Last week, several members of the FireHost team made the long, arduous trip from Dallas to Austin for HostingCon 2010. Here’s the insiders perspective on the “who” and “what” from the event this year.

Meeting up with industry friends and partners was certainly the overall highlight of HostingCon 2010. Interfacing with our peers, competitors, and service providers was a great reminder of how many truly awesome people and companies exist in the hosting industry.

For Fun

The Planet‘s booth provided a very entertaining “assemble a Dell server as fast as you can” challenge. The whole spectacle got quite a bit of attention, and our very own Chris Hinkley was the fourth fastest assembler on the final day of the event. (Unfortunately, only 1st-3rd place received a prize, so the accomplishment will only live on in his mind.)

The Trustwave booth’s theme for 2010 was “Knock Out High Prices”. Cool concept, and they actually had a boxing ring setup where attendees could hop in the ring and punch a guy with a “high prices” t-shirt. It drew a lot of attention, but very few people were brave enough to hop in to take a swing. So on the last day, Trustwave brought in some semi-pro wrestlers to help drive the message home.

On a More Serious Note

Security topics dominated many of the sessions and discussions. As well, “the cloud” in general was a hot topic. It seems industry-wide, multiple definitions of “cloud” exist, and compared to last year, even more interpretations have come to light. That’s somewhat counter intuitive since you’d expect a more concise explanation would emerge over time.

Collectively, our team walked away confident that FireHost is leading the secure web hosting pack, and we have a “golden opportunity” to help real businesses solve compliance challenges and achieve a higher level of security in general. We’re excited to be pioneering an affordable, scalable secure hosting solution for companies of all sizes.

All-in-all, HostingCon 2010 was a fantastic event. The relationships, the knowledge, the partnerships, the industry insight, and even the time spent “car pooling” was a valuable opportunity for team building.

See you in San Diego!

The process of determining how to commemorate this grand occasion was… entertaining (at least to us). So for your amusement, here are some of the ideas that didn’t make the cut:

• We could reveal our secret Secure Server sauce.
• We could raffle deprecated hardware for charity.
• We could post pictures from the company picnic.
• We could post pictures from AFTER the company picnic.
• We could give our semi-professional review of Inception.
• We could post high school yearbook pictures of our CEO.
• We could discuss the weather in Texas and Arizona. (It’s hot. End of discussion.)
• We could TP our competition with #NMD toilet paper, and post the photos.

We considered all of these (bad) ideas (and more), but in the end we determined the best use of this space might be creating a concise recap of all the other mediums by which our loyal blog readers can stay updated about FireHost’s initiatives, news, services, strides, and successes in the Secure Web Hosting marketplace.

On the Web

• FireHost Website
• NoMoreDedicated Website
• Revolution Blog by Chris Drake

In the News

• FireHost Newsroom

In Social Media

• Twitter.com/FireHost
• Twitter.com/NoMoreDedicated
• Facebook

For Support

• MyFireHost Customer Portal
• Knowledge Base

We invite you to explore each outlet and hope you can use and appreciate each one for it’s intended purpose. Please feel free to reach out to us via any medium any time the urge strikes.

In a recent interview, founders Jay Osterholt and Jeff Moore talked with WCPO-TV in Cincinnati about My Child’s Locket’s capabilities and the role Secure Web Hosting plays in protecting their clients’ identities.

We’re so proud to be protecting this and other businesses who need shelter from malicious hacker activity. Thanks for the trust.

Stevie Awards honor American companies and business people from organizations in a variety of industries. The other four nominees have useful, innovate, and very smart products and services that can significantly improve your e-life, so please check them out.

• Data Robotics, Inc’s DroboElite Self-managing iSCSI SAN
• DocuSign’s Mobile Extension enabling users to securely e-sign documents from more than two dozen mobile devices
• Novell’s SUSE Studio for flexible and friendly Linux customization
• Zebra Technologies ZXP Series 8 retransfer printer which produces photo-like images FAST

As you can see, we’ll need your help to out class this year’s very qualified competition. Please help us win by clicking the icon below.

We appreciate your endorsement. The winner will be announced in June.

The full list of finalists from all New Products and Product Management Categories for 2010 is listed on the Stevie Awards website.

The entire FireHost team is excited and honored by this recognition. We want to thank the other finalists for providing stiff competition, and we want to appreciate the CODiE Judges for picking us out of the crowd.

We will wear our CODiE badge proudly as we uphold our mission of making a secure web hosting environment available to companies of all sizes.

A list of all 34 CODiE Award Winners from various categories is now listed on the SIIA website.

FireHost has been nominated “Favorite Service” for 2010 by The American Business Awards, and we need your help to win!

We understand that your time is precious, so we’ll cut to the chase. If FireHost is your Favorite Service of 2010, please cast a vote. It’s easy. You’re only four quick clicks away.

1. Click here to visit the Stevie Awards voting page.
2. Type “D532H” into the box right of Vote with Short Code.
3. Click submit.
4. Register your vote (shhh! we won’t tell if you use a fake email address), and you’re done.

The Stevie Awards were created in 2002 to honor and generate public recognition of the achievements and positive contributions of organizations and business people in America. The competition pits firms of similar size and industry against one other in “weight classes” of sorts, so small and medium-size companies have the same exposure and opportunity to be recognized as a Fortune 100 company.

“We’re proud to be considered as a Favorite Service of 2010. FireHost is committed to providing the highest service levels and innovative hosting solutions to our customers. If you feel we’re living up to that promise, now’s your chance to tell the world,” said Chris Drake, CEO in an open invitation to current clients and business associates. “The past Stevie Award winners and finalist are all amazing companies. We’d be proud to have this association with them.”

The full list of winners and finalists from last year include innovative companies like LifeLock, Citrix Online, WhiteHat Security, and YouSendIt to name a few.

We constantly strive to make enterprise-grade hosting features available for companies of all sizes, and VMWare’s vShield™ capabilities (introduced last summer) have helped fulfill our mission. vShield™ marks a significant advance in virtualization technology by providing a “shared [multi-tenant] computing resource pool, while still maintaining trust and network segmentation of users and sensitive data.”

We quickly realized adding vShield™ to our secure hosting infrastructure would make it possible to package the power and privacy of dedicated servers with cloud-like scalability, and our technology staff has worked tirelessly since the announcement to devise the right solution.

The result of their hard work is an affordable, compliance-ready Secure Server with all the tools necessary to protect your customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) and payment card information from hackers without hiring your own internal IT security staff.

Our new offering combines the best features of Dedicated and Cloud hosting into one, affordable Secure Server. This service is new to the hosting marketplace and unique to FireHost, so we’ve made it easy to compare how our Secure Servers stack up against popular options. “When security and affordability are key factors in your consideration set, we make it an easy decision,” said Chris Drake, CEO and founder.

The standard features of our new Secure Server proves we’re more serious than ever about providing security for all.

• Redundant firewalls help ensure uninterrupted protection from malice on the Web.
• Redundant web application firewalls provide protection at the application level, where many hackers find a “back door”.
• Intrusion protection and DoS/DDoS mitigation suppress “in your face” style attacks.
• Encrypted backup, server monitoring and proactive response are just a few of the managed hosting services available to keep web applications running smoothly.

In addition, each Secure Server has cloud-like scalable resources available at a moments notice.

• Scale up to four processors and 32 GB of memory quickly as website traffic grows.
• Tack on Terabytes of easily accessible SAN space
• Increase resources in anticipation of marketing events and scale back down to what you need once business returns to usual
• Improve business continuity with premium services like load balancing and high availability switching
• Virtualized servers provide scalable resources and on a flexible schedule to help ensure loss of revenue, user dissatisfaction, and brand damage due to downtime never happen.

Charles Lee, founder and CEO of mberry, signed up with FireHost when we were just making the Secure Server idea available to the public. He agreed to help us prove the concept, and his experience has been very positive.“Last year, my business Web sites were hacked three times in two months, and the hosting company didn’t know how to stop the problem. They continued to leave us vulnerable. Of course, we lost revenue, but it also damaged vendor relationships and my brand’s reputation. Since making the switch to FireHost’s Secure Server, our sites have been totally safe.”

It turns out there are a lot of businesses like Charles that need protection from hackers and cybercrime. In our quest to make enterprise-grade hosting available for businesses of all sizes, we’ve become one of the fastest growing hosting companies to watch in the market according to a report released Friday by Tier1 analysts Philbert Shih and Jason Verge.

“FireHost puts each customer inside its security infrastructure, similar to what is found in an enterprise datacenter with the different being the multi-tenancy of the hoster. This is an interesting approach that we believe will work for many customers. So long as the customer does not have particular customized security requirements, they can comfortably fit within this architecture and enjoy security and be in compliance.”

Learn more about how our advanced, Secure Server configurations can help your business.

All nominated products and services underwent an intensive review by subject matter experts, analysts, journalists, and others with deep experience in the field. We took the panel of experts thru a guided demo of our Advanced Secure Hosting solution. Collective feedback was positive and all the judges were receptive to our positioning stating FireHost is “a complete solution for hosting servers built with REAL security in mind.” FireHost offers a “well thought out security plan for hosting servers” and provides “best in class” hosting solutions.

We were selected from 785 nominations submitted by 374 companies in 55 categories, and we’re confidently optimistic about the second round of voting which enables SIIA members to determine this season’s award winners. Voting will begin Tuesday, March 2, 2010 and the winners will be announced in May, so wish us luck.

This is the twenty-fifth year The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) have recognized excellence in the software, education and information industries through the CODiE Awards program. Visit the CODiE or SIIA websites to learn more about each organization.

Each of Demo’s events in the US and China foster productive, face to face interaction between investors, innovators, entrepreneurs, and influencers in the technology industry. Visionaries and veterans from seven technology sectors will be demonstrating and pitching their business ideas next month:

• Social Media
• Health and Life Science
• Clean and Sustaining
• Cloud Computing
• Enterprise Technologies
• Mobile Applications
• Consumer

FireHost provides enterprise-grade website (and web application) protection at prices tailored for to start-ups and SMBs, so we’d enjoy meeting each and every participant to discuss concerns or challenges you may be facing with an upcoming product/service launch. Members of our team will gladly help point your domain in the right direction, so make sure to seek us out at the event.

Spring Demo will take place March 21-23, 2010 in Palm Desert, CA. Thru March 7th, you can register to attend Demo Spring 2010 at a discounted rate. We’ll see you there.

In honor of Kyle’s commitment to bringing design-inspired news to you, we’re giving away a Flip Mino HD Recorder with a custom case designed by Mr. Steed himself!

Here’s how to win:

• Step 1: Follow @FireHost and @KyleSteed on Twitter
• Step 2: Tweet the following phrase as many times as you’d like between Tuesday 10/13 and Monday 10/19 for a chance to win! “Win a Flip Mino HD from @kylesteed and @firehost – celebrating two years http://bit.ly/1saiqi RT to participate!“

You can improve your chances of winning the contest by posting a comment on Kyle’s contest page.

Good luck!

Follow up:

Congratulations David Yarde! You won the custom Flip.