We are pleased to announce that ServerBeach, our Dedicated Hosting division has rolled out some new product offerings today. Do you have large-scale, mission critical applications, stream media or rely heavily on database and e-commerce, but don’t need managed services? Then have a look at these new ServerBeach Dedicated Hosting offers.

We’ve had a lot of interest in the past about remote data backup services from PEER 1 Co-location customers. We’ve been working on a solution and are happy to announce that we now have a disaster recovery offering you can take advantage of. IBM Tivoli® to EMC2® SAN Backup Service is now available to Co-location customers. Until now, this service was only available to our Managed Hosting customers. Remote backup allows you to protect your data and avoid critical downtime and losses in revenue, and enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing your mission-critical data is safe and recoverable. Here’s how it works:

Your data is stored in a remote PEER 1 Data Center located in Atlanta GA, Miami FL* or Fremont CA on a high performance storage area network (SAN). You get full backups of non-excluded data and progressive incremental backups of changed data. Your server hard drive can be set for secure, encrypted daily or weekly backups. You can:

• Recover from hardware failures.
• Reverse human errors from deletions of files or directories.
• Recover from damaged disk or data loss.
• Enjoy enterprise level reliability and availability at a low price.

If you are interested in this service, just call your PEER 1 sales representative at 1.866.683.7747 or email sales@peer1.com

*Co-location clients in our Miami FL Data Center will have their data backed up to the Miami-based Tivoli backup system.

What do PEER 1 and a racetrack have in common? Well PEER 1 has just sponsored two of its employees, system administrators Kevin Lee and Elson Rodriguez, to race in the 24 Hours of LeMons at the Carolina Motorsports Park in Kershaw, South Carolina. Yes, sys admins do have a life outside of the data center.

What is 24 Hours of LeMons you ask? It’s a weekend-long race for cars purchased, fixed up, and track-prepped for total of only $500 or less.

Kevin Lee’s team, “On The Run From Nuns” spent a total of two months working after hours, visiting junkyards on a regular basis, to put together a 1981 Turbo Diesel Mercedes for the race.  The team had no outside help and completely rebuilt the car themselves.

“I spent so much time at junkyards, I never want to see another one again,” said Kevin. “We spent two months straight prior to the race literally tearing the car down and replacing every part on the motor.”

The fantastic 2-day event was an experience for all involved, even through the pouring down rain on Saturday and the blistering hot sun on Sunday. Kevin Lee and Team wound up placing 25th out of 74 cars total, after a broken trans axle took them out of the race mere minutes before its end!

Each team in the race can also face crazy qualifying rounds such as the Marxist Parking Valet, the Widdling Rottweiler Slalom, and/or the Stoney Bike-Messenger Shooting Gallery. Generally, track racing consists of two endurance sessions, one on Saturday and one on Sunday, with a late-night intermission for sleeping, eating, and Band-Aid application in between.

Count on plenty of noise, prizes, water fights, and questionably civilized fun before, during, and after the track sessions. Finally, assuming you’re still standing, there’s the gala awards ceremony, which presents trophies, plaques, and winner’s purses paid out in nickels – yes nickels.

Being the Community Evangelist for PEER 1, I was able to fly out to South Carolina and attend this event taking videos and getting a few interviews – one of them being with Jay Lamm, “The Chief Perpetrator.”  The 24 Hours of LeMons is his of Jay’s, an Emeryville entrepreneur who produced the editorial content of specialty publications back in the ‘90s — car magazines touting, for example, Corvettes.

Jay now owns his own company, DriversDoor Inc. that produces cover-to-cover books and magazines for outside clients who don’t want to run their own editorial staff.

“I wanted to make this race a real challenge,” Lamm said of his decidedly down-market contest, “and one way to do that is make sure it’s a really crappy car and you have to make it (run) anyway.”

It was definitely a challenge and the PEER 1 team survived the noise, grit, grime and FUN!

You can view the full video on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbU8u9K5-nA

PEER 1’s very own Kevin Lee will be taking part in the endurance automobile race known as “24 Hours of LeMons” this year. Kevin and his team, including Elson Rodriguez - another PEER 1 employee in our Atlanta office, will be sponsored by PEER 1 to put the pedal to the metal. They have spent countless hours preparing their 1982 Mercedes 300 Turbo Diesel, enjoying long days of being covered in grease and oil, pinched fingers, and tossing a few choice words around.

“Nasty. Brutish. Not Short Enough.

The crowd. The spectacle. The pall of blue smoke and roasted clutch discs. In all motorsport, no event captures the universal human need to whale on old crapcans and hoover down greasy barbecue like the 24 Hours of LeMons. “

The race takes place July 26-27 at the Carolina Motorsports Park in Kershaw, South Carolina and the website for the event is http://24hoursoflemons.com.

“Each LeMons race is for cars purchased, fixed up, and track-prepped for a total of 500 dollars or less. But before reaching the grid, you’ll have to survive trials like the Personal-Injury-Lawyer Anti-Slalom, the Marxist-Valet Parking Challenge, and the Wide Open Throttle Rodthrowapalooza. Twelve hours into the race, the car voted People’s Choice is called in and awarded a cash prize; simultaneously, the car voted People’s Curse is called in and summarily destroyed. At the end of 24 hours, a gala awards ceremony plies the survivors with trophies, plaques, and four-figure purses in canvas bags full of nickels. What’s not to like?”

To take a peek of what Kevin and his Team are faced with, click here.
To view pictures of Kevin and Team working on their uh…”work in progress”, click here.

Stay tuned for more pictures, videos, and interviews when the event takes place!

PEER 1 service was disrupted yesterday, July 14th due to an underground fire in downtown Vancouver, BC. A series of unprecedented events came into play as an entire BC Hydro substation was put out of service for approximately 2200 customers; water pressure was reduced, impacting the building’s main generator cooling system.

We are taking yesterday’s outage very seriously, as we know our customers depend on us as their trusted IT infrastructure provider. We are conducting a full review of our key efficiencies and fail safe measures to ensure that this type of unlikely series of events does not occur again. We are working with our Vancouver building management and looking at corrective action in that regard, as well as research and review the best practice methods in the days ahead.

In the meantime, our customers remain our most important asset and we will fully honor our service level agreements. Our policy as a company is to maintain open communication and to be transparent in updating our customers on what is going on within the company whether we are reporting good news or bad. In this situation, our PEER 1 team across North America pulled together to offer customer and technical support during and after the disruption.

PEER 1 President’s Message and Timeline of Events

If you were not able to attend the Structure 08 conference in San Francisco on June 25th, you can watch it here:

I was invited by Techvibes to write a blog post about the first ever Structure 08 conference hosted by GigaOM, which I attended and my company PEER 1 sponsored. It was held on June 25th in San Francisco at the Mission Bay Conference Center:

Just got back from the Structure 08 conference hosted by GigaOM and headline sponsored by my company, Vancouver-based PEER 1. The sold out event was a tremendous success with over 600 people in attendance representing companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and VMWare. A third of the conference room was allocated to media alone.

Making the decision to sponsor Structure 08 was an easy one. It is so rare to have a room full of the brightest minds discussing and debating the latest technology impacting IT infrastructure. “Cloud Computing” was by far the topic of the day, a buzz term that seems to encompass anything related to virtualization or on-demand scalable web hosting, which is sometimes, well, cloudy.

The line up of speakers included Jonathan Yarmis of AMR Research, Mendel Rosenblum of VMWare, and a heated discussion that included panelists from Google, AT&T, GigaSpaces, Mosso, Joyent, and XCalibre. Read more

PEER 1 will host a free webinar with partners OnDemand Solutions and Mural Ventures, Tuesday, June 24 at 2 p.m. EDT. In this first-time event, industry experts will share their extensive experience and innovative methodologies that have helped ISVs build successful and profitable Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Attendees will learn how to escape pitfalls that have hobbled other ISVs, potentially saving their businesses thousands of dollars.

SaaS is here to stay, with an estimated 25 percent of all software delivered in the next few years expected to be SaaS, according to Gartner projections. As successful SaaS companies know, in order to take advantage of the considerable benefits of this delivery method you must run your company in a completely new and different way rather than rely on the traditional methods. This webinar will help companies avoid many of the more common mistakes.

What: Free webinar on “The Seven Deadly Mistakes of ISV SaaS Offerings,” which include:

• Cannibalizing your current revenue by providing your existing offering to the same customers
• Underestimating the power of and need for customer service in the SaaS model
• Offering free trials that don’t convert prospects to customers
• Underestimating the importance of web-centricity for marketing, sales and support

Who: Featured speakers

• Mike Jalonen, CEO, OnDemand Solutions
• Jeff Hagins, Partner and CTO, Mural Ventures
• Robert Miggins, Vice President of Business Development, PEER 1

When: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 – 2:00 p.m. Eastern

To Attend: For more information and registration visit http://www.bulldogsolutions.net/Peer1/PER06242008/frmRegistration.aspx?bdls=15176

“We are very pleased to be offering this valuable webinar along with our partners,” said Robert Miggins, vice president of business development for PEER 1. “Through our experiences we have found there are many reoccurring key issues that business owners and developers alike are unaware of. Through this presentation we will give listeners practical steps and insight to address these issues and in turn increase customer reach and satisfaction.”

About PEER 1
PEER 1, a leading online IT infrastructure provider, believes in the limitless opportunity of the Internet and the business growth and continuity it provides for its more than 10,000 customers. PEER 1 delivers highly scalable managed hosting and co-location solutions to ensure customers’ online presence is always fast, always available. Since 1999, PEER 1 has grown to include data centers and network points of presence in 17 major cities across North America and Europe. Serving a variety of companies, PEER 1 offers solutions that grow through every stage of web commerce, regardless of company size. The company’s headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada and the stock is traded on the TSX under the symbol PIX. For more information visit: http://www.peer1.com.

About ODS
OnDemand Solutions provides business and technical services to established and startup organizations who are already using, or who are looking to use, the OnDemand or “Software as a Service” (SaaS) delivery model. Our services and best practices are designed to rapidly develop and launch new OnDemand and SaaS businesses, accelerate growth for organizations with a current SaaS offering, and assist independent software vendors (ISVs) to convert from a perpetual license model to a subscription revenue model.

About Mural Ventures
Mural Consulting is a specialized team of Software-as-a-Service experts. We work with ISVs and Service Providers to create SaaS strategies that drive real actions, and then execute those actions side-by-side with our clients. We deliver business success in the fast-changing, competitive SaaS environment. Mural has conducted over 300 executive SaaS business design sessions globally. From that experience, we’ve assembled 8 Key Success Factors for SaaS success. These KSFs form the foundation for all of our strategy and execution services.

Om Malik is reporting today that the Structure 08 event on June 25th is almost sold out… in fact at the time of his post, there are only 25 tickets remaining. PEER 1 is the proud headline sponsor and we’re ecstatic with the enthusiasm in this event. Om is right, the lineup of speakers and panelists is simply outstanding and we expect the discussion to be lively and very, very informative. Panel topics include:

• Working the Clouds: NextGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs
• The New New Stack: Re-examining the Internet Platform Chain
• The Race to the Next Database: Overclocking and Analytics Augment Your Data Layer
• Harnessing Explosive Growth: Infrastructure Strategies and Tactics
• Infrastructure On Demand: Should You Build Your Future on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)?
• Eyes Wide Shut: Why is the VC Community Keeping Its Wallet Shut to Infrastructure?

Read more

PEER 1 Growing Pains Episode 3 - ‘100% Downtime’.

Janet is at Todd’s bedside in the hospital while he lies in a coma. She speaks to him and he appears to be responding, until things get unplugged…