SSD Reserved Cloud Severs
We have many customers who are enjoying the performance of our Reserved Cloud Servers. I’m happy to announce that we’ve made them even better.
All Reserved Cloud Servers are now upgraded with high performance Solid State Drives (SSD) and with no additional cost. With this upgrade you should see an increase in site performance.
Mr. Ossou already alerted you to the upcoming Silicon Valley Code Camp (October 11th and 12th), but in the spirit of “more is more,” here’s my own personal announcement.
Maybe you’ve been to a code camp in your neighborhood. Los Angeles has three of them, and they’re all pretty sizable. But there’s sizable and then there’s huge, and Silicon Valley is huge. So multiply your local code camp by two or three times, then double that, and you’ll be pretty close to comprehending the crazy sea of humanity that attends Silicon Valley.
The mother of all code camps is only weeks away.
Attendance for the Silicon Valley Code Camp is usually over 5,000 people and this year we are expecting even more. As long time supporters of code camps, user groups, and the ASP.NET community at large, I can tell you this is the big one.
So we went through our first Windows Azure Pack update and we also did the latest Windows update as well. The entire project was done in three phases. First, we updated our back end infrastructure, then updated Windows Azure Pack, and then we applied the latest Windows updates.
To update our back end infrastructure, we announced and scheduled a 10 minute outage mainly to update our databases to make way for the changes in the Windows Azure Pack update. While we never like taking an outage, in our testing in our dev environment a short outage was the cleanest way of getting the WAP update done without introducing a lot of other technical issues.
You may have assumed that the Everleap blog ran on Everleap servers, but until now, that hasn’t been the case.
Most businesses that provide public hosting services like we do also maintain separate “corporate” servers. Not necessarily for performance reasons, but for security, maintenance, legal, or any number of other reasons.
So this blog ran on a dedicated FreeBSD server. It uses WordPress, a php application, and most people still run those on linux or some other decidedly non-Windows server.
A while back I read an interesting blog post by the Product Manager for Microsoft TFS about their TFS Azure support. The thing that really caught my attention was this:
“I was having a conversation with my team about our need to have a better support path from our web site. We need a “contact us” capability that enables you to send an electronic message that will get attention…”
Sounds like he’s talking about, you know, a helpdesk.
In a DiscountASP.NET support ticket the other day someone said to me, “I don’t want to talk cloud. That is such a bogus term and concept.” I was telling him about Everleap, since it would have been a good solution for a problem he was having, but I understand why he reacted like that.
The term “cloud” has been misused and abused to the point where it has become meaningless to a lot of people. Often when we talk to people about the modern hosting platform we’re running here and say to them, “You might want to try our Everleap Cloud Servers,” they just roll their eyes and sigh.
Through our chats with people at Code Camps, from the sales questions that come in and from the partners and vendors we interact with, we’ve heard the question “What is Windows Azure Pack” many times, so I wanted to address the question here.
Windows Azure Pack (WAP) is a collection of Microsoft Azure technologies that Microsoft is making available to Microsoft partners. It’s not the entire Microsoft Azure back end and it’s not the new stuff in beta or preview. WAP encompasses some of the more mature and tested portions of the Microsoft Azure technologies – it has to be mature since Microsoft will need to support it if they are giving it to partners.
What are you doing this Thursday at two o’clock?
If you’re not sure, then I have a suggestion for you; join us for our first (kind of) Google+ Hangout!
I say that it’s “kind of” our first Hangout because we’ve been doing Hangouts for DiscountASP.NET for almost two years, but this is the first for Everleap. And it will also be the first time we attempt a live demo, so you may want to show up and see if we can pull it off. 😉
Everleap is true cloud website hosting, built especially for those of you who like the features of the big cloud services like Azure or Amazon, but don’t need – or want to deal with – their complexity and cost. Take a look at how Everleap works.
It was created by the same people who brought you DiscountASP.NET, which has a decade long history of award-winning, best-in-class ASP.NET hosting. Our specialty is serving the ASP.NET development world, but these days we serve developers of all different stripes.
As part of that ongoing service to the development community, we’ve spent the past year building Everleap.