The BCTIA’s Technology Impact Awards celebrate successes within the industry and the companies, people and innovation that continue to put British Columbia on the map and serve as role models for others in the province. This year, over 100 applications were received from technology companies of all sectors and sizes and from all corners of British Columbia.

“PEER 1 Hosting is a well-deserved recipient of this year’s Company of the Year award,” said Pascal Spothelfer, President and CEO of BCTIA. “Over the years, they have demonstrated excellence by delivering reliable, high-performance Web Hosting solutions for its customers.  We wish them much success and look forward to seeing continued growth and prosperity in the years to come.”

“PEER 1 is honoured to be recognized amongst fellow BC technology innovators at this year’s awards,” said Fabio Banducci, president and CEO, PEER 1 Hosting. “We know the important role the Internet plays for our customers and have worked very hard over the years to manage their online presence, so they can focus on growing their business.”

Press Release

BCTIA Awards

Our head of PEER 1 in the UK, Dominic Monkhouse, was interviewed by Growing Business and shares his insight on using service as the weapon in battling for web hosting supremacy. Below is an excerpt:

What many don’t understand is that every instance of human interaction is a moment of truth for a business. It was a lesson Monkhouse first learned in his second job as assistant manager at Marks & Spencer.

“It wasn’t uncommon for men to come in and buy a suit on a Friday, cut all the tags off, wear it to a wedding and then bring it back on Monday claiming it didn’t fit,” Monkhouse says, recalling one incident where the item was so creased it couldn’t be resold. Much to his surprise, his manager agreed to take it back, insisting that it was all part of owning and building the store’s reputation.

Monkhouse is fostering a similar culture, and believes it’s futile to get into a war over who’s to blame. “We’re in the IT game,” he says. “Things do go wrong and customers break their own stuff all the time. Then, if they ring us and say: ‘It’s broken,’ we’ll assume responsibility. In fact, we’ll say it’s our fault, so we’ll also take accountability, because without owning the problem, we can’t fix it. We won’t say: ‘Actually, we’ve looked in the log file and we think you logged in and broke it.’”

Read full article

Web Hosting Company Celebrates 10 Years from Rajan on Vimeo.

This video captures PEER 1’s humble beginnings a decade ago as a two-person operation in Vancouver, Canada to hundreds of employees in 12 cities around the world today.

PEER 1 began in 1999 at the outset of the Internet age when founder Lance Tracey, alongside then CTO Mark Teolis, set up the original network infrastructure to offer affordable web hosting to customers. Ten years later, PEER 1 has grown to a 360-strong international team delivering global business hosting solutions through its 10GB SuperNetwork™ and 16 data centers around the world. PEER 1’s more than 10,000 customers ranging from startups to enterprises benefit from its 100% uptime guarantee and FirstCall Support™ promise.

PEER 1 10 Year Anniversary Tattoo’s from Charnell Pugsley on Vimeo.

Today we are celebrating our 10 year anniversary. As part of this celebration, members of our staff decided to take it one step further and show their company pride…with tattoos.

Completion of the SAS 70 Type I audit indicates the successful examination of our processes, controls and procedures, pertaining to managed hosting services and the general computer controls at our Miami and Atlanta data centers, by the independent accounting and auditing firm Deloitte & Touche LLP.

SAS 70 is designated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as an acceptable method for a user organization’s management to obtain assurance about the service organization’s internal controls without conducting customer-specific assessments.

Jad Jebara, PEER 1’s VP, Finance and IT commented, “All service providers, no matter what industry, have a responsibility to manage internal processes efficiently, effectively and with a high level of transparency. This is especially important when a company hosts or processes customers’ data – as we do at PEER 1. Completing SAS 70 audit means that all PEER 1 customers can be sure that they will get a safe, reliable service that is managed in controlled manner.”

Read full press release here: http://www.peer1.com/aboutus/news.php?id=127

Many are familiar with PEER 1’s hosting services – Dedicated Hosting, Managed Hosting, and Colocation. But many are not as aware about some of the key advantages of using us.

Service First

We are a service-first driven company. Period. We measure how well we are serving our customers through a Net Promoter Score (NPS), which was developed by Fred Reichheld and popularized through his book The Ultimate Question. NPS has since been used by leading organizations all over as the standard for measuring and improving customer loyalty. PEER 1 improved its NPS to 30, a 76% over last year, which we are very proud of but not satisfied. Our goal is to improve our NPS each year, and eventually reach the top 10 percentile of NPS of any industry worldwide. With our FirstCall Support™ promise, we do everything we can to resolve your issues on your first call by deploying only level 2 and level 3 system administrators with the knowledge and expertise to expedite a resolution. We also have many certified Windows and Linux experts on staff to give you top-level technical support.

Wholly-owned and Operated Network Backbone

We are one of very few providers who own and operate its network infrastructure. Our high performance network, called the SuperNetwork™, spans over 13,000 miles of fiber, connecting all of our 16 data centers across North America and Europe. We also have over 500 peering relationships with some of the largest exchanges in the world, including PAIX, AMS-IX, and LINX. Because we own and run our network, we are able to deliver greater uptime performance, minimize latency, mitigate DDoS attacks, and respond quickly with an on-premise 24×7x365 Network Operation Center (NOC). Our geographical diversity also provides unique disaster recovery opportunities and strategic hosting designs.

Choice of Data Center

Not only can you choose from any of 8 cities for Colocation, but if you need Dedicated Hosting through our division ServerBeach, you can also choose to host your server(s) in either Los Angeles CA, San Antonio TX, or Herndon VA. This lets you have even more control over your hosting experience and ensure you can be geographically close to the majority of your customers for better website and web application performance.

Choice Of Hosting

Yes, we offer Managed Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, and Colocation. But, the real value in offering these different forms of hosting is that you can easily migrate from your dedicated server to a Managed Hosting solution as your needs become greater, or combine any or all into your hosting solution as needed without having to use different hosting providers. This opens up a whole bunch of new opportunities to save money, realize synergies, and simplify your billing and account management. Use a Dedicated Hosting server for your dev environment and a Managed Hosting server for production. Or, colocate your servers on the west coast while using a Dedicated Hosting server on the east coast for disaster recovery, mirroring and backup. Many possibilities to give you the right solution.

If you’re interested in use multiple forms of hosting to your advantage, we have Solutions Engineers on staff to help you design it. Just ask.

Charnell Pugsley, Rob Kinkaid, Dave Sherman, Kevin Lee, Jim Park

Wow! We’ve returned home from the 24 Hours of Lemons event at the No Problem Raceway in Belle Rose, Louisiana. I can honestly say that we got a true taste of this race this past weekend.

In my last post, I mentioned the PEER 1 road trip that started off on the wrong foot with an incompatible wire harness from RV to car trailer which left us with no working lights. Then the car trailer coming off of the hitch to the RV that left us stuck in rush hour traffic in Atlanta. Definitely not the way we wanted to start our road trip. Nonetheless, we made it to the event and all was well. Sort of.

After we finally passed tech and were allowed to race, the first day of racing started off great. The PEER 1 car and drivers (Team PEER Pressure) handled well and then the problems began. First we had an overheating problem due to a stuck

PEER 1 Car Overheating

thermostat.  We pulled the thermostat to run the coolant at full flow all the time.  Apparently, that causes the car to overheat almost instantly.  We drilled the thermostat, but the car would still overheat so we had to run a few laps, come off of the track to let it cool and do it all over again. By the end of the first day, we weren’t confident the PEER 1 car would make it for the next days race.

We started off Sunday replacing the water pump and thermostat with new units. I asked Kevin Lee, our racing team lead what exactly happened and he said:

After a few runs, we never got the car to the point where it wouldn’t overheat and started seeing oil in the cooling system.  This could be an indication of blown head gasket or cracked heads and we suspect that something may have broken off in the block that is possibly blocking the flow of water.

By the end of the race, the PEER 1 car just couldn’t make another lap around the track. We ended up finishing in 42nd place (which by the way matched our car – #42 and we all know 42 = answer to life, the Universe, everything ) After all of the long hours our team spent wrenching and welding, getting sunburned and dehydrated, we still had a damned good time and we’re looking forward to doing it again. Maybe we’ll get to go head-to-head with other hosting providers the next time, if they’re up to the challenge.

PEER 1's Mercedes race car at 24 Hours of Lemons

View our pictures from the 24 Hours of Lemons on our PEER 1 Flickr here: http://tinyurl.com/lbzet5

View all of the pictures (over 7000!) that we took at the event here: http://tinyurl.com/mk2bud

Charnell Pugsley
PEER 1 Community Evangelist

We’ve mentioned previously on our blog that we’re headed to the track again for the 24 Hours of Lemons and we’ve challenged you to a race. Will we see you there?

Last year PEER 1 participated in the 24 Hours of Lemons event that took place in

PEER 1 at 24 Hours of Lemons - Kershaw, South Carolina 2008

Kershaw, South Carolina. We posted pictures and a video interview with Jay Lamm, “The Chief Perpetrator”of the event and we’ll be at it again this year at the “Laissez Les Crapheaps Roulez New Orleans” on June 6-7, 2009.

We’ll have employees from two of our office locations participating – PEER 1 Atlanta and ServerBeach San Antonio. PEER 1’s system administrator Kevin Lee will be leading the team again this year. Last year, we quoted him saying, “I spent so much time at junkyards, I never want to see another one again”. Well, this year he was back at it hitting the junkyards getting the PEER 1 1981 Turbo Diesel Mercedes ready for this years race.

To remind everyone what the 24 Hour of Lemons is all about:

Nasty. Brutish. Not Short Enough.

The crowd. The spectacle. The pall of blue smoke and roasted clutch discs. In all motorsport, no event captures the universal human need to whale on old crapcans and hoover down greasy barbecue like the 24 Hours of LeMons.

Each LeMons race is for cars purchased, fixed up, and track-prepped for a total of 500 dollars or less. But before reaching the grid, you’ll have to survive trials like the Personal-Injury-Lawyer Anti-Slalom, the Marxist-Valet Parking Challenge, and the Wide Open Throttle Rodthrowapalooza. Twelve hours into the race, the car voted People’s Choice is called in and awarded a cash prize; simultaneously, the car voted People’s Curse is called in and summarily destroyed. At the end of 24 hours, a gala awards ceremony plies the survivors with trophies, plaques, and four-figure purses in canvas bags full of nickels. What’s not to like? — 24 Hours of Lemons Website

For requirements, rules, and fees, visit http://www.24hoursoflemons.com. For track information and location, please visit http://www.24hoursoflemons.com/events/noproblem09/

For more information on the PEER 1 race challenge, or if you’re in the neighborhood and would like to say hello, please contact:

Charnell Pugsley
PEER 1 Community Evangelist
cpugsley@peer1.com
210-798-4413

We’ve partnered with Lisa Sabin-Wilson, celebrity blogger and author of “WordPress for Dummies”, to offer free premium blog templates, valued at $1,200 each, designed exclusively for PEER 1 and ServerBeach.

With an estimated 133 million blogs worldwide and growing, social networking and blogging has become the fourth most popular activity on the Internet, surpassing even e-mail.* For those looking to join the fast-growing blogging community, or just wanting to spice up current blogs, PEER 1 is offering five free custom-designed WordPress themes as a download to anyone who visits the PEER 1 or ServerBeach Web site.

The templates won’t be around for long, available for download only until June 30. To view the different designs and download a favorite, visit the PEER 1 Web site http://www.peer1.com/resources/wordpress_themes.php or the ServerBeach Web site http://www.serverbeach.com/resources/wordpress_themes.php.

To view the full press release, please visit http://www.peer1.com/aboutus/news.php?id=118

We’ve just recently launched SmartMonitoring^TM, a full suite of advanced monitoring solutions now available for our managed hosting customers. Utilizing the platform of partner, Absolute Performance Inc., SmartMonitoring provides in-depth data and analysis to better anticipate IT needs for business success. This offering, which will be expanded to all product lines later this year, represents strategic momentum in working together with best-of-breed companies to provide PEER 1 customers a valuable range of products and services.

“With the launch of SmartMonitoring, we are offering the best monitoring services available, while continuing to provide the advanced hosting services that are in greatest demand by our customers,” said Tim Varma, director of product management for PEER 1. “SmartMonitoring will help our customers increase efficiency and maximize IT resources, which is especially vital in today’s economy. With our fully scalable hosting solutions and services, PEER 1 adjusts to customers’ needs and helps them be more cost effective, to keep their businesses running smoothly.”

With SmartMonitoring, PEER 1 customers can choose the services and features, from basic to highly complex, that are most vital to their business success. These services are available through SmartMonitoring’s on-demand platform interface, which provides anyone in the organization, from CEO to system engineer, understandable, information on how application and system components are working together. This real-time data gives insight into potential issues so they can be proactively addressed in the most efficient and timely way.

For more information and full press release, please see http://www.peer1.com/aboutus/news.php?id=117