Hosting365 News

Hosting365 ranked 25th in Deloitte Technology Fast 50, 2008

Hosting365 today announced that it ranked Number 25 in the 2008 Deloitte Technology Fast 50, a ranking of the 50 fastest
growing technology companies in Ireland. Rankings are based on average percentage revenue growth over five years. Hosting365 grew 1,143 percent during this period.

Hosting365’s Managing Director, Stephen McCarron, credits the continuing move to an outsourced IT and infrastructure hosting model and the company’s position as a leader in both value and enterprise service with the company’s 1,143% revenue growth over the past five years. He said,
“We are thrilled and honoured to be ranked in the Deloitte Fast 50 for the second year running - it is a testament to the passion, commitment and energy of the amazing team I work with, both in Dublin and Krakow.”

The Fast 50 programme, now in its ninth year in Ireland ranks the fastest-growing technology companies in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. This year, there were 17 companies from Northern Ireland in the ranking. The average annual growth rate of the 50 winning companies was 460%.

Announcing the winners of the Technology Fast 50 programme, David O’Flanagan, Partner with Deloitte, Dublin said: ?Congratulations to our 2008 Fast 50 winners – their success is indicative of the innovative technology companies present in Ireland. To have 16 new companies in the awards is a true sign of the talent and creative thinking that is present in
the technology industry in Ireland. It is this innovation and fresh thinking that will ensure Ireland’s continued success in this competitive industry.?

The awards took place in the Guinness Storehouse on October 16th. Industry figures speaking at the event included Jim Breen, CEO, Pulse Learning, John McElligott, Director of Strategy and M&A, eBay Global Classifieds and David Tansley, Partner, Technology, Media and Telecommunications, Deloitte UK.

Details of the final Technology Fast 50 ranking list are available to download at
www.fast50.ie.

Iron Mountain have ‘lost‘ 2 truck loads of tapes in the space of a month. There’s a few reasons why this is a huge story and a significant hit to their customers business as well as their own.

The data on the tapes can be cracked, as they admit ‘using sophisticated equipment’, which really means someone with know-how can do it. Depending on what the data is, it may be used for all types of fraud by the thief, as well as the fact that the backup data copy is now gone and there a security hole to be plugged here until it is replicated again.

Of course if you have any sense you wouldn’t touch tape backup any more - it’s an antiquated technology. It rely’s on a poor medium, manual processes, and has logistical issues. Backing up on more reliable media like a redundant array of hard drives through a VPN in an off-site secure data centre makes much more sense. (heehee … and guess who can provide this for you? !!)
And the great thing about this Moore’s Law business is that the kind of system I just mentioned is not only FAR FAR better than tape backup, it’s also cheaper to do. Faster … more reliable … easier to access and restore … automated and secure : it boggles the mind that many CTO’s and SME’s still consider tape backup a viable solution.

Hosted Anti-Virus is more secure and reliable than local machine software, because the virus never even gets to your PC and you are not responsible for regualr updates.

From Business and Finance

McAfee customers were left bewildered recently when their antivirus program began attacking legimate third-party applications as malware. The problem was caused by an update that McAfee issued for its popular antivirus software, with hundreds of executables wrongly flagged as W95/CTX, low-risk Windows 95 malware. Among the applications affected were Microsoft Excel, Flash, Google Toolbar and Adaptec drivers. McAfee published a list of about 330 programs known to have conflicts with the update, but experts have speculated that the true figure is much greater. Operating systems across the board were afftected by the mistake.

This is just one example of the many ways local Anti-Virus software can let you down. The primary issue of course is that unless you are in a highly controlled corporate IT environment, the responsibility for protecting your computer is actually yours - not the anti-virus software provider. This is because you must make sure the software is up to date with the latest definitions.

Hosted Anti-Virus is by no means perfect … since it really only protects your email … but the majority of incoming files to your PC do originate via email. If you protect your email service with a hosted anti-virus service, any infected mails will be detected and quarantined before they ever get to your machine, preventing any threat of an infection.

It’s funny … when I joined hosting365 I had just setup Roundcube as my webmail client (I was a customer before I became an employee!) and it took about 30 mins (and I’m not a techie!), so naturally I thought it could be deployed within the same time for all customers.

Clearly I was wrong … there’s so much more to consider when innovating for a 30% of the Irish market than when playing with webmail for 1 person

However, after much work and testing (remember Roundcube is still beta) we’ve launched it for ALL OUR CUSTOMERS!

Just go to webmail.hosting365.com, and enter your email address and password - it’s that simple! No need to enter domains, no need to go through control panels.

In case you’re interested, the reason it couldn’t be launched in 30 minutes, is that we process 40 million emails a month, so you can image the impact of a IMAP based webmail client on our infrastructure!

Innovation is hard .. much harder in a big company .. but it’s worth it, and as you can see (ref: FREE BLOG PLAN !!!!) we’re really trying.

Expect to see more innovations over the coming months! In fact, why not use this blog for what’s it’s really mean’t - and post in the comments the kind of innovations YOU’D like to see from a hosting company. PLEASE!!!

It stuck me earlier as I was speaking to someone about equipment financial deals with suppliers and banks that the hosting model is very similar to it - although with far more added value.

A financing deal basically allows you to purchase an expensive piece of equipment - say a 5000 euro server - and pay it back over a period of time. This saves the company cash flow and also allows the company access to more ‘assets’ (inverted commas as the equipment is not as asset until it’s owned) which they will use to help grow or streamline the business.

In the case of hosted services - servers in particular, as it’s most relevant to the example above - a company can lease a server over a period of time (same benefits as above) AND get the additional benefits of managed services (staff expertise), IP connectivity (a good data centre will have lots of redundant and carrier neutral bandwidth), fast upgrades/repairs (based on agreed SLA’s), and most importantly, a hosted off-site server in a world-class data centre that can provide intra- or inter-net facilities.

I wonder then, when it comes to technology, should data centre businesses try to compete with the banks and equipment vendors when it comes to leasing deals? There is potentially no server software that can’t be provided as a hosted application now, once the customer office has a broadband (or equivalent) connection.
The hosting providers value-add is so much greater than that of a financial house, it would seem logical for IT Managers to consider this option when looking at their 2006 budget provisioning. Lower costs and increased service provision … win/win!:-)

There’s been lots of talk in Bubble 1.0 and Bubble 2.0 (that’s now!) about SaaS : Software as a Service (i.e salesforce.com, Microsoft Live), and it seems now that business, software and infrastructure have caught up with the IDEA of it, SaaS companies are becoming successful.

I came across an article by Nicolas Carr (of ‘Does IT Matter‘ fame) called ‘Here comes HaaS‘ and it strikes me that the dedicated servers model we use (and many other data centres) is exactly this.

Google Define doesn’t have a technical definition for it, so I’ll explain it here in plain English, or I’ll try! Rather than purchasing a server, installing your OS and other applications and connecting it to the Internet (all of which involve capital expenditure, and are on-going labour intensive), HaaS means for a monthly payment that is a fraction of your normal cost, a business can lease a server, with managed services support, standard OSes and bespoke application deployments, and a boat-load of connectivity.

For example, we sell a dedicated server - your own machine, which you can do with as you please (within reason on course, we have an acceptable use policy), install OSes and applications, and provides you with fast (and lots of) bandwidth - for only 59.95 a month! When I joined here first I couldn’t believe that, if I add the cost of buying my own computer and a simple broadband connection, if would be more than this a month, and my own machine in a data centre for this cost - WOW! Of course NOW saying that makes it look like I’m pimping our own products!
What’s important to know about Hardware as a Service is that it’s really relevant to you. Why? It takes away pain, it saves money, it provides access to dedicated resources (people and infrastructure). Moreover, I believe Haas is the enabler that will change the face of Software-as-a-Service. With Microsoft’s SPLA licensing, which effectively makes access to high-end software a lot more affordable, and of course, the Open Source OSes and applications, using the HaaS model, a relatively small monthly fee can provide you with office server funcationality, for literally a small fraction of the cost doing it in-house would be.

Watch the HaaS space, I think it will evolve into a H+SaaS model where bundled solutions will be offered rather than just empty-shell machines. There’s a business opportunity here for software companies to package and license there applications in the H+S-aaS model, and charge on a per-user / per-domain basis.