iWeb Communities: Blog

It’s Halloween time, but iWeb won’t hide under a witch, ghost or iPhone costume. At iWeb there’s no time for fun with so much work to be done.

You can go trick-or-treating without a care in the world while our team of skilled professionals keeps an eye on the uptime of your pumpkin, and on its candle power supply

Happy Halloween !

iWeb has recently announced the opening of its third data center in Montréal. It seems that the city is a good place for web hosting purposes.

John Rath, a data centers expert, has produced an analysis [PDF] establishing localization factors for a data centers. According to Mr. Rath, the selection of a site requires some instinct : “the most important factor is simply building where their gut feeling is”. But two practical issues come first when considering site selection.

1. Natural Disasters and Weather

Vulnerability to disasters of a geographical location has an important impact on the viability of a site. A data center must not be exposed to power outage because of hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes or floods.

2. Workforce and Business Climate

The availability of a qualified workforce is another essential factor. Same thing for demographic trends of one city compared to another. Evidently, the business climate, including governmental subsidies, tax breaks and costs of doing business are requirements not to be neglected. It is also important to estimate energy consumption costs, and the proportion of this energy that is “green”.

Many others factors are analyzed in Mr. Rath’s document.

According to Mr. Rath’s analysis, we can conclude that Montréal is an excellent site to establish a data center. The city had some problems with an ice storm at the end of the 1990s, but Hydro-Québec, the state run electrical utility has since updated its network and infrastructure. Furthermore, because of the great hydroelectric potential (a relatively green way of producing energy), the electricity is available at low prices. Finally, Montréal can count on five Universities on its territory, providing a steady stream of IT professionals… which could eventually join iWeb workforce !

Germany’s national research centre for aeronautics and space’s data center is run in part by robots, as shown in this video.

The center has to manage an enormous quantity of data, many of which is made of photos from satellites.

We can concede that the robot is pretty good at moving archives from one point to another. However, iWeb technicians should not yet be scared about losing theirs jobs…

We are running out of space in the iWeb warehouse, so we are putting tons of servers on sale from 29$ / month ! We have updated our server warehouse clearance section so you can order a discounted dedicated server directly from our website, and get info on new offers.

The new page presents some new useful options such as sorting out results by price or by date, or only showing the available offers for a certain price. A “news feed” (RSS), which will notify customers for any new offer as soon as it is available, has also been added. You have to be vigilant since quantities are limited !
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You are excited by the evolution of network uptime and are able to install a hard disk with one hand while surfing the Web with the
other? You need the sound of a 1 megawatt generator to fall asleep ? You could sell a Linux server to Bill Gates ?

Well, there’s probably a place for you at iWeb ! With the expansion of the company, the number of employees should go from about 60 to almost 100, and many jobs are now available :

• - Technical representative
• - Representative – Advanced technical solutions
• - Technical Sales Representative, Shared Web Hosting
• - Technical Representative – Colocation
• - Sales Representative – Prospecting

We are looking for dynamic people to complete our reputed team and to participate in our baby-foot (and petanque) tournaments. You are not the enthusiastic, smart and full of promises person we are looking for ? Well, this is not a lost cause since you can recommend someone you think would be good enough for iWeb and receive 500dollars in exchange ! Do not hesitate to consult our offers on iWeb Recruit and to send your resume to cv [@] iWeb8.com.

Beginning this week, iWeb offers to its colocation and dedicated servers clients the opportunity to use a KVM switch to connect to their servers.

The KVM Remote Access Switch offers a convenient way to temporarily control your server remotely as if you were in front of your server, it allows you to access the BIOS and to modify its configuration, to see error messages as they occur, to witness the booting process, and much more.

What is beautiful is that when you will be requesting a connection before 9:00 PM the day before, or on Friday before 6:00 PM for a connection on Monday, it won’t cost you a dime. Please note, however, that we have limited quantities of KVM switches, and that they must not be used to install an OS iWeb does not support.

More details are available on the KVM switch page, and you could request a connection from the Customer Hub.

After having attended the “Data Center Dynamics” conference and the “Hosting Transformation Summit”, a delegation from iWeb is going to the ISPcon in San Jose, California, from October 16th until the 18th.

The event objective is to regroup many players of the “Internet industry” in order to discuss the future of their business. There will be conferences about wireless, hosting and VoIP.

For this occasion, Patrick Bertrand (account manager) and Sylvain Leclair (VP sales and marketing) will be there to attend conferences and meet customers and/or industry’s colleagues. Do not hesitate to contact us if you are there !

More details are available on the ISPcon website.

When I received this press release, I started to read it and between each paragraph I wondered: “what does it mean?”. As I do not believe to be more insane than another person (it is what I tend to believe!), I was thinking to myself that I was probably not the only one who does not understand this financial slang. I thus took the initiative to analyze the whole thing so that everybody, like me, who have neither the will, nor interest to read the book ?finance for dummies? (supposing this book exists?) can understand the whole situation.

In clear terms, what the press release explains is that iWeb prepares to offer new shares to get extra financing and hopefully get 13 million dollars of funding by November 15 (approximate date). This additional financing would be used for completing phase 3 and 4 of the CL date center, refunding debts (to decrease the interests that we pay) and to support our growth for the next years.

Those who want to learn more can continue their reading; the others, now you know in 2 sentences what the press release explains in 1 page!

Are you still with me? Then let’s continue! To issue new shares, the company must fill a “prospectus”. The “prospectus” is a document with a lot of information about iWeb, which we must produce before issuing shares so that the potential investors can make the decision to buy some (or not). For the moment, this prospectus is “temporary” which means that we don’t know yet how many shares will be offered and at which price. This information will be written in the “final” prospectus which will be published right before the offering. The deposit of a temporary prospectus is not a firm commitment to issuing shares because the decision will have to be made in the best interest of the company according to price per share than we will be able to get.

This said, there are several methods to share offering. In our case, we decided to do business with investing companies which will buy our shares and which will resell them thereafter. By using this method, the investing companies which will resell our shares are called “underwriters” (in our case, the “underwriters” is a group that includes GMP Securities L.P., Cormark Securities Inc., National Bank Financial Inc.)

It’s a press release which contains many technicalities whose relevant content is summarized in some very important and significant lines. By hoping that you will be like me, a little more familiar with this slang in future press releases!