Posts Tagged ‘Website Hosting’

FireHost Secures Capital Investment To Support Growth

by FireHost Evangelist on September 13th, 2011

Today, we proudly announce that our Series B round of funding has closed. The investment, led by The Stephens Group as well as earlier angel investors, will fuel investments in growth and infrastructure and enable us to make the company mission of becoming the global provider of secure hosting in the cloud a reality. See the official press release for more details.

“This capital investment represents a huge vote of confidence in our secure hosting solutions for SMEs and our ever-growing enterprise customer base, including several Fortune 50 and many Fortune 500 companies,” said Chris Drake, FireHost founder and CEO.

Looking Back

Since day one, our goal has been simple – provide the most secure hosting solution available to businesses of all sizes. Not an easy task, but with a security-minded ethos and dedication to customer support, we’ve met the challenge and opportunity with brute force.

We’ve experienced triple-digit customer growth year-over-year and successfully secured tens of thousands of web applications in the process. Within the last eight months, we’ve made numerous improvements to our MyFireHost customer portal, including Security View, and the gratifying initiative of launching the industry’s first PCI-DSS 2.0 compliant public cloud. Strangely enough, we believe this merely scratches the surface of our capabilities.

Looking Ahead

This infusion of capital enables us to continue investing in secure infrastructure, increasing our market share in the hosting space, and focus on delivering exceptional security to our customers.

In the coming months, you can look forward to improved:

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Introducing Secure Cloud Servers: A Cloud Environment Like No Other

by FireHost Evangelist on April 26th, 2011

PCI 2.0 Compliant CloudSecurity has arrived in the public cloud. With our latest service release announced today, Secure, Public Cloud Servers have now achieved PCI 2.0 Compliance.

The Origin
The latest PCI Data Security Standard announced in Q4 2010 addresses security and virtualization and all the controversy surrounding these two topics. As a participating member of the PCISSC, we decided to take the Council’s challenge head on by achieving PCI 2.0 compliance for ourselves and creating a secure, public cloud offering unlike anything else in the industry.

The Outcome
Secure Cloud Servers take the scalability and autonomy that makes public clouds so great a step further by providing:

  • High availability for every customer
  • Up to 8 processors
  • Up to 84 GB RAM
  • Unlimited storage available
  • Managed backup snapshots with 14 day retention
  • And more (of course)

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SSL Your Way to a Safer, More Successful Cart

by FireHost Evangelist on April 13th, 2011

SSL (secure socket layer) Technology is the web standard for securing and encrypting confidential PII (personally identifiable information) on eCommerce websites. Every piece of information transmitted on a https:// page is encrypted by an advanced cipher (often 128-bits or more) to help prevent unwanted parties from obtaining credit card numbers, home or work addresses, passwords, social security numbers, and even just your first and last name in raw format.

Consumers may not know the term SSL certificate, but they do increasingly recognize “secured by”, “protected by” and “verified by” badges on the eCommerce websites they visit.

Unfortunately, each web browser has the ability to determine where and how SSL certificates display, and some of the most popular web browsers suppress SSL badge visibility by decreasing the opacity or moving them to an inconspicuous location on the web page.

Extended Validation (EV) certificates (aka “The Green Bar” to consumers) combat browser suppression because they’re displayed front and center on every page where the SSL certificate has been installed correctly.

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Business-class Web Hosting from Day One

by FireHost Evangelist on April 14th, 2009

FireHost entered the web hosting business “by accident” in 2003. At the time we won our first hosting client, our business model was focused primarily on interactive website design and implementation, not website hosting. We had an impressive client roster and were working actively to develop enterprise-level websites for corporations like Nestle, Pizza Hut, Qualcomm, and Shell Energy. To facilitate our web design and development business, we had established a complex and efficient internal development environment that enabled us to build, test, and publish our web design and technical development on a multitude of web browsers.

As usual, we created and tested Qualcomm’s new website in our internal development and hosting environment. Once the website was built solid and performing perfectly, we turned it over to the client. The site’s performance suffered immediately after it was live in the client’s hosting environment – media loaded and ran slowly and various creative elements crashed when the site experienced heavy visitor traffic. After a few vigorous rounds of troubleshooting, we brought the site back into our hosting environment where it ran without a hitch! At this point, we (and they) realized the problem was not with the website, but instead Qualcomm’s own hosting environment.

Like many companies, they had devised a robust marketing campaign designed to drive traffic to the new website. Because of the problems brought about by their hosting environment, the management team quickly determined the launch would only succeed if FireHost continued to host the site. We agreed and in a surprising turn of events, we were transformed into an enterprise-level secure website hosting provider.

Qualcomm eventually worked out the kinks with their own hosting environment and took over hosting the website (which is still live today – http://www.cdmauniversity.com/), but we never turned back. FireHost’s evolution as a secure web hosting provider for business has been driven by one simple principle – everyone deserves to be vigorously protected while never having to sacrifice website performance. Since the very beginning, we have heard and addressed our client’s needs, and the result six years later is a complete shift in our business model.

FireHost’s commitment to providing relevant solutions for businesses continues today as we introduce exciting and innovative secure, web hosting services. With the growing number of attacks on web sites and web services by hackers, the vital need to protect companies’ data, and the growing presence of media and social interaction online, FireHost answers the call by providing industry-leading security for web hosting on some of the best and fastest hosting equipment available. Contact a FireHost Agent today for more information about fast and secure web hosting.

FireHost Outlook 2009

by FireHost Evangelist on December 22nd, 2008

In this last blog post of 2008, we’d like to reflect on FireHost’s achievements in the web hosting services industry. The last twelve months for our hosting company were extremely busy, and we’re proud to rehash all the enhancements we’ve implemented to deliver better, more secure web hosting and online backup services to our great customers.

2008 Accomplishments:

  • Achieved 99.999% network up-time throughout the year
  • Changed company brand from TargetScope Hosting to FireHost in March
  • Added FireVault Secure Online Backup services to our portfolio in March
  • Migrated FireHost’s presence in Texas to a brand new, North Dallas Data Center in July
  • Developed key relationships with important web hosting industry partners at HostingCon Chicago in July
  • Expanded FireHost web hosting and online backup services to a Scottsdale, AZ data center in August
  • Added CDN services that allow clients to serve content worldwide via 45 POPs in 23 cities in August
  • Began hosting high profile clients like the National Breast Cancer Foundation who require maximum up time and speed during huge traffic spikes from national exposure in September
  • Integrated Website Security into FireHost network in October

The agenda for 2009 is packed just as full of web hosting service enhancements and new web security products that will make choosing FireHost as your web hosting provider an even more clear choice. Here is a sneak preview into a few of the web hosting enhancements you can look forward to in the next year.

2009 Agenda:

  • Implement an additional database security layer to facilitate SOX and HIPAA compliance reporting in “one-click”
  • Complete the FireHost Customer Portal which will empower new and existing clients to easily and intuitively configure, customize, and manage web hosting service and backup storage plans on demand
  • Introduce Load Balancing services and extend individualized server clustering capabilities to every FireHost Dedicated Server client
  • Add Virtual Private Server (VPS) capabilities to FireHost’s web hosting solution matrix
  • Expand our Microsoft Exchange service to include automated long-term archiving

We’re jazzed about having an aggressive to-do list. As always, FireHost will test, re-test, and test every new hosting product again to ensure it’s a solid solution before adding it to our mix of online data backup and web hosting services.

Goodbye 2008. Hello 2009!