Daily Archives: July 15, 2010

Rackspace Hosting, the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry, has announced that the new South Africa Tourism website is being hosted by Rackspace Hosting.

“As part of the successful 2010 Soccer World Cup event, the SA Tourism site is considered a critical component of its success” said SA Tourism e-Marketing Manager William Price, “The number of site visitors sky-rocketed following the reconstruction of our new site rising to a total of more than 250,000 a month since June 2009. This reflects an increase of more than 600%. Our site availability is of paramount importance to SA Tourism and for this reason our organisation had no hesitation in approaching international hosting and cloud computing specialist Rackspace to host the site. The site’s objective of a 1-million unique visitor count this year has already been more than achieved”

The SA Tourism website is comprehensive without being overwhelming and offers a wealth of information, neatly categorised and easily available. Hot buttons include Best of SA, Traveller, Business Tourism, Media, Research, Plan your trip and About SA. Other information-rich features include Adventure & Sport, Wildlife & Safari, Culture and Heritage, Natural & Scenic and Entertainment & Leisure.

“Rackspace has been extremely responsive to our needs” added Price. “They are indeed fanatical about their customer service and very proactive. Rackspace provided highly professional assistance with our migration and their proactive approach has pre-empted possible problems. Support of this calibre makes our user experience as smooth and rewarding as possible and is vital for our consumer-centric approach. We cannot tolerate site downtime and hence we have a 100% network uptime guarantee with Rackspace”

Ongoing hosting service from Rackspace helps enable SA Tourism to achieve its objectives of being the authority on South Africa travel information and meet the overall needs of first-time English-speaking visitors to South Africa.

“Every day, we try to help our customers take full advantage of Computing-as-a-Service models, such as hosting, cloud computing and SaaS, to power their businesses” said Brian Thomson, EMEA Managing Director at Rackspace Hosting. “This enables organisations like SA Tourism to benefit from lower costs, reduced IT complexity and increased productivity”

About Rackspace Hosting:
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leading specialist in hosting and cloud computing industry and has been ranked in Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past six years. Rackspace Hosting UK provides Fanatical Support to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Dedicated Hosting, cloud hosting and data centre facilities .

www.rackspace.co.uk

Award-winning dedicated server and web hosting company Superb Internet added the top-drawer Parallels Small Business Panel to its product line today.

Parallels, a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software, developed the control panel specifically with small-to-medium businesses in mind—extremely cost-effective with exceptional ease of use, the panel streamlines operations and offers one-stop access to programs and applications.

“Parallels has always been a pioneer in software development, consistently innovating game-changing products for the consumer, businesses, and service provider-markets” says William Song, Senior Product Manager at Superb Internet, “The Small Business Panel, which is extremely feature-rich and retains many of the elements of Parallels’ popular Plesk Panel, is the latest example of that and we’re excited to introduce it to our dedicated server and managed hosting customers.”

To introduce the new product, Superb is offering special pricing for the Small Business Panel. “We want to continuously provide the latest and best technology to our valued customers, and we hope to encourage them to take advantage of the Parallels panel by offering it at a competitive price,” explains Song. The Parallels Small Business Panel is now available to Superb dedicated server and managed hosting customers starting at $18 per month (regular price $25).

About Superb Internet Corporation
Since 1996, Superb Internet has been consistently recognized as a premier web host by leading trade organizations and publications, such as Find My Host and Web Hosting Magazine. Earning accolades in all key service areas—including customer support, managed dedicated servers, and reseller services— Superb Internet provides a complete range of managed web hosting solutions. The company serves clients in more than 150 countries worldwide, providing virtual shared web hosting, dedicated & managed services, and high-volume, mission-critical high-availability geographically-dispersed cluster solutions. Focusing on providing exceptional customer service and reliability (offering an industry-leading 100% uptime guarantee), Superb is committed to staying “Ahead of the Rest.”

Superb Internet is headquartered in Honolulu, HI, with company-owned data centers staffed 24/7/365 in McLean and Springfield, VA and Seattle, WA, as well as its own coast-to-coast IP backbone. For more information about Superb Internet Corporation,.

www.superb.net

The Planet, the global hosting leader, today announced that Chairman and CEO Douglas J. Erwin will be a featured speaker on two conference panels at HostingCon 2010, which takes place July 19-21 in Austin, Texas. Web Hosting Evangelist Kevin Hazard will also participate in a panel on social media.

Erwin’s first appearance will be at the conference track titled, “Adding Value to Your Business With Financial and Operating Metrics,” scheduled for Monday, July 19, at 9 a.m. CDT. Erwin joins executives from Endurance International, SingleHop, Corelink Data Centers and Cheval Capital in discussing methods used to track business and create value. The session will be moderated by hosting legal expert David Snead.

Erwin’s second panel takes place later that day at 1 p.m., titled, “Opportunities and Advantages for Hosting Resellers.” Moderated by Liam Eagle, editor of the Web Host Industry Review, Erwin will join executives from Tucows and A Small Orange to share perspectives on reselling hosting services, including how to optimize business operations through partnerships and new technologies, such as the cloud.

On the second day of the conference, Hazard will participate in a panel that examines how hosting companies can best utilize social media marketing to drive brand awareness, gain feedback and ultimately increase profits. The session, titled “Optimizing Social Media for Branding, Traffic and Sales,” is slated for July 20 at 9 a.m. and includes social media experts from NameDynamics, Resolution Media and Appbistro.com.

The Planet is a silver sponsor of the conference, and will showcase its hosting and cloud solutions at booth 124 of the expo. There, the company will continue its popular Server Challenge, which tasks conference attendees to post the fastest time in correctly rebuilding a server. Giveaways will include an Asus Eee PC netbook and a Flip video camcorder. The Planet is also running show specials, with discounts on various hosting and cloud solutions available to those who visit the booth.

For more information on The Planet at HostingCon, visit http://www.theplanet.com/events.

About The Planet

The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 18,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 12 million Web sites worldwide. Customers have the power to choose from the broadest range of hosting solutions in the industry, from dedicated servers, Managed Dedicated Servers, Managed Hosting and data center colocation, all backed by 24x7x365 support. With the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class service, backed by state-of-the-art data centers and an enterprise-class network, The Planet turns IT into a powerful competitive advantage that enables customers to grow their businesses. For additional information, visit http://www.theplanet.com