“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:

• Convenience: Easier and more efficient management of your secure cloud hosting environment through our customer portal and API
• Control: Additional security controls, transparency and advanced reporting in the customer portal
• Service/Support: Increased staff to ensure a high level of service and support is maintained 24x7x365, as we grow
• Redundancy: Hosting facilities in the United Kingdom will provide a European version of our Secure Cloud Hosting environment as well as a global disaster recovery option for our U.S. hosted customers.
• And much, much more.

It is a very exciting time to be a part of FireHost, (so join us, we’re hiring), and we look forward to future growth as the disruptive force in the hosting industry.

Thank you to our investors, partners, vendors and the growing community of supporters. Most importantly, thank you to all of our customers.

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)

Compare us to other public cloud solutions, and you’ll see we’re worlds apart. Factor in exemplary protection, reliable performance and fully managed support synonymous with the FireHost brand, and you have what many consider an unbeatable combination.

We are very proud of this offering and feel this marks a new milestone in the hosting industry.

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.

Compared to basic SSL certificates, EV certificates take longer to obtain because they include physical and legal validation of your business. EV certs provide the same level of encryption as regular SSL methods, and they tend to be a little more expensive to maintain, but they are the most trusted and recognizable way to reassure shoppers.

SSL badges offer more than just “feel good” reassurance to shoppers. The encryption provides real protection for PII transmitted thru an eCommerce site, and SSL certificates purchased from a reputable and accredited, business-grade provider come with insurance ($250,000 for a single site EV for example) that provides financial backing for your business and consumers should the encryption fail.

With all the risks facing eCommerce websites, SSL certificates are an affordable “must-have” costing approximately $40/month for entry level protection.

SSL encryption and validation is a wonderful and necessary technology, however it comes with a few “special considerations” that could have negative repercussions if they’re not handled in a professional way. For example, SSL products are useless if they’re installed incorrectly, and the encryption / decryption process can slow down your application’s server.

For eCommerce websites requiring high availability, we provide expert installation and a process called SSL Acceleration to prevent these caveats from negating the SSL product’s wonderful benefits.

Expert SSL Installation involves knowing where to install an SSL certificate, not just how to technically enter the code on the page. Every page with user input should be accompanied by https:// protection. “My Profile”, “Your Account”, “Checkout Here” and “Login” pages accurately described by those handles should always be protected by SSL encryption.

It’s not as simple as that however. eCommerce websites in particular have a unique set of SSL certificate installation requirements. For example, the shopping cart should be protected, but not necessarily product pages. An SSL certificate must be installed in such a way that it’s encryption resides within the page not the user’s session. If these intricacies are left unattended, your SSL has a higher chance to fail and/or make your site load improperly and with errors.

SSL Acceleration is a Cadillac solution for high traffic eCommerce websites that want to maximize SSL capabilities. In simple terms, acceleration means offloading SSL validation to a load balancer instead of using the web application server’s valuable resources to deliver the SSL encryption/decryption process.

For eCommerce websites, SSL acceleration helps ensure optimal load times during peak traffic days (and weeks), but acceleration should not be considered a seasonal “nice to have”. On calmer shopping days, SSL acceleration allows eCommerce site administrators to protect more page content (perhaps even proprietary non-public facing page content) and use SSL technology in the way it was intended – to protect all (or as much of) the content located online from being intercepted and misused by malicious cyber criminals.

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.

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!