Daily Archives: January 5, 2012

2 posts

Certified Hosting Announces Free CloudFlare Hosting

Certified Hosting, a leading web hosting provider offering shared web hosting, reseller hosting, and dedicated server hosting plans, announced today the introduction of CloudFlare functionality through all shared hosting and reseller hosting services. The service, which is fully integrated with Certified Hosting’s existing cPanel web hosting setup, improves website performance and security for a better, safer, and more dependable end-user experience.

“We have been in discussions with CloudFlare for a while now, and we have worked hard to bring this incredible new technology to our customers,” says Kacy Carlsen, co-founder and CEO of Certified Hosting. “With the click of a button on their existing cPanel installation, our shared hosting and reseller hosting customers can now provide a faster, more responsive service to their end-users, without worrying about downtime or threats to their security.”

Launched just over a year ago, CloudFlare was initially developed with a focus on securing websites and protecting them against a range of potentially crippling online attacks. Developers Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn began creating a “firewall in the cloud” where visitor traffic passes through one of 13 data centers before it reaches your website. Here, traffic can be monitored, and in the event of a traffic spike, CloudFlare automatically checks for signs of spamming, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and bot crawling. Most distinctively, since the CloudFlare servers act as proxies to numerous websites, the CloudFlare security system actively learns from attacks and grows progressively more intelligent over time. As a result, Certified Hosting users who opt for CloudFlare functionality can be confident that their website is robustly defended at all times.

“CloudFlare takes security off of the list of things our users have to manage for themselves,” explains Carlsen. “After selecting a security level for their website, our shared web hosting users can let CloudFlare manage their security with no further input required. Even better, in the event that a web hosting server does become overloaded with disruptive traffic, the CloudFlare system automatically calls upon a cached version of the website from one of the distributed cloud servers. Our customers can be completely assured that their website is available to end-users consistently, and is always performing at its best.”

The cloud-based distributed nature of CloudFlare does not only impact website security – Certified Hosting customers will also notice significant improvements to the speed and performance of their website. Usually, when an end-user logs on to a page, the content must be transmitted from one static server to their home computer. Potentially, this requires traffic to be routed around the entire world. When using CloudFlare, a mirrored version of the website can be accessed on the CloudFlare server that is geographically nearest to the user. As a result, page loading times decrease dramatically and customers are able to view website content or place orders quicker than ever before.

“We are pleased to add Certified Hosting as a partner,” says Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of CloudFlare. “Certified Hosting has integrated CloudFlare into their control panel, making it simple to offer improved website performance and security to all of their customers.”

“CloudFlare makes accessing websites lightning-fast, while also making sites more secure,” says Carlsen. “But I guess the thing I like most about CloudFlare is that it works perfectly, without requiring our customers to learn a completely new system. At Certified Hosting, we are always looking for new ways to give our customers better service on their unlimited web hosting plans, without introducing complexity.”

As Certified Hosting has grown, the company’s commitment to improving its flagship unlimited hosting services has always remained at the forefront. Now, with the addition of easy-to-deploy CloudFlare functionality, every customer can enjoy new and improved features at no extra cost.

For more information on Certified Hosting and CloudFlare hosting services, visit certifiedhosting.com.

About Certified Hosting
Certified Hosting was established in 1999 as a Southern California-based unlimited web hosting company to provide shared hosting, reseller hosting, and managed dedicated servers to Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and individuals throughout the world. Recognizing that each client has unique goals, Certified Hosting tailors hosting services to meet the individualized service needs of clients in many specific industries. Some, but not all, Certified Hosting services include unlimited FFmpeg hosting, Flash hosting, WordPress hosting, Dolphin hosting, Elgg hosting, Magento, Joomla, Drupal, and PHPmotion hosting, among many other technologies used by webmasters and business owners.

For more information about Certified Hosting, visit certifiedhosting.com.

Internap Acquires Web Host Voxel

Internap Network Services a provider of intelligent IT Infrastructure services, today announced that it has acquired Voxel Holdings, Inc., a provider of scalable hosting and cloud services for the enterprise, in an all cash transaction valued at approximately $30 million, plus an additional potential $5 million in cash tied to the delivery of specific objectives during the next two years. The transaction was closed on Friday, December 30, 2011. Headquartered in New York City, with a global presence extending into North America, Europe and Asia, Voxel serves more than 1,000 customers and has approximately 50 employees.

The combination significantly enhances Internap’s flexible IT Infrastructure platform with the addition of Voxel’s dedicated hosting and cloud products. Voxel’s offerings are highly complementary to Internap’s existing portfolio and provide a level of automation and self-service that will be available immediately to Internap’s customer base. Voxel also extends Internap’s addressable market, enabling the company to serve early- to mid-stage IT Infrastructure customers seeking dedicated hosting services, a high-growth market currently estimated by Tier1 Research to reach approximately $3 billion in 2012.

“As IT Infrastructure outsourcing advances, enterprises increasingly seek service providers to support myriad applications and workloads throughout their entire IT lifecycle,” said Eric Cooney, president and chief executive officer of Internap. “This acquisition of Voxel increases Internap’s market share and growth rate, accelerates our product roadmap and creates an unmatched competitive position as an IT Infrastructure services provider.”

Voxel provides on-demand dedicated hosting and cloud services to enterprises and web-centric businesses. Founded in 1999, with strong roots in software development, Voxel has leveraged deep industry expertise, modular components and intelligent automation to overcome the complexities of both dedicated and cloud environments and provide highly agile infrastructure management solutions. Its dedicated hosting offering provides customers with a robust online interface and comprehensive API that enables them to provision and activate services in minutes, gaining cloud-like flexibility from dedicated physical servers. Moreover, customers can also seamlessly integrate physical servers and cloud instances in the same environment, overcoming a typical barrier to enterprise cloud adoption for use with legacy or complex custom application stacks.

By adding Voxel’s service locations in Amsterdam and Singapore to Internap’s existing service locations, the combined company will offer a truly global platform of colocation, managed hosting, dedicated hosting and cloud services. Additionally, Voxel’s automation technologies and expertise will be leveraged to enhance the existing Internap product set.

“We are excited to be joining Internap, a company that shares our commitment to developing innovative IT Infrastructure solutions to drive the next generation of Internet and cloud applications,” said Raul K. Martynek, president and chief executive officer of Voxel. “The combination of Internap’s broad market presence and robust, high-performance IT Infrastructure platform with our expertise in automated hosting and cloud services will deliver a powerful option for a broad range of enterprise customers.”

Voxel was backed by Seaport Capital in New York. DH Capital served as financial advisor for Voxel. – www.internap.com