dedicated server contract easy web hosting: <b>best web design companies</b><BR>

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RapidSSL is like the QuickSSL Premium Certificate in that it:
- Offers commercial-level protection starting at 128-bit encryption.
- Is compatible with 99%+ of browsers.
- Safeguards access to your site over "https," rather than the less secure "http".

VMware Virtual Machine Economics

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST
This past summer VMware released the newest version of its ESX server product - called VMware Infrastructure. The product runs as a very small Linux server OS, enabling Web hosts to operate virtual machines with any kind of operating system.

Zoho Doubles Customer Count in 5 Months, Racing Google Apps to 1 Million User Mark

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:20:00 -0500

When I first met Raju Vegesna at the Office 2.0 conference last October, Zoho had just passed the 100,000 user mark. Less than 5 months later, Raju says they're closing in on 200,000.

While Nielsen/NetRating (PDF) claims that Google has a 92% share of the web-based productivity apps market, Raju points out that Zoho and ThinkFree together attract as many unique visitors as Google Docs and Spreadsheet. (See Ismael Ghalimi's elaboration on the user count discrepancy.) 432,156 users visited Google Docs last December; that's 3% fewer than in October. Zoho, on the other hand, has undergone rapid growth (as CEO Sridhar Vembu puts it, "we try harder") - and hopes to beat Google to the 1 million user goal.

By the way, when Raju and I were introduced, a colleague of his described him as Zoho's PR strategist. I just found out that in addition to attracting favorable coverage in every possible media outlet, he was also in charge of company's data center infrastructure. (Raju recently managed to offload this responsibility.) He insists it wasn't as much work as it sounds, because Zoho's apps run on a self-healing grid that's attached to a pool of standby servers. If any application server dies, the appropriate code will automatically be deployed on one of the standby machines. The failed hardware can be swapped out whenever someone has time. As for customer data, everything is replicated three times and backed up offsite.

(Zoho's Rackable servers are colo-ed at Savvis and Equinix. They're in the process of migrating from 32 bit to 64 bit machines with dual core Intel Woodcrest processors and 8 to 16 GB of RAM. The new machines arrived last week, but won't be deployed until late March. As Google's recent hard drive study shows, a longer burn-in period can help weed out faulty hardware.)

Zoho's HR processes are similarly efficient. Adventnet, Zoho's parent company, has 600 employees (and counting). Whenever a new Zoho product is conceived, a dedicated team of 2-6 developers is allocated to the project. Having rapid access to talent gives Zoho a tremendous competitive advantage. Forget Google Office; the loooong list of ideas and partnerships that Zoho's in the process of implementing might coalesce into Zoho Life: single sign on access to an ever growing suite of fully integrated web apps that do... everything.

Keep an eye on Zoho; they're setting the standards for delivering a seamless SaaS experience. And sign up for an account if you don't already have one. Lastly, stay tuned. They've got some big announcements on the way.