appreciate all, and we’re happy to give away a free node as a thank you for the work you put into it. Of course, there are a few more requirements.
There’s something that can be said for all of the VPS.NET staff – we’re addicted to Apple products. Perhaps it’s their oh so sexy design, the superior build quality or their ease of use; whatever it is, if it’s Apple, we have to have it. We also know that some of our customers fall into the same boat us, being addicted to Apple, and requiring constant access to monitor their business. So, why not share some of our favorite apps?
iSSH – Definitely the favorite SSH client for use on the iPad, though it does come with a price tag of $9.99. The best part about it, is the easy to use cut and paste option. It sounds a little funny to be doing cut and pasting in SSH, but we’ve found it to be quite useful.
NiceTrace – Diagnosing network issues is a breeze with NiceTrace. It gives you constantly updating trace route information, allowing you see where any delays might be.
CamCard – We often find ourselves being the spotlight of conferences, having business cards literally thrown our way. It sometimes can get a little overwhelming. CamCard definitely makes it easy to keep track of business cards, having an easy to use scan utility, and it also exports to Excel files which is a big help. Things like the LinkedIn integration are very cool too.
Data Usage – The app doesn’t do much besides monitor your data usage, but lets not downplay the importance of that. Going above your monthly limits can be quite expensive. It has a number of notification methods that can be used to alert you when you reach pre-defined thresholds and if you go over your monthly limit.
ShoeBoxed – We’ve recommended this app before, but I can’t recommend it enough. I’m terrible at keeping track of receipts, making it quite difficult to get reimbursed for business expenses when away for conferences and meetings. ShoeBoxed is awesome, as all you need to do is scan in the receipt and it does the rest for you. It can even export to an excel spreadsheet, if you need it to. Fear Accounting no more!
Smart Keyboard – The biggest complaint we hear in the office on the iPad is the keyboard especially when being compared to Android. Smart Keyboard has the same great predictive text tools as Android, and at $1.99, it isn’t too much of a risk if the default keyboard annoys you.
Fuze Meeting – On the run yet have a meeting scheduled? Fuze Meeting is by far the best meeting app for the iPad. Not only are you able to attend meetings, but you can even contribute outside documents, like keynote presentations. If you’re real sly, you might be able to get way with attending a meeting while at the beach, without the boss knowing you’re not even at your desk.
Pulse – Burnout is awful; one of the easiest ways we avoid it is by scheduling a few breaks to read the news, rejuvenating ourselves a bit. Pulse is definitely the favorite reading tool, allowing you to bring any news source necessary, as long as they have a RSS feed. With sharing capabilities on Twitter and Facebook, and allowing you to save articles to Instapaper, it’s the office favorite.
There are many other great tools out there – feel free to share your own! You might even see us using them at the next opportunity.
The VPS.NET team has been in Utah, the location of our corporate office, this week. Yesterday we were able to tour the datacenter hosting our SLC A-F clouds, and for your viewing pleasure, we snapped a few quick photos.
“The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.”
— Bill Gates
All of us here at VPS.NET have been inspired by the work of Steve Jobs; he was a true visionary with exemplary leadership skills — traits which all of us hope to acquire throughout life. While the world mourns his untimely death, looking back at some of his most memorable reveals a man who was determined to change the world for the better. Steve Jobs will not only be missed as a innovator but also for the great person he was.
Our friends at UK2Group put together a compilation shortly after his resignation in August, starting with the demo of the Apple Macintosh in 1984 and ending with the Apple iPad keynote in January 2010. It’s a beautiful tribute for a man who touched us all, and especially for those who had the pleasure of using an Apple product.
May his vision continue to inspire us all.
This morning we held our first ever formal town hall chat, which was completely open public. We went into not really knowing what to expect — was anyone even going to show up? We knew there were inherent risks, especially making it completely open to the public, but we also believe in complete transparency. Thankfully the town hall went off nearly without a hitch; in fact, the biggest struggle we faced was that the chat room was entirely filled before the town hall was even scheduled to start.
Out of this town hall, the biggest story was the announcement of USA based phone sales and support, which will be available to all customers free of charge later this month. Some of our technicians have already jumped into the ticket queues, so it’s possible you’ve already had a quick chat with them. We will have toll free numbers for both USA and UK based customers when the system goes live. We hope that our customers find that phone support to be a pleasant and helpful experience and we anticipate hearing feedback from our customers.
Looking back at the town hall, it should be considered a great success, drawing in over 100 guests, only limited to that due to the chat room. Taking away the experience, there’s a few things we can do it in the future… and there will be future town halls!
