Today we sent out the January 2010 GoGrid Customer Update to all GoGrid customers. We wanted to ensure that all people who are interested in GoGrid have access to the latest and greatest information coming from our headquarters so the full newsletter is posted below. If you want to get regular updates similar to this newsletter, I recommend that you subscribe to the GoGrid blog RSS feed, subscribe to blog post via email, follow us on Twitter (@GoGrid) as well as become a GoGrid Facebook Fanpage.

Below is the entire GoGrid Newsletter (January 2010):

Hello Michael,

On behalf of everyone here at GoGrid, I want to wish you a very successful 2010!  We are starting the year off with a bang that includes some exciting new developments that I want to share with you in this edition of the GoGrid Newsletter.  Here are the specific topics:

1. New Features and System Enhancements
2. GoGrid CDN: New Singapore and Paris Points of Presence (POPs)
3. New Partner GSIs
4. Preventative Power Maintenance
5. End-of-Life: CentOS 5.1 w/Apache &  RHEL 5.1 w/Apache operating systems
6. New CentOS 5.3 & RHEL 5.4 base operating systems
7. Two New 3rd Party Services to Monitor your GoGrid Servers
8. Hosting for Haiti

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As all of you know, a devastating series of earthquakes rocked the Haiti region on January 12th, 2010, crippling the infrastructure, killing thousands and leaving even more people utterly homeless. While relief efforts are currently underway, the recovery and assistance effort is an on-going uphill battle with little or no relief in sight. Countries from around the world have rushed people, medical supplies and other humanitarian aid, but as aftershocks continue (today there was a 6.1 registered aftershock, for example), the fragile and brittle stability is being further shattered.

The bottom line, the Haitian people need assistance of ANY TYPE immediately and in an on-going basis, whether it be in the form of time, money or other types of support. Doing absolutely nothing is the worst thing that you can do. Even if you cannot afford to donate time or money, there are other activities that you can do to assist in the relief efforts (one example is listed later in this post).

The outpouring of relief efforts thus far is impressive, however, as a worldly community living under the same “roof”, we all need to put aside our differences and work together to help the Haitians in their time of need.

Hosting for Haiti Initiative

Officially launching today is an initiative comprised of a group of Hosting Providers who normally compete head-to-head. The initiative brings together several hosting providers including Rackspace, Peer1, GoGrid, The Planet and ServInt, in an effort to create a consolidated and organized front to provide monetary assistance to the Haitian Relief Efforts. HostingForHaiti.com is a site designed to provide support from the hosting industry, because through a unified effort, more gains can be realized.

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The GoGrid newsletter went out today. Unfortunately, if you are not already a GoGrid customer, you didn’t receive it…until now! There are a lot of exciting items covered here (a few of which you already know if you subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed including the Edit, Delete and Restore function of MyGSIs). If you aren’t already a GoGrid user, I recommend that you sign up (and here is a quick hint, if you want a $100 GoGrid credit on new account, contact a GoGrid Sales Rep and they can consult with you on your best options for the Cloud).

Below is the entire GoGrid Newsletter (October 2009):

Hello Michael,

In this edition of the GoGrid newsletter I cover recent feature releases, planned features for the next release, and the end-of-life (EoL) of Server Images with preinstalled applications.  Here are the specific topics:

1. MyGSI Enhancements: Edit, Delete, and Restore
2. Revamped Billing Summary Widget
3. Cloud Storage: Data Import via Postal Service
4. Sneak Preview: Planned features for the next two releases slated for early and mid November: (more…)

GoGrid, and parent company ServePath, are excited to announce participation in Microsoft’s new WebsiteSpark Program, specifically targeted towards Web Professionals. Using WebsiteSpark, Web Pros can drive new business opportunities through connections with partners and customers around the world.

Before jumping into the details and Q&A, if you already know that you want to participate in this program with either GoGrid or ServePath as your Hosting partner, please visit our signup pages on the GoGrid site or ServePath site.

But what does all of this mean? Trust me, I have read through all of the 19 pages of Frequently Asked Questions and Program documentation and it is a bit overwhelming. So, this blog post is really an effort to try to cull out the critical points of importance for you. However, if there are any questions that you do have after reading this, I encourage you to talk to some WebsiteSpark folks or sales reps at GoGrid or ServePath. At a high-level, this is an incredibly helpful program targeted towards Web Professionals.

Probably the best way to approach this is through a series of questions and answers.

What is WebsiteSpark?

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Today, Novell issued a Press Release which discusses how Cloud Providers, like GoGrid, will enable customized security environments within their infrastructure using Novell technology. GoGrid is excited to be one of the participants in the initiative.

The full Press Release is located on the Novell site and is posted below:

Novell to Demonstrate Cloud Security Service at Burton Group Catalyst Conference

WALTHAM, Mass.
21 Jul 2009

Leveraging extensive cloud-related patent portfolio, Novell will enable cloud providers to offer customized security to their enterprise customers

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Today we had some very exciting news. GoGrid has been positioned in Gartner’s Visionaries Quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand) in the Magic Quadrant.

About the Magic Quadrant
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted July 2009 by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

For a limited time, the full Gartner Magic Quadrant study is available on the GoGrid home page. Simply look for this graphic and click through for the full report:

The report is only available until October 7th, 2009 so get it now!

The press release is available online and the full text is provided below:

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Perhaps that subject was not strong enough. The Financial Sector is currently weathering a hurricane, recently suffering the largest drop since 9/11. Merrill Lynch fell into the hands of Bank of America. Lehman Brothers is in bankruptcy and looking for a buyer with Barclays buying some of their assets. The Airline industry is failing. AIG and other financial companies are looking for some sort of an economic bailout. HP is eliminating 24,600 jobs. And this was all over just a few days. If one extends the look a bit further, the perspective is just a grim: gas prices going up, the dollar losing value and housing going down. One simply cannot be surprised by any of this.

The Tech Sector is getting hammered as well, but this time, it isn’t “our fault.” The Dot Com bust managed to drag down the other sectors last time, but we learned our lesson. Long gone are unproven businesses and their associated models. Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors are taking long looks at business, not just getting in the car for a drive but doing a full check under the hood, looking at the road both ahead and behind and fully vetting the drivers and passengers. To get money as a start-up is truly an accomplishment nowadays. You have to have a proven business model, installed user base, and a clear direction of where your company and your industry will go.

I recently attended TechCrunch 50 which showcases 50 startups and allows them to present their business or service to a panel of experts. I saw about 1/2 of the companies’ presentations and I noticed that the companies where they couldn’t articulate or prove their monetization strategy, these companies got an earful of criticism from the experts. Similarly, at a meetup in San Francisco, the question asked every presenter is “How are you making or going to make money?” It’s a very simple question, but one that must be answered or the company loses credibility.

Perhaps we should apply these same simple questions to the Financial, Housing and Airline Industries? I guess the markets are already doing that.

It will take a long time before all of these markets start to recover, and corporations and businesses are currently challenged to prevent the hemorrhage of money and capital expenditures within their IT infrastructure. I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal called “Cutting Tech’s Energy Bill” by William M. Bulkeley that discusses how large companies are looking at ways to cut electricity usage within the Enterprise. With energy costs directly and indirectly rising, it’s critical for the embattled IT manager or director to make fiscally sound and environmentally responsible decisions to keep their business moving forward will simultaneously ensuring that their technology progresses.

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I spent some time analyzing search trends of different computing keywords to try to put everything in perspective. Google trends is a nice too that gives insight into broad search patterns.

We all know that the term “Cloud Computing” is relatively new to the Technology buzz. But just how new is it? For starters, I ran a quick comparison of “Cloud Computing,” “Grid Computing” and “Utility Computing”.

The term Grid Computing has been around for a while (even before Google Trends tracking shows it). But as you can see from the graphic above, it is trending downwards. Utility Computing has pretty much remained below the radar in comparison. But, the newcomer Cloud Computing, which made its full entrance into this trend analysis around 2007 is rapidly gaining momentum. 2008 seems to be a pivotal time where it surpassed Grid Computing (and continues to grow).

Cloud computing is relatively new as a server hosting term. People are starting to loosely associate it with traditional hosted server solutions. So to put this all in perspective as well as add some other “hot” keywords in to the mix, I trended the following:

• Cloud computing
• Grid computing
• Dedicated server
• Colocation
• Virtualization

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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: (more…)

For those of you who have already signed up for a Trial or Paid GoGrid account, WELCOME! For those who have not, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? As many of you have already started using GoGrid for a variety of purposes, I felt that it might make some sense to provide some more information and clarification about your new service.

As always, please feel free to contact us should we need to clarify anything, to simply suggest some new or improved feature or to just RAVE about GoGrid in general.

For starters, I definitely recommend reading through the FAQ section of the GoGrid site as there are some answers to your questions there. You can get information on:

• How to access and update your account
• Change your billing information
• Learn about the fundamentals of administering your account and servers
• …And much more!

However, if you are like me, frequently you pass over all of the “Welcome” emails that you receive when you sign up for things. So, for those of you who have GoGrid accounts, here is a refresher; for those of you who do not, here is what you are missing.

What is the fastest way to get up and running? (more…)