Today, PEER 1 officially launched FirstCall Support™, a guarantee to address customer questions and resolve issues within their first call to PEER 1. The company soft launched FirstCall Support™ back in November 2008 for our Managed Hosting customers. The goal is is getting any technical issues resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible for customers, so that they can focus on what’s most important, running their business.

Also, you may have noticed that PEER 1 recently updated its web site look and feel. The new layout is designed to be more user-friendly and to clearly distinguish between all three lines of PEER 1’s IT hosting solutions: Managed Hosting, Dedicated Hosting (through SeverBeach), and Co-location. It also integrates more closely with the ServerBeach web site, including tabbed browsing between the two. The ServerBeach site is also currently going through a re-design, so you’ll be seeing a new look there very shortly.

Click here to read the official PEER 1 annoucement.

PEER 1 and ServerBeach has been featured on HostReview.com’s  monthly Best Web Hosting Awards list for November 2008. PEER 1 ranked No. 1 in the “Best Managed Hosting Service” category, and ServerBeach is listed both as No. 6 in the “The Fastest Growing Company” category and as No. 9 in the “Best Dedicated Server Package” category.

The Best Managed Hosting Service award identifies companies with best performance through the last month, weighing the overall presence of the company and equipment procurement, provisioning and installation, and network monitoring and management capabilities.

Fastest Growing awards showcase fast-moving companies that are increasing quickly in size and prestige.

Best Dedicated Server Package awards highlights companies that offer outstanding performance and value for dedicated servers, considering the price, technology, reliability and overall performance of the hosting company.

We are very happy to have received these awards and thank our customers for helping us to achieve them!

PEER 1 was listed today in a Vancouver Sun article for being one of the “Top 100 Fastest Growing Publicly-Traded Companies.“  Of the 50 businesses listed, PEER 1 ranked #39.

Since 1999, PEER 1 has grown in to a highly respected, profitable organization with over 300 employees in the United States and Canada. Our unique combination of high touch and high performance is a key reason why many businesses choose PEER 1 as their preferred IT infrastructure provider.

You can read the full article here: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/features/businessbc/index.html

Last week at the Austin Game Developers Conference PEER1 employees spoke with attendees on just how much latency kills when it comes to gaming. What a coincidence! PEER1 just so happened to have a booth at the conference offering “Latency Kills” packages geared towards hardcore gaming providers, publishers, and developers. GREAT!

The conference turn out was even bigger than last year, which PEER1 also attended. There were many great companies exhibiting their products and we all made our rounds to introduce ourselves to each and every one of them, learning about their business and products at the same time.

The 2-day conference was a complete success and we certainly look forward to attending next year seeing many familiar faces, while at the same time making many new friends.

You can view our pictures taken from the conference at any of these websites: PEER1 on FaceBook, PEER1 Community, Flickr, or PEER1 on MySpace.

PEER 1 will host a free webinar with partners OnDemand Solutions and Mural Ventures, Tuesday, June 24 at 2 p.m. EDT. In this first-time event, industry experts will share their extensive experience and innovative methodologies that have helped ISVs build successful and profitable Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Attendees will learn how to escape pitfalls that have hobbled other ISVs, potentially saving their businesses thousands of dollars.

SaaS is here to stay, with an estimated 25 percent of all software delivered in the next few years expected to be SaaS, according to Gartner projections. As successful SaaS companies know, in order to take advantage of the considerable benefits of this delivery method you must run your company in a completely new and different way rather than rely on the traditional methods. This webinar will help companies avoid many of the more common mistakes.

What: Free webinar on “The Seven Deadly Mistakes of ISV SaaS Offerings,” which include:

• Cannibalizing your current revenue by providing your existing offering to the same customers
• Underestimating the power of and need for customer service in the SaaS model
• Offering free trials that don’t convert prospects to customers
• Underestimating the importance of web-centricity for marketing, sales and support

Who: Featured speakers

• Mike Jalonen, CEO, OnDemand Solutions
• Jeff Hagins, Partner and CTO, Mural Ventures
• Robert Miggins, Vice President of Business Development, PEER 1

When: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 – 2:00 p.m. Eastern

To Attend: For more information and registration visit http://www.bulldogsolutions.net/Peer1/PER06242008/frmRegistration.aspx?bdls=15176

“We are very pleased to be offering this valuable webinar along with our partners,” said Robert Miggins, vice president of business development for PEER 1. “Through our experiences we have found there are many reoccurring key issues that business owners and developers alike are unaware of. Through this presentation we will give listeners practical steps and insight to address these issues and in turn increase customer reach and satisfaction.”

About PEER 1
PEER 1, a leading online IT infrastructure provider, believes in the limitless opportunity of the Internet and the business growth and continuity it provides for its more than 10,000 customers. PEER 1 delivers highly scalable managed hosting and co-location solutions to ensure customers’ online presence is always fast, always available. Since 1999, PEER 1 has grown to include data centers and network points of presence in 17 major cities across North America and Europe. Serving a variety of companies, PEER 1 offers solutions that grow through every stage of web commerce, regardless of company size. The company’s headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada and the stock is traded on the TSX under the symbol PIX. For more information visit: http://www.peer1.com.

About ODS
OnDemand Solutions provides business and technical services to established and startup organizations who are already using, or who are looking to use, the OnDemand or “Software as a Service” (SaaS) delivery model. Our services and best practices are designed to rapidly develop and launch new OnDemand and SaaS businesses, accelerate growth for organizations with a current SaaS offering, and assist independent software vendors (ISVs) to convert from a perpetual license model to a subscription revenue model.

About Mural Ventures
Mural Consulting is a specialized team of Software-as-a-Service experts. We work with ISVs and Service Providers to create SaaS strategies that drive real actions, and then execute those actions side-by-side with our clients. We deliver business success in the fast-changing, competitive SaaS environment. Mural has conducted over 300 executive SaaS business design sessions globally. From that experience, we’ve assembled 8 Key Success Factors for SaaS success. These KSFs form the foundation for all of our strategy and execution services.

PEER 1 Growing Pains Episode 3 – ‘100% Downtime’.

Janet is at Todd’s bedside in the hospital while he lies in a coma. She speaks to him and he appears to be responding, until things get unplugged…

PEER 1 will be sponsoring Pangea Day by supplying free managed hosting services, systems architecture, database failover services, and on-site, day-of-event technical support for the Pangea Day IT network.

On May 10, 2008, Pangea Day will use the power of film to help bring the world together to share a unique experience through live broadcast venues in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro and thousands of self-organized events planned in over 100 countries.

The Pangea Day event will feature around 24 short films and includes a number of exceptional speakers and musical performers, such as Queen Noor of Jordan and Iranian rock phenomenon Hypernova.

Pangea Day was created in 2006 when documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize, at the Technology Entertainment Design conference in California. The prize aims to grant the winner a ‘wish to change the world,’ and Noujaim chose to use film to bring the world together.

PEER 1 is sponsoring the first-ever Structure 08, presented by GigaOM. Focusing on the innovations of internet infrastructure, the conference will bring together the most influential leaders of the industry at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on June 25, 2008.

PEER 1 will host a private press event as well as a private VIP dinner, hosted by Om Malik while at the conference. Presented by GigaOM, Structure 08 is a significant one-day event that will sort through the emerging and disruptive computing technologies which are now becoming the building blocks for the next generation of the Internet. The conference will cover and examine many topics of technology innovations, such as virtualization, SaaS and cloud computing, associated with the current Internet infrastructure build out and the companies leading the way.

PEER 1 is committed to offering the smartest, most reliable solutions for its customers, engaging in every stage of IT infrastructure development while providing the needed platform for innovation.

Did you know that PEER 1 is one of the only hosting providers to offer all three types of web hosting under one roof; co-location, self-managed and managed hosting? All of these solutions are backed by PEER 1’s fully redundant network that delivers high performance bandwidth through 15 state-of-the-art data centers and 17 points-of-presence (POPs) across North America.

The full conference web site is available at http://www.structureconf.com.

While I am a Linux girl at heart, I am constantly watching and reading up on Microsoft and it’s direction – for better and worse. By no means am I against Microsoft or any of it’s products and today, I am watching them even closer after reading an article posted on CNET yesterday titled, “Microsoft: Web at the center, not PC“.

Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has the right idea, the right focus, and I’m very curious to know if his ideas and focus are being backed by the rest of the company. Some argue that this is a little too late in the game for them, but hey..at least they’re keeping themselves in the game, right?

He starts by preparing a memo to be sent to the employees -

“Over the past 10 years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the Web is at the center of our experiences–experiences delivered not just through the browser but also through many different devices including PCs, phones, media players, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions, cars, and more.”

Further, Ozzie outlines three principles to guide the company in this new era. Chief among those is the notion that “the Web is the hub of our social mesh and our device mesh.” The notion of a Mesh is one that Ozzie has been working on for some time and has culminated in the Live Mesh service that Microsoft detailed on Tuesday. He states that this transformation has been quite the challenge for Microsoft to embrace.

“More than two years ago when I wrote the memo entitled The Internet Services Disruption, much of the company was still focused on bringing our Office 2007 and Vista products to market,” Ozzie said. “Aside from MSN, IE/IIS and our tools groups, it was truly ’software’, not ’services’, that was top of mind.”

But, he said, “since then, we’ve made tremendous progress in our expansion toward ’software+services’–from the long-term quests we’ve undertaken and customer scenarios we now envision, to the great services and service-enhanced software we’ve begun to bring to market, and the amazing projects at various stages within our development pipeline.”

This memo gives us a look inside of the mind of Ray Ozzie and hopefully it’ll be spread through the company and embraced. This article is definitely worth the read.

We have announced the winner of our Growing Pains Free Hosting Contest, with a prize of 12 months of free managed hosting, valued at more than $2400.00!

Tim Mateosian, co-founder of Big Room Studios which is headquartered in Portland, Maine, has won a managed hosting server that includes 1 TB of monthly data transfer and bi-weekly vulnerability scans. PEER 1 received more than 1,000 online entries from viewers of the premier episode of “Growing Pains,” the company’s humorous video-short series.

Big Room Studios specializes in offering combined online services – Web and Print Design, Custom Web Development, Website Implementations using their BRS Core Framework, IT Support and Consulting. Started in 2002 by Mateosian and his brother, the company now has clients throughout North America and the UK.

Mateosian has been a PEER 1 customer for almost six years now and has worked in the hosting industry for more than 10 years, when he started as a hosting reseller. The business grew to include advanced web solutions when his brother, a talented programmer, joined and created a web framework for the firm. PEER 1’s self-managed hosting is the ideal solution for this kind of programming, since the Mateosian brothers require more control over the server environment in order to run their web solutions.

Mateosian was very excited when he heard the news of winning and stated that the timing couldn’t be better! Not to mention, he’s never won anything before!

PEER 1 will be holding a new contest, calling for contestants to create and upload their own “growing pains” video, in conjunction with the upcoming second episode of “Growing Pains” due out in May.