(The Hosting News) – Proceeding a rigorous and independently performed assessment it’s internal policies and procedures controls, Codero has completed its first SAS 70 review. The purpose of SAS 70 Type I certification is to analyze the current state of a service provider’s control environment and effectiveness in meeting control objectives. This structured, multi-step process focused on the following areas:

• Operations and control environment
• Monitoring and risk assessment
• Information systems and general computer controls
• Control of access to computer programs and security of data
• Control of new development and changes to existing programs and systems
• User responsibilities

SAS 70 – Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) No. 70, Service Organizations – is a widely recognized auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), which has been in place since 1992. A Type I service auditor’s report provides a description of controls at a specific point in time; a Type II report includes the service organization’s description of controls as well as detailed testing of its controls over a minimum six-month period.

“Completing SAS 70 Type I certification has been an important process for Codero to undertake,” stated Shawn Hashmi, Director, Operations at Codero. “In light of Sarbanes-Oxley and a growing number of state privacy laws and rulings, the audit allows us to be very transparent with customers in demonstrating that we utilize a sound system of internal controls.”

With this in-depth audit now concluded, Codero is pursuing SAS 70 Type II certification for its data center and corporate-wide operations, scheduled for completion by July 31, 2010.

Auditing services for the SAS 70 Type I report were provided by Mayer Hoffman McCann P.C. (MHM) through a strategic association with CBIZ. MHM is an independent public accounting firm specializing in high quality attest and accounting services, including audits, reviews and compilations. CBIZ, with offices in major cities throughout the country, is one of the nation’s leading providers of outsourced business services, providing accounting and tax services; employee benefits and insurance; as well as a wide range of consulting services.

See SAS 70 at Codero for details on the company’s recent SAS 70 Type I audit of control objectives and activities within its Phoenix data center and Overland Park, Kansas corporate headquarters.

(The Hosting News) – Spain based web hosting firm Arsys, has officially announced it is the recipient of  Parallel’s Rookie of the Year Award by Parallels, a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software.

Faustino Jimenez, CEO of Arsys, collected the award during the Inaugural Partner Awards at the Parallels Summit 2010 in Miami, Florida that took place earlier this week. The conference brought together industry leaders from around the world to discuss trends in the hosting industry, such as cloud computing, cloud hosting and IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service).

The Parallels Rookie of the Year Award acknowledges Arsys’ significant growth in sales during the first year in the Partner Program. This is the first year Parallels recognizes this achievement. In 2009, Arsys introduced several technologies from the software company in different technology projects, such as its control panels, and new services such as Virtual Private Servers (VPS). During that same year, Arsys pioneered the development of a commercial cloud hosting platform in Spain.

“With this award we want to recognize the significant growth of Arsys over the past year. Its projects in virtualization and cloud computing are driving the hosting industry in Spain and represent a new generation of Internet services”, said Jack Zubarev, President of Parallels.

“We chose Parallels as our partner in these projects because it allows us to offer maximum reliability. The services are proof of our ongoing commitment to innovation, letting us continue to grow and deliver the highest quality to our more than 250,000 customers”, said Faustino Jiménez, CEO of Arsys.

In 2009, Arsys attained the Parallels Platinum Partner status, the highest commitment level of the Parallels Service Provider Partner Program.

(The Hosting News) – Managed hosting provider Carpathia Hosting,  stated this week  it has teamed up with Citrix® Systems, Inc. to launch the second generation of its enterprise cloud offering, Carpathia InstantOn™.  This new offering, powered by Citrix® XenServer™, InstantOn is the first cloud solution truly aimed at meeting the needs of enterprise computing for public clouds and private virtual datacenters, while delivering cloud solutions that are managed, flexible and scalable.

Carpathia InstantOn is easily-accessed and managed through Carpathia’s web-based E3 Portal™ and is powered by XenServer, the only enterprise-class, cloud-proven server virtualization platform.  Enterprises using Carpathia InstantOn can easily deploy custom compute and storage solutions, blending dedicated and cloud resources in a single solution.  Solutions are available in either multi-tenant or private clouds to meet the most stringent security and compliance requirements including government standard like FISMA and DIACAP, financial standards like PCI and healthcare standards like HIPAA.

“Delivering robust public and private cloud solutions for production-ready applications has been our focus from day one,” said Jon Greaves, CTO, Carpathia Hosting.  “With the announcement of our second generation cloud service built on Citrix XenServer, we are giving our customers additional flexibility, scale and management that further allows them to take advantage of both our enterprise cloud services as well as our traditional managed hosting services.”

Built to meet the needs of small, mid-size and large organizations with production-ready applications, the following cloud services are available with Carpathia InstantOn:

• Virtual networking. Networking solutions to support virtual compute and storage allowing InstantOn to be deployed in enterprise configurations taking advantage of solutions like Citrix® Netscaler® VPX™.

• Virtual Compute.  On-demand computing services for both simple virtual machines and complex topologies including connections to existing dedicated infrastructure in a secure manner.

• Virtual Storage. Object and block storage solutions designed to support enterprise compute requirements.  Storage can be shared between multiple virtual machines and dedicated servers with multiple copies of each object.

• Private Cloud or Private Virtual Datacenters. Virtual Compute and Storage solutions deployed in a private or reserved deployment.  Combines the advantages of cloud technology such as dynamic scaling and instant provisioning while being fully managed.

• Compliant Cloud.  Designed to meet government IT standards including FISMA and DIACAP.  Enhancements include RSA authentication, SSL VPN for management access and inter/intra virtual machine firewalling.

• Virtual Disaster Recovery. Replicated data ensures you have a current offsite copy of mission critical information at a fraction of the cost of traditional disaster recovery solutions.  Pay for cloud resources on-demand during DR testing and DR events.

Virtual Development & Test.  Virtual Compute, Storage and Networking solutions designed specifically for test labs for easy deployment and promotion into production at a dramatically lower price-point than deploying dedicated development and test lab environments.

Enterprises using Carpathia InstantOn can also easily deploy custom compute and storage solutions, blending dedicated and cloud resources in a single solution. InstantOn can be used in conjunction with Carpathia AlwaysOn™, a traditional managed dedicated hosting solution, to deliver the ultimate in flexibility.   Underlying all Carpathia InstantOn solutions is Carpathia Cloud Orchestration™.  Cloud Orchestration allows cloud and managed dedicated resources to scale seamlessly in a single solution allowing customers to select which applications and services fit best in the cloud and which should reside on dedicated infrastructure.

“We have been impressed with how Carpathia Hosting has approached building enterprise cloud solutions for public and private clouds, especially when it comes to access and payment models tailored for enterprises deploying production-ready applications,” said Simon Crosby, CTO, Datacenter and Cloud Division at Citrix Systems.  “The combination of Citrix Cloud Center (Citrix C3) and Carpathia’s unique Cloud Orchestration model has resulted in an enterprise cloud solution that is truly industry-leading.”

In addition to Carpathia InstantOn, the companies plan to team up on additional cloud offerings including virtual desktop as a service.  Carpathia Hosting and Citrix will host a live webcast on March 16 at 1:00pm EST to discuss private and public clouds for the enterprise as well as Carpathia Hosting’s second-generation InstantOn cloud service.  For more information and to register for the webcast, visit www.carpathiahosting.com/enterprisecloud.

(The Hosting News) – Linux based hosting provider PacificHost  announced it’s release of a new cPanel skin for its shared and premium hosting customers. In addition the company also announced the addition of a new auto-installer which permits it’s users to  automatically install a wide variety of new and supported scripts on its services.

cPanel is the most popular control panel used in hosting services today. Pacifichost just unveiled its new “PacificPanel” skin which hopes to bridge the gap between billing, support and managing a website. The new panel features a new twitter widget allowing clients to view the company’s twitter updates in their control panel. It also comes with a list of new icons allowing the customer to switch back and forth between their Client Portal, Support Center and cPanel account.

With the new skin came a few new custom icons, including the “Inode Distribution” and “Running Processes” icons. The Inode page allows customers to view the amount of Inodes or Files on their account. The Processes page allows clients to view processes running on their account and gives them the ability to “kill” any rogue processes that might be hanging.

“The hosting market is a very competitive market and will continue to expand as our reliance on hosting services continues to grow. Our new skin sets us a part from the competition and helps to establish our name in the hosting industry.” said Thomas Perry, the President and CEO of PacificHost.”

Earlier in the week, PacificHost replaced “Fantastico”, a well known script auto-installer in the industry with a new auto-installer known as “Softaculous”. The up and coming installer allows users to pick from over 130 scripts and advertises to be up to 2x faster than Fantastico. Additionally, Softaculous states they update scripts after releases much faster by taking only days to push out a software update.

“Even though Fantastico was free, I truly believe this increases the value of our hosting services and thus makes any cost completely worth it. This is only part of a long list of features we plan to implement as we go deeper in 2010.” said Mr. Perry.

TheVisionWorld.com developers of “Vision Helpdesk — A True Satellite / Multi-Domain Helpdesk” Today, announced their Unique High Commission Offering Affiliate Program.” The Vision Helpdesk Affiliate Program is FREE for all, you don’t have to purchase Vision helpdesk license to become Vision Helpdesk Affiliate Member” said a Company release.

The Company HR. Preeti Sharma said:

“Our affiliate program is designed to suit websites, online marketers and online web services. Best of all, It costs nothing to join our network, It’s easy to set up and you can start earning in no time.”

Vision Helpdesk Affiliate Program is offering Huge Commissions –

•               Refer a client for Leased Plan You Earn $20 per sign up.

•               Refer a client for Owned Plan You Earn $50 per sign up.

If you refer 20 owned license clients a month – You Earn $50 x 20 = $1000

She added “The unique thing of our Affiliate Program is — you can offer Vision Helpdesk Discount Coupons to your referrals too. We go beyond the basic banner referral, you can add your referral URL as a text Links; Email it to your friends and much more to make it even easier for you to sell. So Act Today! or Regret it..”

For more details on Vision Helpdesk Affiliate Program please read –

http://www.thevisionworld.com/affiliate-program

Webhostuk Limited unveils a new range of managed dedicated servers

Webhostuk Limited (http://www.webhost.uk.net), one of the UK’s leading web hosting companies, has today unveiled a new range of dedicated servers. The new servers which are managed Dell servers, use Intel Dual Core and Quad Core processors. The servers are designed for excellent and robust performance, faster response times and improved scalability. With the new Quad Core Xeon processors, powerful RAM and high capacity SATA hard drives, a user can run the most complex programs/applications with relative ease. The new Dual Quad Core server delivers eight processing cores in two physical processors which in effect offer a substantial increase in performance over its previous generation of single quad-core processors.

The launch of this new range of managed servers will now give the best dedicated hosting experience to small, medium and large business models. The company now offers free managed services along with all their dedicated server series to make things simple and easy to manage for their end user clients.

The servers reside in one of the finest World-class data centers and are connected by redundant gigabit connections. All servers come with generous bandwidth allocations and superb network backbones supported with Webhostuk Limited’s commitment to offer unmatched service and support, which helps the customers to deliver superior level of service and consistency to their end-users and achieve greater profitability. All servers are available in both Linux and Windows configurations with the choice of award winning control panel – WHM/cpanel and Parallels Plesk. A range of additional services and features such as dedicated IP’s, additional drive storage, RAID arrays, SSL certificates etc, can be added by the customer to suit their exact requirements.

Abbie Clayton, Head of Business Development, Webhostuk Limited, says “Big, small, short, tall; Webhost.uk.net continually strives to offer the best possible server solutions, equipped with the latest processing power. Our robust series of managed dedicated servers are capable and ready to meet the ever growing needs of web hosting customers and their business. We now offer managed services free of charge so that our customers can solely concentrate on the productivity of their business and revenues.

Webhostuk Limited’s dedicated servers range (http://www.webhosting.uk.net) is backed by 24×7 technical support (Email and Live Chat), offering a 100% SLA network uptime guarantee.

Nowadays the Internet is becoming a transposition of real life. All people have a virtual identity to defend in term of reputation, credibility and authoritativeness. But behavioral dynamics between virtual entities have been mapped into that virtual world too.

The concept of Love has been the first to gain interest from so-called “dating sites” such as MatchMaker or FriendFinder for example.
That interest is understandable because Love is universal and can be between people of different cultures, ethnicity, skin color and it inspires any moment of our life.

But there is in my opinion a bigger sentiment than love that strangely has not been explored in terms of virtual environment up to a couple of years ago: friendship!

In fact if the concept of love can be seen in different ways depending of different latitude (western cultures view some aspects differently than eastern), friendship is really universal and universally accepted from all people.

Despite that, before Facebook the concept of friendship was almost not implemented on the virtual world. Facebook for first has added some mechanism to accomplish that, for example the need to request friendship and the need to get added as a friends before to share content or read personal information.

What are the main charactertistics of friendship in the real world?

Facebook implemented only some major of that: enjoying, communicate each other, sharing interests. In my opinion it is missing another big element: to help each other in the time of need! Yes this aspect has not been implemented yet on a well known social network.
There is a new social network called qmpeople that is going to fullfill that gap between the concept of friendship actually implemented and the real friendship.

Thanks to a new qmpeople service helpme in fact, people can help their friends by giving them some good suggestions or, if needed, some money by using a paypal account. In a few words that service would be a middle way between Yahoo Answers and charity sites.

The reason a person asks help from qmpeople does not matter. Editors check requests to avoid scams and other tricks and users can help him if they want. For example, take a look at this story in which community helped him to repair its motorbike or this one (the italian version of qmpeople) in which we have bought a new acquarium for small turtles.

That’s really friendship!

Isn’t it?

NTT America Inc. has officially announced it’s plans to offer new and expanded capabilities across its state-of-the-art data centers and dedicated hosting platforms. The new Virtualization Services combine NTT America’s secure hosting infrastructure with VMware’s industry leading virtualization platform to deliver a highly efficient and flexible foundation for hosted IT infrastructures.

NTT America’s Virtualization Services provide customers with key benefits, including: higher server utilization; reduced number of servers; lower overall cost; increased efficiency; increased scalability; rapid deployment of new applications; and enhanced management, control and reporting of their virtualized dedicated hosting solutions. NTT America’s Virtualization Services are available now in its premier data centers located in San Jose, CA and Sterling, VA.

Through a globally unified capability designed by NTT Communications, NTT America is also offering virtualized hosting services in premier data centers located in London and Hong Kong, and later this year in Singapore. For more information about NTT Communications’ global infrastructure and its virtualization offering, called BizHosting Global in Japan, please refer to their October 27 announcement located at: www.ntt.com/aboutus_e/news/data/20091027.html.

Customers using NTT America’s global Virtualization Services gain the advantages of a single point of contact for management, support and billing; and a consistent set of Virtualization Services based on NTT Communications’ global infrastructure. Customers can quickly build and deploy follow-the-sun solutions that enhance their business continuity planning and enable them to be closer to their customers around the world.

“We are excited about our Virtualization Services and the worldwide capabilities we can deliver. The global partnership between VMware and our parent company, NTT Communications, makes it possible for us to extend the advantages of virtualization across our portfolio of dedicated hosting products and services, and enables our customers to quickly and cost-effectively meet their business goals,” said Doug McMaster, VP of Products & Solutions, NTT America. “Virtualization Services enable customers to contain costs, improve scalability, rapidly deploy new applications, improve efficiency and usage of servers, and achieve high availability for their critical business applications.”

“VMware is pleased to have NTT Communications as a service provider partner delivering enterprise-class services based on the industry-leading VMware platform,” said Dan Chu, vice president, Cloud Infrastructure and Services, VMware. “As a VMware vCloud partner, NTT America is bringing customers worldwide a highly reliable and manageable offering that is compatible with private VMware environments. We look forward to working together to enable increasingly integrated private and public cloud offerings to enterprises around the globe.”

(The Hosting News)- HostGator.com has formally announced on Monday that it had renewed its commitment to providing its customers with sustainable and environmentally friendly web hosting services.

Last week, the company renewed its agreement with 3Degrees, one of the nation’s leading renewable energy sales, trading and advisory firms, to purchase Renewal Energy Certificates (RECs) for 130% of the electricity used to power and cool HostGator’s more than 1,800 shared and reseller servers.

“It takes a lot of electricity to keep servers online and working well. That results in a bigger environmental impact than we’d like to see. As a result, we’re going to continue doing what we can to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions and help the environment,” said Brent Oxley, founder and CEO of HostGator.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, a REC represents the property rights to the environmental, social, and other nonpower qualities of renewable electricity generation.  A REC purchased by HostGator represents one megawatt hour (MWh) of renewable electricity generated and delivered to the power grid. This energy will displace the generation of conventional electricity throughout the power system and reduce emissions into the atmosphere. The certificates HostGator purchases are for wind farms in the state of Texas.

Through its purchase of RECs, HostGator prevented close to 3,600 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere in 2009. This is equivalent to the CO2 emissions generated by burning 18 railcars full of coal, or the annual CO2 emissions of 650 passenger cars. Electricity production remains the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global climate change.

HostGator purchases credits for 130% of the electricity used to power and cool the company’s servers to work towards reversing, instead of simply neutralizing, its environmental impact. Through this effort, HostGator is actively working to lower pollution, mitigate climate change, and encourage the development of our national renewable energy resources.

(The Hosting News) – A new 24×7×365 managed security services was announced by Host.net for its cloud computing customers through a partnership with network security provider StillSecure. Utilizing StillSecure’s ProtectPoint™ managed security service as a virtual appliance, Host.net can now provide 24×7×365 security monitoring and management of the virtual infrastructure, immediate response to security threats, and compliance reporting for enterprises using its cloud computing service for line-of-business applications and complex hosting.

Virtual security services including firewall, VPN, intrusion detection/prevention (IDS/IPS), vulnerability scanning, web security, and email security can be purchased from Host.net on a subscription basis as either a standalone solution or service bundle. Services can be configured for monitoring both gateway and internal connections, providing comprehensive protection against internal and external threats. All security services are backed by a 24×7×365 SAS-70 Type II audited Security Operations Center (SOC) that is staffed by certified security analysts.

The new virtual-based security services offer the same vigilant protection, monitoring and management as the hardware appliance-based service with the added benefits of standard high-availability redundancy, near-immediate failover in the event of a virtual equipment failure, and the ability to rapidly upgrade and add system resources (CPU, RAM and disk) when a specific client’s traffic and workload demand more horsepower from the firewall.

“Host.net is one step ahead of most data centers because they truly understand the importance of embedding security within the virtual environment,” said Steve Harris, VP of Managed Services at StillSecure. “Host.net customers save time and money by leveraging the pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run VMware version of our ProtectPoint managed security services.”

“We had the rare opportunity to team with StillSecure during the strategy and design phase of their new platform. The result is a product that protects the customer’s mission with CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability),” said Roger Barranco, Host.net’s Chief Technology Officer and VP of Operations. “Host.net uniquely interweaves security throughout the platform rather than simply layering security on top of their infrastructure as other providers do. It’s a critical addition to our service portfolio that will help keep our clients’ virtual infrastructure safe from both inside and outside attacks.”

Host.net’s new StillSecure-based managed security service extends the competitive advantages of Host.net’s cloud computing platform, which focuses on performance, high availability and data protection. Benefits of Host.net’s cloud computing services include 300-500% performance increases over standard hosted SAN solutions, recovery of virtual machines within one minute of a host failure, full data backup to one on-site and one off-site storage subsystem within Host.net’s own national virtual private data center (vPDC) network for near-immediate disaster recovery, and optional replication to additional Host.net sites for added security and redundancy.

As a single source for virtual enterprise server, SAN storage, backup/restore, disaster recovery, colocation, Internet access, multinational transport, MPLS, Metro Ethernet, managed security and IP voice, Host.net leverages their capabilities to ensure the integrity and availability of their clients’ data.