GoGrid Blog

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area tomorrow (April 30th) we hope that you can attend StartUp SF, a meetup designed to help you “kickstart your startup.”

Speaker and Demo tables

Jonathan Cobb - Founder/CTO of Kiptronic (http://www.kiptronic.com)

Topic - “Genesis of a Startup: from Concept to Company”

• Early Validation — Before you start in earnest, you might wonder — What makes a good idea? Is yours worth pursuing? How do you size your opportunity?
• Covering the Basics — A handful of best-practices recommendations for general company administration: corporate formation, capital structure, legal, accounting, etc.
• Building the Core Team — How do you attract talent at this very early stage? What kinds of players will you need pre-funding? Post-funding?
• Market Validation — How do you execute to prove you have a winning idea? What milestones make sense for your business?
• Fund Raising — When should you raise money? Who should be your target funding sources? How much should you raise? What are common investment terms?

Demo table companies: Triggit, Askpedia and MotivePath. Also come see a demo of GoGrid, a definite “must have” for any startup.

Every attendee will receive:

• $100 GoGrid service credit which enables you to deploy, scale and load balance server networks instantaneously - More info about GoGrid

• Orrick’s Startup Kit CD which includes legal documents critical to every startup Venture - More info about Orrick

Quick Details:

When: April 30th, 2008 from 6pm to 9pm
Where: Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, 405 Howard St, SF at the 8th Floor Cafe
Who: Technologists, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Web 2.0-ers (over 21 years of age)
Bring: Business cards, elevator pitch, curiosity, legal dilemmas and hosting needs
Cost: $10 in advance / $20 at the door (all proceeds go to charity)

Register at: http://startupsf0408.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see you there!

Last Friday, we wrapped up our exhibit at the Web2.0Expo in San Francisco. For being a late Expo entrant, we have had a resounding success, with some people saying that GoGrid was among the “best at the show.” Not bad for signing up on the Friday before and having our booth together on Tuesday. We also tried to think creatively and do some “stunts” that were a bit out-side the box.

Here’s a photo-rundown of a few of the “stunts” we did:

Giving Away “Free” Servers

Since we are a 7-year old Internet hosting provider, GoGrid almost competes against our own parent company, ServePath. So, we took a stack of our old rack-mount servers and hand-drew a sign that said “Free Servers, they are useless now that GoGrid is live.”

This generated a bunch of questions and at the end of the show, a few of the servers “walked out the door.” People loved the concept and couldn’t believe that we would be giving them away. (We also gave away $99 promo codes for GoGrid!)

GoGrid Motorcycle

Another last-minute addition was the “guy on the motorcycle.” One of our colleagues has a friend who drove his 6 cylinder, 1540 cc Honda motorcycle around Moscone with a GoGrid banner unfurled behind him (a bigger engine than a Scion Xb). Mike Loskutoff, the cyclist, is a leftover hippy, trained arborist, and champion chess and pool player. Several people saw him and commented to us at our booth about it.

Riding such a big bike in circles does take its toll. The circuit was described as “similar to riding up to Lake Tahoe at 5 mph.” I wouldn’t want to do it!

GoGrid Bicycles

Going “green” is very important to us. GoGrid save on carbon emissions (virtualization helps with that) and motorcycle advertising certainly is better than hiring a truck to pull a banner. So, continuing with that, we strategically placed “GoGrid bicycle advertising” around the Web2.0Expo entrance.

Take a look at the custom bell on that first picture! The “Bell Bike” is a 40 year old Motobecane 10-speed converted many years ago to upright handlebars for night commuting.

All in all, these stunts proved successful! Drop a note if you saw them in action and what you thought! We have also posted more images on our Flickr photostream for the Expo.

With the bubble-wrap just coming off of the public beta of GoGrid, we were able to get a last-minute booth at the upcoming Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Those of you going to the Web 2.0 Expo are encouraged to come by our table located in the Long Tail Pavilion (table 22). (If you are heading to get food, we are right on your way to get there.)

At our table, we will be doing product demonstrations of GoGrid, answering questions, and giving away $$$ towards a GoGrid account. Come loaded with your questions and ideas on how you can use GoGrid to better your business. Also learn about the new GoGrid QuickStart Facebook Servers that are now a hot template within your GoGrid server deployment UI.

Web 2.0 Expo runs from April 22 through April 25 at Moscone West located at 747 Howard Street in San Francisco. The Exhibit Hall is open: Weds 10:30am - 4:00pm, Thursday 10:30am - 6:00pm and Friday 10:30am - 3:00pm.

If you…

• …have ever wondered how to get your application on the Facebook network quickly…
• …need to rapidly scale a server environment…
• …want a sandbox, QA or demo environment that you can turn on and off at will…
• …are tired of paying for dedicated or shared hosting…
• …want to deploy real Windows servers in minutes…
• …are a LAMP or Ruby-on-Rails or Linux developer and a looking for a hosting provider…
• …want to experience an extremely slick and elegant web-based UI used for deploying and load balancing servers…

…then you should definitely come by our table and/or give GoGrid a try!

See you at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo!

ServePath, the people who bring you GoGrid, is pleased to announce the latest and greatest meetup in the San Francisco Bay Area: StartUp SF. As regular attendees of meetups around the Bay Area, we have experienced first-hand what we think works and what people are looking for, so we have partnered with Orrick to bring you a new technology meetup, specifically designed to help “kickstart your startup!”

The format for this meetup is simple. Socialize, hear how other successful companies got that way, see demos of products, meet with venture capitalists, and generally have a good time.

You and your technology friends are cordially invited to inaugurate the StartUp SF Meetup on Wednesday April 30^th, 6 to 9PM at the spectacular offices of Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, 405 Howard Street, San Francisco.

Speaker and Demo Table details:

Jonathan Cobb - Founder/CTO of Kiptronic (http://www.kiptronic.com)

Topic - “Genesis of a Startup: from Concept to Company”

• Early Validation — Before you start in earnest, you might wonder — What makes a good idea? Is yours worth pursuing? How do you size your opportunity?
• Covering the Basics — A handful of best-practices recommendations for general company administration: corporate formation, capital structure, legal, accounting, etc.
• Building the Core Team — How do you attract talent at this very early stage? What kinds of players will you need pre-funding? Post-funding?
• Market Validation — How do you execute to prove you have a winning idea? What milestones make sense for your business?
• Fund Raising — When should you raise money? Who should be your target funding sources? How much should you raise? What are common investment terms?

About Kiptronic - “Kiptronic provides a software-as-service platform as a comprehensive solution for publishers of video and audio content. Our Media Services Platform allows our customers to dynamically deliver ads with their content, extending their reach to any device, with support for leading hosting platforms and formats. We support audio and video delivered both online, such as in a website video player, or offline to any downloadable media device.”

Demo tables

MotivePath - Robert Ficcaglia - Founder (http://www.motivepath.com)

About MotivePath - MotivePath®, Inc. provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to help marketers and advertisers quickly and easily reach highly targeted audiences for their product and service messages. The MotivePath technology platform empowers Everywhere Media™, and features a SaaS service core capable of serving targeted ad units and creative interactive content across web, social networks, mobile, video, and even connects to offline media such as print, outdoor and screen media. It features content management for tailoring content for different media types and channels, reporting, predictive models and analysis. It provides full campaign management, ROI measurement, scenario analysis, and Key Performance Indicators. In addition, the MotivePath open service platform enables clients and partners to integrate directly with MotivePath technology, resulting in the availability of best of breed solutions through the MotivePath partner program.

Triggit - Susan Coelius Keplinger - COO (http://www.triggit.com)

About Triggit - Triggit makes it quick and easy for web publishers to monetize their sites with advertising. Using a cross platform web application, publishers can now drag and drop ad units directly into their pages, optimize efficacy and track the results. Triggit takes the pain out of monetization.

Askpedia - Yong Su Kim (http://www.askpedia.com)

About Askpedia - Askpedia is an online knowledge marketplace for Questions and Answers. Users post questions with optional financial rewards for best answers. Others answer questions to earn rewards and establish their reputation within the community. All questions and answers, as well as users, are tagged and indexed with tags and location information to enable content and location based discovery. Askpedia also utilizes personalization technologies to match Q&A and experts to users based on interest and knowledge profiles.

More about the event

StartUp SF brings together technologists, entrepreneurs, technologies, services and solutions to meet, learn, socialize and network to success and monetization. We hope that you will join us for a fun professional evening. EACH MEETUP DONATES ALL TICKET PROCEEDS TO A DIFFERENT CHARITY. This inaugural event will be donating to Habitat for Humanity.

At the event, you will hear some tips and tricks from a successful startup, find a good crowd, demos of some thought-provoking leading-edge products and drinks and light snacks.

You will leave better connected and educated AND with the following gifts from us:

• $100 GoGrid service credit which enables you to deploy, scale and load balance server networks instantaneously - More info about GoGrid

• Orrick’s Startup Kit CD which includes legal documents critical to every startup Venture - More info about Orrick

Please join us for StartUp SF and tell your friends about it.

When: Wednesday April 30^th 6 – 9PM

Where: Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, 405 Howard St. San Francisco at the 8th Floor Cafe

What: StartUp SF Meetup, networking, knowledge, friends and schwag to kick start your startup.

Who: Technologists, Entrepreneurs and interested folks who are over 21 years of age

Bring: Business cards, elevator pitch, curiosity, legal dilemmas and server needs

How Much: $10 in advance / $20 at the door (all proceeds go to charity)

Bring yourself and your technology friends to meet like-minded, future-looking folks who may become your next colleague, customer, vendor or competitor.

With the additions of new GoGrid server templates, especially the Facebook-ready ones, we know that you will really want to understand what is contained within each image, down to the version numbers. We have made this as easy as possible to get to. When you install a Server using one of the pre-defined Operating System templates, you now have an icon that looks like an “i” next to the OS and Template selections. Clicking on that icon will launch the new GoGrid Wiki that contains useful details on GoGrid.

The GoGrid Wiki provides information around the:

• Supported Operating Systems
• Template Images
• Billing Model
• User Interface
• Network Devices

As more functionality is added to GoGrid, this information will expand.

You can drill down through each of the sections. Below is the Operating Systems expanded.

And within each Operating system, you can view details of what the current different templates are. All new templates are flagged with the icon.

Clicking on the CentOS 4.4 Facebook image, for example, provides the following information:

• Install Notes - basically an output of “uname -a;“
• Security - how the iptables is set up, for example
• Image Details - see the software packages and associated version contained within the default GoGrid template. You can see this by running the Linux command: “rpm -qa;“

We encourage you to peruse the new Wiki as many of your version question can be answered there. Also, you can get additional details on Load Balancing, the UI and Billing. If there is something that is not covered within the Wiki or this blog, drop me a note.

Our second round of new GoGrid templates have been released today, bringing some great new functionality: Ruby-on-Rails and Facebook! As mentioned previously, we are rapidly compiling and releasing new server OS templates with pre-configured useful application sets.

Today we released the following 3 new templates:

Web/Application Servers:

• CentOS 4.4 (32-bit) - Facebook-ready
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) - Facebook-ready
• CentOS 4.5 (32-bit) with Ruby on Rails

We have some other templates queued up for release early next week:

Web/Application Servers:

• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) - Facebook-ready
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) with Ruby on Rails

Next week we will be explaining what exactly we mean by “Facebook-ready” and “Facebook Accelerators” but essentially, if are a Facebook developer and have an application that you want to quickly get on the Facebook network, just get a Facebook-enabled GoGrid server. These servers come pre-configured in order get your application in front of Facebook users with little configuration. While you have been suffering through the application development part, we have been taking all of the pain out of the hosting part! More later about Facebook.

We have made a few changes to the GoGrid website as well including a quick comparison between GoGrid, Dedicated Hosting and Amazon’s EC2. But don’t just take our word for it, give GoGrid a try by signing up for a Trial (Pay-as-you-go) account.

As part of our regular updates to GoGrid code and functionality, we have released several new Web/Application and Database Sever Templates to GoGrid. This is part of a two set release with the next round coming tomorrow. (More information on the second set of templates in a subsequent blog post.)

One of the great features of GoGrid is the ability to instantly create new servers based on precompiled and tested templates. Our goal is to provide a significant number of templates to match many different development needs and do so in a timely manner.

Yesterday, we released the following templates:

Web/Application Servers:

• CentOS 4.5 (32-bit) with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) with LAMP stack
• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) with IIS, ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express

Database Servers:

• CentOS 4.5 (32-bit) with PostgreSQL 8.2
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) with PostgreSQL 8.2
• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express

These 6 additional server images now compliment the original list of servers:

Web/Application Servers:

• CentOS 4.4 (32-bit) with Apache 2.2 and PHP 5
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) with Apache 2.2 and PHP 5
• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) with IIS 6.0

Database Servers:

• CentOS 4.4 (32-bit) with MySQL 5.0
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) with MySQL 5.0
• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Workgroup (additional charge of $99.99/month)
• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard (additional charge of $249.99/month)

With 13 templates and growing, GoGrid is rapidly becoming the de facto source for scalable, on-demand servers. Also, remember that we are the first to bring FREE web-based load balancing into the mix, as well as an allotment of static IPs, free inbound bandwidth and a “utility” type of pricing model (pay as you go). So what are you waiting for? Sign up for GoGrid and get your development or production environment running in minutes.