PEER 1 Hosting Business Social event. Next one is Feb. 9th in Austin, Texas, 6-8pm at Cover 3 Restaurant.

We’ve teamed up with Microsoft and their WebMatrix experts to host a Business Social event on Thursday, Feb. 9th in Austin, TX at the Cover 3 Restaurant from 6-8pm. Eat, drink and mingle with some of Austin’s brightest business minds. Discover how WebMatrix’s robust development tools allow you to create and publish killer websites and apps for your customers. RSVP is required as we have limited capacity. RSVP Here and guarantee your attendance.

More About WebMatrix

The features and benefits of the revolutionary WebMatrix development tool allows you to start from dozens of open source applications and build sites in matter of minutes. And the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer walks you through installing and configuring OSS applications and generates your database credentials automatically so you can get up and running faster.

RSVP Here

In case you’re unfamiliar, True Blood is a hugely popular HBO series that will be entering it’s fifth season in 2012. With over nine million fans on Facebook, social media engagement has been vital to the show’s success.

Set in small town Louisiana, the show features all sorts of supernaturals such as telepaths, shape-shifters and you guessed it – vampires. One of the reoccurring aspects of the show is the vampires’ ability to “glamour” someone, or put them into a hypnotic, trance-like state. Haus and BBDO wanted to create an app that would give fans the ability to glamour their friends, keeping them engaged while they eagerly await the launch of the fifth season next spring.

How it Works

The Glamour Your Friends app is simple: fans upload a photo of themselves via their webcam, hard drive or Facebook photos. The app then turns them into a Glamouring vampire, complete with fangs and a sultry southern drawl. Fans can customize the audio and location specific to the recipient, and then they can share their creations with each other on Facebook and Twitter.

Glamour Your Friends uses software licensed from Motion Portrait to create a 3D avatar.  Facial recognition is used to place bitmap data that the user uploads onto a 3D mesh. The Flash client communicates with Motion Portrait’s software through web and Flash APIs. To ensure the demand of such a large and devoted fan base could be met, HAUS worked with PEER 1 Hosting to create a load-balanced GPU hosting solution.

Feeling Glamorous? Go ahead and try it for yourself.

Guest author Brent Evans is an Office Administrator and esteemed music critic, based in our San Antonio office.  Recently he was given the opportunity to participate in the Employee Exchange Program. His office location of choice? Vancouver.

I landed in Vancouver at 2pm on a Sunday.  After a quick 20 questions with the customs agent, I had my bag and was on my way to the hotel.  I made it without any problems and by 3.30pm I had deposited my stuff and was ready to see the city.  After about 10 minutes of walking around, I realized I should have actually looked at a guide book or two before I landed.  With no idea where to go or what to do, I just started walking.  I wasn’t too worried because this is how I handle almost all of my adventures.  No clear plan and just an idea of what I want to accomplish.

At this particular point in time I wanted to accomplish two things.  See the city and get something to eat.  After checking the menus at several different places, I decided on the Vancouver Moose.  Ultimately, it was their $5.95 surf and turf that appealed to both my pocketbook and my taste buds.  I sat down at the bar and asked the bartender what was affordable and tasty, beer-wise.  His response was rather short in a great-another-cheap-tourist sort of way, but I didn’t let it ruffle my feathers and enjoyed my first meal in Vancouver.

After I was fed, I decided to continue my walking tour of the city.  I use the word tour in a loose sense because I had no clear destination in mind.  During this tour, I saw the sights, shared pints with complete strangers and found myself in, as I would later learn, the “worst” ghetto in Vancouver.  Worst is in quotes because it reminded me of my neighborhood back in San Antonio.  Anyway, the whole evening made me realize that each stop provided “single-serving friends.”

These “single-serving friends” act much like the little coffee creamers we have in my office.  Just like the coffee creamers cream exactly one cup of coffee, these people offer up conversation and comradery for exactly one visit.  You shake hands, have a few pints, exchange a bit of conversation and then go on your separate ways knowing full well that you will probably never meet again.  It’s a single point of contact that exists in a single moment of time.  I’m not the only barfly to experience such meetings, but since I was on a weeklong adventure in Vancouver, including a brief stint in the office, I wondered if all of my experiences with coworkers would be just as superficial.

I started work at 8.30am the next day.  I was a bit nervous about meeting everyone, but I knew that my mildly inflated ego, self-deprecating humour and general agreeableness would get me through.  All my worrying was for not because everyone was very nice and accommodating which was quite a refreshing contrast to the rather cold weather outside.

After my initial introductions, I worked during the days and saw as much of Vancouver as I could at night, usually with a Vancouver co-worker in the lead.  It was a great change of pace from the same ol’ San Antonio.  High rises, public transportation, craft beer and rather forceful panhandlers.  At first, I was rather hung-up on the differences between the offices and cities.  The Vancouver office, for instance, has high cube walls, plenty of space, beautiful views and walkable coffee shops on every corner while the San Antonio office does not.  But as the week wore on I realized that we weren’t all that different.  Everyone worked just as hard, dealt with similar drama, enjoyed good conversations and tried not to get too bogged down.  It was this realization that made my Vancouver counterparts much more than “single-serving friends.”

The sudden realization that everyone in the PEER 1 organization had similar ups and downs made it much easier to open up to different people and find those common interests and beliefs that make for a truly lasting connection.  Suddenly, anything and everything was new and meaningful.  Gone were the preconceived notions and ideas leaving you with people enjoying other people – their company, their conversation, their opinions.  It made the whole experience that much more special because the voices on the other end of the phone were no longer just voices.  They had faces, names, feelings, opinions.  These were people that I’d talk to again.  Sure I’d take care of business first, but then I could have a conversation about office politics, music or whatever.

Now, sitting at my desk back in San Antonio, I can say that my quick stint in Vancouver taught me a lot.  I learned about the ins and outs of H.R.  Nothing but hugs and kisses for those girls by the way.  I also learned that, deep down, we are all people and that no matter which office or country you work in, you will find similar opinions and experiences.  Ultimately, you will only meet “single-serving friends” if you really want to keep the experience single-serving.

Nasuni recently published their Cloud Storage Benchmark Study Report which had only six of the leading 16 cloud storage providers pass their rigorous test for performance, stability and  scalability. PEER 1 Hosting, along with Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 made the final six.

The company’s research began in April 2009, and evaluated cloud storage providers in a specific use case – how providers perform for mid-sized organizations that want to take advantage of the cloud for primary storage, data protection and disaster recovery. The five testing stages used for the study were API Integration, Unit Testing, Performance Testing, Stability Testing, and Scalability Testing.

To download the full report, click here.

Guest author Monica Cardenas is a Sales Operations Assistant, salsa dancer and aspiring author based in our Miami office. 

What is gratitude?

Gratitude is a feeling of thankfulness for blessings or benefits we have received. Grateful people are quick to acknowledge the kindness and help they receive from others around them.

I read once that a team is a group of people coming together to collaborate. Their reason for coming together might be simple: to reach a shared goal or task for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. But what keeps a team together is when its members become deeply committed to each other’s personal growth and success. That commitment usually transcends the team. This has certainly been my experience at PEER 1 Hosting. The team that I have joined here would no doubt outperform any group or multitude of individual contributors. Teams here have a synergistic effect—one plus one equals a lot more than two.

When I reached my one-year milestone, I sent a thank you note to my team of PEERS to make sure they understood how significant this date was for me. I’ve never felt more like a team and I couldn’t have made it without the help of my colleagues, who have offered me support day after day, not just during working hours but at all hours.  

To say that I am grateful for this may even be an understatement!

In our latest infographic, find out how Greenpeace grades global IT brands like IBM, Facebook, and Apple in their Clean Cloud Power Report Card. Also, who has the greenest datacenter, how one can “greenify” a datacenter and more. Feel free to embed and share the infographic. Enjoy!

Created by PEER 1 Hosting Green Data Centre Hosting

EMBED THIS IMAGE ON YOUR SITE

<a href="http://www.peer1.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Energy_Efficient_Data_Centres.png" rel="lightbox[2668]"><img src="http://www.peer1.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Energy_Efficient_Data_Centres_Sm.png"></a><br/><span style="font-size: 10px;">Created by PEER 1 Hosting <a href="http://www.peer1hosting.co.uk/colocation/green-data-centre/?v=p1&utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=Infographic&utm_campaign=GreenDCs">Green Data Centre Hosting</a></span>

This week our team of GPU experts is on site in Seattle, Washington to share the power of the PEER 1 Hosting GPU Cloud with attendees of SC11 – this year’s SuperComputing Conference.

SuperComputing is one of the longest running technology conferences in America, getting it’s start back in 1988 in Orlando. Every year the conference brings together mathematicians, computer scientists, quantz and data nerds of all types for a week of technical talks and sessions focussing on the latest trends and ideas in super computing.

Attending the show? Don’t forget to stop by booth #6102 for a demo of our affordable, high performance GPU cloud.

Not sure what the heck a GPU cloud is? Check out our datasheet to learn more!

Zunicore is a professional-grade cloud service that allows users to benefit from customizable resource pools versus preset virtual machines, hands-free autoscaling, and transparent pricing. FairPlay Pricing™ guarantees that customers pay only for what they use and are never locked into a long-term contract.  The complexities of managing the cloud have driven many businesses away from the public cloud. Now, with Zunicore’s simple dashboard that show the user the resources being used, the amount of resource remaining, and options to increase or decrease resources, it is easier for companies to migrate to the cloud. The core features of our new public cloud include:

• User-controlled Environment: Customizable resource pools that allow users to increase or decrease the size of their pool, or add virtual machines based on their business needs. This type of control also provides Overdraft Protection against the users hosting cost.
• Data Reliability: Unlike other cloud environments that utilize local hard drives for storage at an additional cost, Zunicore offers persistent storage area network (SAN) storage, which is more reliable, less susceptible to data loss and offers higher performance – all at no extra cost.
• Scalability: Hands-free autoscaling allows users to specify by how little or much they want to scale their resources, based on user-defined thresholds such as technical resources, cost, or both.
• Minimized Downtime Risk: Several features help limit Zunicore’s risk of downtime: availability in PEER 1 Hosting’s three geographically dispersed datacenters on two continents, AnyCast DNS across PEER 1 Hosting’s FastFiber Network™, persistent SAN and a Zero Downtime Network service level agreement (SLA).

Early users can sign up for a free 30-day trial. If you are at Cloud Expo all this week in Santa Clara, CA stop by the Zunicore booth (#622).

Read Official Press Release

BROGA surfaced in Vancouver during this year’s edition of PEER 1 Hosting’s wellness challenge. Rob Station, Solutions Engineer, created it out of a desire for dudes to be totally awesome at not having body problems from sitting at a desk all day. According to Rob, to get a workout like this, you would usually have to look like a drunken person in front of dozens of women in stretchy pants. Not anymore boys, not anymore.

Their instructor, Alex Mazerolle , takes their wussy baby bodies and navigates them through the labyrinth of tight muscles and leads them to a galaxy of holy crap, I feel great! They enter as co-workers, they exit as bro-workers.

Notable BROWORKERS include PEER 1 Hosting’s Executive VP and CFO, President and CEO, Accounting Gurus, Network Operations Center (NOC) Jocks, Datacenter Operations Superstars, Marketing Whizzes and even Mr. Station, a Sales Bro.

BROGA’s not for everyone – especially girls. Luckily, Rob developed a fail-proof test to help you identify whether you have what it takes to survive the BROGA trenches. Thinking about exploring the ying to your muscles’ yang amongst your favorite work compadres? Take this test.

I WANT TO BE ABLE TO PUNCH THE INTERNET WHEN IT BREAKS (FACE AREA PREFERRED)

[ ] wouldn’t that hurt your hand?
[ ] somewhat agree
[ ] STRONGLY BROGREE

I WANT A POWERFUL ENOUGH CORE TO FLING THESE EXCEL SHEETS INTO OUR HOT, YELLOW SUN

[ ] I feel like this is an overreaction and impossible
[ ] somewhat agree
[ ] STRONGLY BROGREE

I WANT TO GET RID OF MY NORMAL DESK AND GET A RACECAR DESK (ACTUAL 400hp RACECAR)

[ ] isn’t that dangerous?
[ ] somewhat agree
[ ] STRONGLY BROGREE

RAAAUGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[ ] that isn’t even English
[ ] somewhat grrr
[ ] MURAHHHHHH BROGA RUUUGHHHHH

If you answered “STRONGLY BROGREE” to any of these questions, you are right for BROGA. And if you join the movement, I guarantee you will be happy with the outcome. Our monthly classes are full of BROWORKERS, and the formerly male-devoid “regular yoga” class at PEER 1 Vancouver now holds about 50% “brogis”.

But still, no stretchy pants – they keep it strictly professional.