As an exclusive Microsoft Network Partner, PEER 1 invites you to join the new Microsoft BizSpark, a new program for Startups. Microsoft knows that today’s most promising Startups are tomorrow’s most successful businesses, and wants to ignite the process. With Microsoft BizSpark, Microsoft encourages you to innovate by giving you fast and easy access to its current, full-featured development tools and platform technologies.

Find out how choosing PEER 1 as your BizSpark Hosting Provider can benefit you today!

Read the full details here: http://www.peer1.com/hosting/bizspark.php

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!

Today PEER 1 launched the new Partner Network, for all its lines of business – co-lo, managed hosting and ServerBeach self-managed – and means that we can work even more closely with our partners and their clients. This program really opens up many more revenue options as well, since it includes both a comprehensive Referral Program, active now, and Reseller Program, available soon. These programs offer features like:

Referral Partners
· Provided a variety of choices for significant business and revenue growth opportunities, and don’t have to close the sale or support the client afterwards
· Have revenue options to receive a one-time commission of up to 100% for each new referral or participate in a revenue sharing plan that pays a monthly recurring commission of up to 15%

Reseller Partners
· Eligible discounts for dedicated servers, setup fees and managed services
· Have the flexibility to set pricing
· Receive the full support of a dedicated PEER 1 account team made up of a personal account manager, technical specialist, and a billing specialist

One of our long-time partners who has been working with PEER 1 for 10 years, Mark Lewis the CTO of Mass Transmit, says:

“We have enjoyed a very consistent level of service with PEER 1 both with its Referral and Reseller Programs. We mostly resell their dedicated servers, but sometimes have clients who want to deal directly with the hosting provider. In those cases, we refer them to PEER 1 without hesitation, knowing they are in the best of hands. We also enjoy a good relationship with our account team. Our technical account manager has helped us many times when we’ve been in a pinch.”

To learn more or to get involved check out www.peer1.com/partners

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 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.

 The security conference that last year made headlines with a hacking challenge whose winner walked away with a $10,000 prize will reprise the contest next week — this time with more money at stake, the contest’s organizer said today.

CanSecWest, which will run from March 26 to 28 in Vancouver, British Columbia, will feature a second “PWN to Own” contest that pits researchers against a trio of laptops – all patched. All in typical client configurations with typical user configurations. You hack it, you get to keep it.

Each has a file on them and it contains the instructions and how to claim the prize.

Targets (typical road-warrior clients):

• VAIO VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10
• Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate SP1
• MacBook Air running OSX 10.5.2

As you can see, they are all armed with the latest versions of Windows Vista Ultimate, Mac OS X 10.5 and the Ubuntu Linux distribution, said Dragos Ruiu, the conference’s organizer. The first to hack one of the laptops by exploiting a remote pre-authentication code-execution vulnerability in a default service on the notebook’s operating system will take home the machine and a $10,000 prize.

3Com Corp.’s TippingPoint unit and its Zero Day Initiative bug-bounty program is providing the cash, as it did last year.

Do you have a passion for hacking? Check out the full article on CanSecWest here.

I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox for a long time now and lately, it’s been nothing but frustrating. With each new version, I’m becoming more and more frustrated and finding it to be slower and buggy. Perhaps a lot of it is brought upon myself by installing add-ons but when I talk to others about it who don’t use add-ons, they talk about the same problems.

After reading about the new Safari 3.1 release, I’ll be checking it out and using it to see how well it works for me. The latest version of Apple’s browser adds some major enticements to switch. “With the 3.1 release” of Safari for both the Mac and PC, writes Computerworld’s Seth Weintraub, “Safari has become the fastest browser you can use. If that isn’t enough reason to make a switch, its strong adherence to Web standards and rapid adoption of new technologies might make you think again.”

Apple released Safari 3.1 on March 18 with an updated rendering engine that makes the fastest Internet browser even faster.

On top of that, Apple’s new browser includes some features that reflect the future of the HTML 5 specification: offline storage, media support, and CSS animations and Web fonts. It also adds some needed compatibility and bug fixes, as well as some other new features that really make it a great everyday browser.

Read CW’s First Look about Safari 3.1 here.