We are now located at #10-1176 Frankin’s Gull Road

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We hope you will join us in this new stage of our business journey.

Having said that, the usage of  “anything 2.0″  as a tag is a common method used the world over to describe a bigger and better incarnation of the thing that came before, and a word created out of usage is as good as any word.

Most importantly, I wanted  to announce the launch of the new Hosting Nation site.  It’s cleaner, faster, and has more information than ever before.

For one, we’ve officially launched our agent plan, a hosting plan for web designers that features managed billing, invoicing and support services.   For another, we’ve really focused on promoting our applications and software demonstrations.  You can check out our live cPanel demo and our ever evolving  WordPress on WordPress blog.

We’re also promoting our SEO, marketing and web development services.  Since we have years of experience in the web industry, and we’ve been paying it forward to clients for so long, it makes sense to offer our skills as a service.  (Doesn’t mean we won’t give advice for free, because we will, because that’s how we are. )

The updates are currently on the Canadian Hosting Nation site, with many more updates to come.  Stay tuned, and happy hosting!

The project was especially exciting because we eat sushi there every Friday.  We have a standing reservation at the table in the back every Friday at 12:30 where we meet and talk shop with a few other local designers and programmers.  It’s the best sushi on Vancouver Island, everyone agrees with me so far. The fish is fresh, the service rocks, and the prices are unbelievable.

Erik always gets the Hotate with Tobiko roll (scallop and flying fish roe).  I always get a Spicy Tuna of some sort with pork Gyoza.  Randy would get the Beef Donburi and Rick likes the Kami-Kaze roll with asparagus.  Green Tea all around, of course.

Anyway, visit their new website at www.sushi-ichi.ca.  Who knows, maybe we’ll see you there!

There are over 10 tutorials in series one including:

Advanced Poll
Account Lab Plus
4Images Gallery
Crafty Syntax Live Help
b2Evolution
Coppermine Photo Galley
Moodle
Mambo
Help Center Live
Geeklog
Gallery

You can view the tutorials here.  Stay tuned for more video tutorials when Hosting Nation launches series two!

Shiloh, our corporate mascot, was adopted from the BC SPCA in 2005 by Hosting Nation GM Rick Lawrence.

Hosting Nation is more than just hosting for humans, we’re all animal lovers too.  Serious animal lovers.  So much so that our servers (Dorian and Roma) are named after one of Randy’s alpacas and his dog respectively  (Randy is our system administrator).

That’s why we chose the BC SPCA as a cause that we could all agree on.  We want to get involved in the community in a way that most people can identify with, and it’s tough to find someone who hasn’t been touched by the SPCA in some way while living on Vancouver Island.

So we’re announcing our “Pennies for Pets” promotion.  During the months of February and March 2009, 50% of all revenue from new or transferred hosting accounts will go to Central and North Vancouver Island BC SPCA organizations.  It’s our goal to raise $10,000.00 in donations for the BC SPCA, which means we need a total of 200 individuals to sign up for or switch their hosting to Hosting Nation by the deadline on March 31st 2009.

Just 200.  I don’t want to start saying things like “For Just Pennies a Day” and “For Less than a Cup of Coffee a Day”, but believe me – I will, I’m not above that sort of thing at all.  Our “Hosting for Everyone” package gives you 5Gb of storage space, 50Gb of bandwidth and a whole ton of add-ons and extras alongside awesome support for just $8.95 CAD per month.  Did we mention that half of that goes to a worthy cause?  Well it does.

No excuses citizens, we’re taking them all out of the way.  If you have hosting, it’s no problem.  We’ll credit any hosting account that you transfer to Hosting Nation with the remainder of time on your current hosting plan (up to one year).

And all you have to do is forgo 2 of your quad venti doubleshot caramel macchiatos each month.  You’ll be helping support small business in the Central Vancouver Island region and contributing to a great cause.

Visit www.hosting-nation.ca/spca for complete details of the Pennies for Pets promotion.

When we watched President Obama’s speech on the morning of the 20th, it was hard not to be impressed with the man.  He has an air of confidence rarely seen, even among the distinguished ranks of our world leaders.  As an orator, he had the world hanging on his every word.  There’s a sense of honesty there, of transparency.  A belief that he will unite the people for a common cause and will succeed where others have not.

Alright, enough gushing.  The reason I brought this up is to talk about a single word that drives everything we do at Hosting Nation.  That word is transparency.

I bring up that single word today because it’s been my belief for some time that transparency is something all businesses should aspire to, but few seem to embrace.  The need to be transparent in our dealings with the citizens of Hosting Nation (past, present and future) is a fundamental part of our vision and our mission.

It’s a tough sell.  There’s a lot of competition out there offering products and services that seem amazing and incredible.  Packages are unlimited, unmetered and at times, (we think) unmanageable. We wonder how it’s possible for companies to offer thousands of Gigabytes of bandwidth to shared hosting users when we know that dedicated servers peak out at about 3 terabytes (that’s 1024 gigabytes) and that overages are subject to additional fees.  We know that most dedicated servers have, at most, 1 or 2 Terabytes of diskspace so don’t know how other companies are able to offer shared hosting plans with diskspace in the hundreds of Gigabyte range.  Don’t get me started on unlimited plans.

I say I don’t know how they can offer it, I should say I don’t see how they could honour it.  How they offer it is loosely based on a principle I learned a long time ago called breakage.

Breakage works like this.  Essentially, a web hosting company will offer you amounts of bandwidth and diskspace that they know you won’t use.  If you do use it, they often have a clause in their TOS about “reasonable and fair usage” or “unreasonable CPU usage” so they can shut you down.  Best case scenario, a few users will go over a predetermined (usually undisclosed) amount and the web host does some fancy load balancing to make sure everyone stays up.  At worst, many people go over bringing the server to a screeching halt.

Here’s an example of how breakage works.  Let’s say that you own Sophie’s Widgets.  You sell a specific type of widget, but you’re having a tough time breaking into the market, so you decide that everyone who buys one of your $50 widgets gets 3 days and 2 nights in Las Vegas.  Sweet deal right?

The catch is that the Vegas trip is only available if you book it within a year.  And you have to pay for airfare.  But hey, airfare’s cheap.  Then you discover that you can only stay if you check in on a Sunday through Wednesday, and not on holidays.

What ends up happening is that only a small percentage of people who get the certificate are actually able to use it.  The Vegas trip only costs you if someone decides to use it.  So now you’ve sold 1000 widgets, making $50,000.00  Only 100 of the people who bought widgets were able to get to Vegas (that’s unusually high, but I’m making a point), which cost you $300.00 each for the rooms (that’s $30,000.00).  If the widgets cost you $10 each to make, you’ve still made a clean $10,000.00 and 1000 new clients.

Let me put it another way.  A burger joint claims to make the biggest burger within 100 miles.  They say that if you can eat the burger, it’s free.  If not, you have to pay for it.  The burger, if you have to pay for it, costs $40.00 (it’s REALLY big).  It costs maybe $10.00 to make.

500 people line up for the challenge.  2 of them actually manage to finish it off.  At $40.00 a pop, the restaurant has MADE $14,400 and only LOST $20.00.  (Actually, chances are they didn’t lose anything – as the 500 people trying to eat the bigger burger also brought friends who ordered other food.)

I know you’re all wondering exactly what this has to do with Hosting Nation, and I’m about to get to it.  There’s a reason we don’t offer unlimited or unreasonable amounts of bandwidth and diskspace.  Are you ready for it?  Transparency.  We’re prepared to provide you with every single byte of diskspace and bandwidth that you pay for in our Hosting for Everyone plan.  5 Gigabytes of Diskspace and 50 Gigabytes of Bandwidth.  We know that everyone on our shared servers could use that and we’d stay running.

We also receive and post real-time server reports from Hyperspin.  We want you to be able to check uptime so you know for a fact that we run at 99%-100% uptime, all the time.

Want to know more?  Visit www.hosting-nation.com for complete details on our hosting packages and current promotions.

A lot has happened for us.  New office, new logo, new website with new features.  A lot of lessons learned the hard way.  (we’ll be talking about our new design and some of those hard lessons in our upcoming segment “Behind the Servers – How Hosting Nation found it’s groove”.  It’s a working title, but there will be a segment, stay tuned).

After the dust settled, we pushed the button to go live last week.  Which brings us to today, and what’s in it for you.

Sign up for our “Hosting for Everyone” web hosting package before January 31st, 2009 and receive an 8gb USB Flash drive.  The only criteria you need to receive a USB Flash Drive are:

• You must sign up for one years’ hosting.  That includes both transfers and new hosting accounts.
• You must sign up before midnight on January 31st, 2009.

Our “Hosting for Everyone” package provides 5gb of disk space alongside 50gb of data transfer alongside our awesome addons and support services.  Read more about our hosting for everyone plan here.

You can read the complete details of the promotion here. Remember, to receive a free USB flash drive you have to sign up for web hosting by midnight PST on January 31st, 2009.

After a particularly jargon-esque day of writing legalese type documents and official notifications, I was faced with the imminent need to begin calling it something.  It wasn’t quite a flyer builder, because along with sales flyers we’d seen uses for realtors who wanted to do dynamic floorplans, uses for bands or musicians that wanted interactive gig posters and for developers who wanted interactive lot maps.  In a moment of clarity, I said “well, it’s a Dynamic Content Generator for Displaying Multimedia Content”.

But, that’s much too long, and probably wouldn’t fit on the business cards.  Several moments later, Erik (our senior developer who maintains he’s not a marketing prodigy, I have my suspicions…) comes out and says “Let’s call it Adam”.

Adam stands for Advanced Dynamic Application for creating Multimedia content.  You can check him out in glorious action at www.adamsapp.com (the domain was Erik’s idea too. When he’s on a roll, he’s on a roll).

Adam converts PDF documents into dynamic web pages.  You’ll start by uploading a PDF or image file (Adam is a hosted solution) to a personalized workspace.  There’s a drag and drop feature to add hotspots to your document, which you can reshape to fit specific areas.  Each hotspot is associated with a content field where you can add text, images, HTML and a fair sized buffet of flash objects.

Adam comes with three basic stylesheets by default so you can change the look and feel of your web document.  If you’re a CSS practitioner, you can add as many new stylesheets as you want -- so the styles are virtually limitless.

It’s important to us that Adam plays well with others in the sandbox, so we’ve worked hard to make sure he could be used for all sorts of purposes (like band posters online, sales flyers, even real estate walkthroughs.)

Supported Content Providers in Action

And the best thing (we feel) about Adam is that he’s a do it yourself option.  You have complete creative control over your materials -- and it’s simple enough that almost anyone can use it.

Peep the official Adam Forum for a full feature list and check out the blog for announcements as well for upcoming features and communication from the creators of Adam.  You can also follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/HostingNation

Adam is still quite young and has a lot of growing to do.  That’s why we’ve made a free, ad-supported version to play around with while Adam is in early stages of development.  Wanna see?  That’s cool, sign up for an account with Adam now.

Epilogue: Ever since we named Adam, I haven’t been able to get the theme song for the 60′s cartoon Atom Ant out of my head -- which is where the title of this post comes from.  Following the strange path in my head, it started as Adam, then Adam’s App, then Adam Ant (new wave singer from the late 70′s and early 80′s), then Atom Ant.  If you happen to be (like me) someone who appreciates a bit of nostalgia with their morning coffee, here’s the intro for the Atom Ant show.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIk11Qu_jtk

As a result of an automated mail system update in the early hours of Tuesday, November 25th, Hosting Nation Clients would have been unable to send or receive email.

The specific reason for this was that after the update, the mail system defaulted to a simple default configuration leaving out custom settings. As a result port 26 was disabled; and there were some problems with sender address verification.

At this time, the issue has been repaired – and you should be able to send and receive email as normal. We do know what caused the issue, and are certain we can prevent it from happening again. To verify whether an email was sent, you can check your ‘sent items’. If the message is showing as sent then it got through. If you received a ‘message rejected’ response, or the mail came back to you – it will have to be sent again. We regret any inconveniences this may cause you in your day to day business dealings.

We would really like to be able to promise 100% uptime with no outages or issues, but we simply don’t feel that’s possible. What we can promise is that 100% of the time we are committed to providing increasingly better levels of service and stability, and that when issues arise we are equally committed to resolving them as quickly as possible – most always within 12 hours or less.

As a service to clients, we are constantly working on our knowledge base – located at http://support.hosting-nation.com. In the event that you experience any issues with website outages or issues, we encourage you to submit a ticket to our helpdesk – we endeavour to respond to all tickets within the hour and resolve all issues within 24 hours.