iWeb Communities: Blog

Jimmy Tanzil is the founder of shared web hosting provider, 2ip, which targets mostly the U.K. and european market. Thanks to original and creative marketing, 2ip is growing and adding additional capacity, both in U.K. and Canadian datacenters (in iWeb Technologies’s facilities in this case)

The interview should especially interest those looking to start a web business, and looking to iWeb as a trusted provider for their infrastructure.

Can you tell us more about yourself? Are you the founder of 2ip? How did you start in the hosting business?

Yes, I am the founder of 2ip. I have been in the hosting business since 1997. I sold my first hosting company last 2007. After I sold the company I was trying to focus on the free hosting market through the free hosting services offered by 2ip. It does not work as I would expected and I was back offering paid premium hosting services in 2008.

About 2ip, can you tell us more about the company? How was it founded? I also saw that 2ip is using original and creative marketing, with Youtube videos, online chat, user reviews, social media and also creative product packaging. What is the story behind that?

2ip.Com was originally founded to offer free hosting services and was originally planned to earn revenue purely from advertising. Being said that, I have planned a lot of creative advertising to promote our free services to attract both advertisers and users around the globe. The plan was to aggressively offer our free services globally by offering locally supported services in each country by what I call a community leader. I would say the project was terminated prematurely due to lack of capital for further development. Seeing that I have spent already too much into the project in infrastructure and development, I decided to make use of the existing infrastructure to start offering premium hosting services. So right now, I am just executing the plans which I have for the “free” hosting project, but into the paid hosting market and it turns out to go very well.

Can you tell us more about your technology requirements? What kind of web infrastructure do you need to power your business, both in terms of server hardware, server software, and network requirements?

What I’ve learned from my previous years running a hosting company is to make everything as simple as possible. Back then I was setting up the infrastructure environment to accommodate enterprise level clients with complex setup, while we are selling shared hosting services at $5 or less per month. Lessons well learned, now I am setting up the company to be as simple as possible. Infrastructure wise, we lease dedicated servers instead of spending a lot of capital to buy servers and network equipments upfront. Since I want to really focus to the “newcomers” market segment, I will not be focusing on the high end hosting environment. We will always be using Cpanel as our control panel and will only be offering Linux based shared hosting services. As for network requirements, we will scale up as we grow larger which can be done easily since we are leasing dedicated servers.

What were your criterias when looking for a datacenter and for your infrastructure hosting solutions? What made you choose iWeb?

I would say definetely a good reputation. Second is generous bandwidth and competitive pricings. I am very careful when choosing a data center provider as our partner. Since we are not planning to run our own data center and network infrastructure, I must be sure that the partner we choose will be around for many, many years to come. With that being said, I am confidenent that iWeb will exceed my expectation. That is why I have choosen iWeb as our Canadian data center and network provider.

What would you like to see offered or improved at iWeb Technologies? Finally, would you recommend iWeb as a web infrastructure provider?

From time to time we always had clients who outgrows their limited shared hosting capabilities. It would be great if iWeb has a reseller program to reseller VPS or Dedicated Servers as we would love to offer these clients to options to upgrade to either a VPS or Dedicated Server through iWeb. I think that answers the second question as well.

Thanks to Jimmy Tanzil for the interview, and congratulations again for his success!

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 11th, here are the highlights:

• Intel demoes first-ever 32nm processors, which will be built from newly modernized manufacturing plants in the US. The chip will have an integrated GPU and memory controller.
• The two co-founders of MySQL has left the Sun Microsystems, and the developer community is asking questions. Zetetic says back-end developers should now turn to PostgreSQL
• Quirksmode compares the state of current web browsers,

If you are a web designer, a web developer, an entrepreneur, then you know how important networking, presentations, and continuous learning are. One has just to see the speed of new technologies and new paradigms launching every month and every to know that if you don’t keep up, you’ll soon be

However, the list of events is very difficult to track. It might be easy to know about local events, but for big international conferences and meetups, there is not yet a place where you can get the list, and choose from the list of events the ones you are going to attend or present.

The new iWeb Calendar has the goal to be the definitive resource for web designers and web developers, saving you time, instead of going through all the blogs and all events pages. As such, it’s definetely a page you can bookmark, and consult regularly to see if there are unmissable events. Event organizers are also welcomed to consult the calendar; if your event is not listed here, do add it below, and we’ll see to it. You can expect to see:

• Web Design conferences, such as the Future of Web Design, SXSW, 
• Programmers conferences and meetups, such as RailsConf 2009, Php Québec
• Web Hosting conferences and conventions, such as dtsummit, under the radar
• mobile applications events
• events for web entrepreneurs, such as Web2.0 Summit, etc.
• web marketing events and conferences

Ideally, we would also want to include there important dates, such as national holidays, and any other date that would be significant to the community.

(if you don’t see the calendar, you might be viewing this post by email or RSS, do come on the iWeb blog)

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 10th, here are the highlights:

• The Kindle 2 was unveiled officially yesterday. See also a hands-on video and pictures at Engadget.
• Google has released Google Sync Beta for iPhone and Windows mobile phones, which allows a user to sync contacts from Gmail and calendar from Google Calendar
• Google PowerMeter measures your electricity usage. See the article on NY Times
• For web developers, here’s how the development team at IMVU does 50 releases a day. They have a bot which run 1000+ automated tests, from unit tests to user interface tests in Selenium

Going through Apple hardware history, one can see frequent updates in consumer devices, especially the laptops, the iMac and the iPod/iPhone families. Server-grade hardware on the other hand, are nowhere to be found. The XServe RAID (see left picture) was terminated in Jan 2004, the XServe cluster node was terminated in November 2006, and XServe seems for now the only Apple hardware dedicated for Mac OS X Server. One can then wonder if having a mac server is now a viable option.

The Future of Mac Dedicated Servers

What’s the state of Mac Servers hosting? for potential users looking to get a mac server, how viable is now a mac server, and how do they compare with “standard” hardware? Those are the questions that this article plans to answer.

If you have gone through iWeb’s website, you may know that we offer 2 different options for those of you interested in Mac systems: the affordable, all-in-one mac mini, and the powerful XServe.

Obviously, they cater to 2 different audiences. The mac mini is for consultants, small business owners, mac shops, but also for large companies interested in the mac mini’s low-cost solution. The XServe on the other hand is for IT departments, used frequently by large design agencies, media and multimedia companies, and also seen in scientific research, as nodes in a large computing cluster. In both cases, one will choose a mac server for its simple and intuitive setup, both in terms of hardware and software and integration with existing mac systems.

Here’s a simplified table showing how the mac systems compares currently, in Feb 2009:

The “ingregration” bit there deserves a little bit of explanation, since Apple doesn’t really advertise it on their pages. Mac OS X server Leopard has for instance Screen Sharing built-in, which allows a client (say, your mac laptop), to connect to the Xserve or the mac mini, and have a GUI to install software. It also has XGrid or high availability. Of course, you can enable VNC on a Linux setup, but on an XServe, it just works!!

There are also niffty third-party applications to manage your mac server, such as the new iStat that you can install on your mac mini to monitor the hardware (or use any of the applications listed here).

Final Outlook

If you are an experienced web developer, one cannot deny that Linux systems are by far reliable, unexpensive, and the standard deployement OS for developers. If you are building a standard web application, then, it’s a no-brainer, just get a dedicated server (see any of these pages).

However, if you are in the movie industry, if you want to build a simple workgroup cluster, if you want to integrate with existing mac software, then dedicated mac servers are a clear choice. In a way, the final decision does look like when you decide to get a mac desktop/laptop, because of existing software and workflow, instead of a cheaper PC box with potentially more (clunky) software.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 9th, here are the highlights:

• RIM reaches 50 million BlackBerry sales. The company also reached very recently its 10 year anniversary
• jHeidi is a new iPhone application which access and manage MySQL and Oracle databases
• Linutop 2 has launched. It’s still the same concept: a small aluminium box, a PXE card, basic components, and Linux as the OS, for about 350 dollars.
• SEOMoz reminds us that while “social media” is powerful, it’s not as important as search, and businesses should also not forget other tools such as emails, conversion tools, landing pages, and customer acquisitions techniques.

NEW: For those who want a condensed version of the iWeb blog, there is a new RSS feed, without the iWeb Tech News Highlights. This is the follow-up since the last discussion thread.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights feature was done on the iWeb blog for the past weeks. As stated in each post, the goal was to go through all the news, filter the mass of information found on blogs, and highlight news which would be important for web designers, web developers or sys-admins who didn’t have time to go through all the blogs, or who want to make sure they didn’t miss something. You could see it as the equivalent of Sladot review, a popular daily podcast on technology news, or Wallstrip, a daily videoblog about finance.

Christian Aubry, a Montréal-based video podcaster at @amicalmant, commented though that the feature added “noise” on the Internet, and for those who follow the iWeb twitter account, it was also meaningless, almost like spam. He also had mixed reactions about the authenticity and value of the feature.

Christian has been collaborating with iWeb Technologies for a long time, and as such, this was an opportunity to re-think the feature. One way to improve the feature is to focus on quality instead of quantity, and as such, the feature is going to be done every week. The format is going to stay the same, but with more insights, and more details on news that especially interested us, and how it can help iWeb customers. In practice, this means we’ll get the 5 biggest stories of the week on Fridays, related to web development and web hosting, give our insight and analysis, and how it relates directly to you.

I hope you will find the iWeb blog more interesting and more valuable after this editorial change. The feedback of the community, such as Christian Aubry’s, is important, and we’ll take the feedback into account. Do leave comments if you have anything to voice, or join us on twitter

Important: From comments about this change, it seems that many were satisfied with the old format. The series will probably be relaunched daily next monday.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 5th, here are the highlights:

• Google has released a mobile geolocation sharing service called Google Latitude. The use case is to allow family, friends or other authorized people to see on a map where you are currently located.
• InformationWeek states why Windows must go open source, a testimony to Microsoft’s problems
• Facebook turned 5 years old yesterday.
• Online viewers in the U.S. watched 5.9 billions Youtube videos in Dec 2008. See other stats on how YouTube dominates online video.

In the business of running web servers, the iPhone is not perceived as a professional tool for system administration. It does lack tethering, the battery is limited, you can’t run multiple apps at the same time, etc. but the most important caveat is there’s no keyboard, which means you can’t type commands with it. A real sys admin tool should also have real-time notification in the background, which is not possible on the iPhone.

Nevertheless, the iPhone or the iPod touch is a compelling mobile device. The 3G access is speedy enough for casual access, there’s a wide array of applications available, with Apple pushing with enterprise features such as IPSec VPN, and after all, it has more features and more power than any other mobile phone available in the market. As such I’ve made a list of applications that sys-admins should find interesting to add to their workflow, from the most obvious to the exotic but useful applications

1. Mail.app

Why: Mail.app allows you to receive alerts and notifications, from third-party monitoring services, and also keep in touch with your team. Mail.app doesn’t have push email, but you can set it up to pull new emails regularly from your email server

Price: $0, included with the iPhone

2. Safari.

Why: Safari will allow you to “visually” check the responsiveness and availability of websites and servers.

Price: $0, included with the iPhone

3. NetNewsWire

Why: This will allow to check status of software or hardware which publish a RSS feed, such as the Status section on the iWeb blog.

Price: Free

iTMS Link: NetNewsWire

4. TouchTerm Pro

Why: TouchTerm Pro allows you to ssh to Solaris and Linux servers, and do remote server administration. TouchTerm Pro is the most complete ssh client for the iPhone.
Price: $14.99
iTMS Link: TouchTerm Pro

5. Jaadu remote desktop

Why: Jaadu remote desktop can connect to your server, windows server 2003 or windows server 2008
Price: $24.99
Link: Jaadu Remote Desktop

6. 1Password

Why: 1Password allows you to store passwords for your servers and different services.

Price: Free

Link: 1Password

7. Network Ping

Why: Network ping has tools for traceroutes, a telnet console, and as the name suggests, a ping tool.

Price: $3.99

Link: Network Ping

8. Network utility

Why: Network Utility allows you to do lookups and scans. Less features than Network Ping, but still potentially useful

Price: $0.99

Link: Network Utility

9. aSubnet

Why: aSubNet is an IPv4 subnet calculator to set up a network

Price: $0.99

Link: aSubnet

10. Inco

Why: Inco is a remote system monitor and administration tool for Mac OS X

Price: Free

Link: Inco

11. iNagios

Why: iNagios is not an iPhone application per se, it’s a web application with pages optimized for the device’s Safari. It’s also read-only, which means you can’t solve any system incident. Still, sys-admins should add it to their bookmark

Price: Free

Link: inagios

12. netshare

Why: NetShare allows you to tether your iPhone’s 3G connection, and work from your laptop, for those times where there is no open wifi access.

Link & Price: This was taken down by Apple shortly after it was put on iTMS. If you did download it… well lucky you!

13. Air Sharing

Why: Air Sharing allows you to store documents on the iPhone. For sys-admins, you can for instance put PDFs of your servers setup and architecture, manuals or reference networking books.

Price: $4.99

Link: Air Sharing

If you have any other applications you use for System administration, do share with us in the comments!

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb.4th, here are the highlights:

• There will be 6 editions for Windows 7. The differentiation between the different versions is better than Windows Vista, but it’s still too complicated to distinguish for the vast majority of users
• IBM is planning to build a 20 petaflops supercomputer, for the U.S. government, for nuclear research. The fastest system today can only reach 1 petaflop, only achieved last year
• Amazon has beaten eBay in December, and is expected to race past eBay this year.
• Why CSS should not be used for layout. And a post published just afterwards, Why CSS should be used for Layout

iWeb is currently hiring up to 40 new employees. If you are interested in working in the world of new technologies, if you are interested in working for one of the most important hosters in Canada, traded on TSX-V (IWB.V), then iWeb is made for you. Here are 2 positions which iWeb is urgently seeking: Director of Deployment and activation, and a Project Manager in Automation.

See our French blog for full version and description of the positions.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb.3rd, here are the highlights:

• the iPhone is now the #1 mobile (phone) gaming device. There are well-founded rumours of a much more powerful iPhone this year. The current iPhone is as powerful as the Sega Dreamcast
• Google had a technical problem last weekend, with all search results marked as malware, which spurred reactions around the web. CNET asks the questions if there’s a threat of monoculture, with the problem of over-dependancy on a sole provider
• There was the slashdot effect, where a link on slashdot would bring a website to its knees. There was then the digg effect. Now mashable tells about the “Tweet effect“, when a user with 40.000 followers links to page
• Internet Explorer’s usage slips, while Firefox (Safari and Google Chrome too) gains. IE has now just 65% of the market, back to more than 90% a couple of years ago.
• Finally, Google has released a new version of Google Earth, with lots of new features to explore the Earth. The biggest one is the ability to view seas, the planet Mars, plus many others that you can see in the video.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 2nd, here are the highlights:

• Songsmith, a software which allows everyone to create tunes from voices, is the new viral product from Microsoft. The software is still in beta, but already everyone is all over it on blogs and youtube. See this remixed video of Roxanne, by Police, on a reggae beat. Even Linus Torvalds raved for the first time about Microsoft.
• By 2012, Koreans will get 1Gbps broadband connections at home. South Korea is at the frontedge in modern telecommunications infrastructure, and the country is also planning a 10Mbps wireless access. 
• a new application to create ajax 3d preloaders
• Adobe and Apple are working together on a version of Flash for the iPhone
• An interesting retrospective of big websites, how digg, amazon and twitter looked at their beginnings.