WordPress.com Company Automattic Names First Official Chief Financial Officer
Automattic has named Stuart West chief financial officer
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Polldaddy, and Akismet, announced on Wednesday that Stuart West will serve as its first full-time chief financial officer. It has also appointed its first General Counsel, Paul Sieminski.
In the new role, West will be responsible for leading Automattic’s global financial strategy, and will provide operational and strategic leadership as WordPress.com continues to grow by expanding product offerings and building its community of publishers and bloggers. WordPress.com currently serves 18 million publishers, and is responsible for ten percent of all websites worldwide. The number of WordPress websites has increased from 35 million to 70 million in the past year alone.
It is somewhat surprising that Automattic has been around since August 2005, and is behind what is the most popular blogging platform and CMS in the world, and West is its first official CFO.
What this appointment may mean for web hosts is an opportunity to reach even more customers through tailoring web hosting services to WordPress users. In February, WHIR editor Liam Eagle investigated what WordPress hosting customers want through an interview with WP Engine CEO Jason Cohen. Cohen says it works with Automattic to preload some of its plug-ins like JetPack to create a more robust WordPress hosting solution.
“WordPress has been doubling in scale every twelve months and we are positioned for further growth and development. Stuart and Paul’s experience will help manage the coming critical stages of intense expansion,” Automattic CEO Toni Schneider said in a statement. “Both understand the vision of Automattic and our commitment to grow the company in a way that supports our users and the open source community at large.”
Prior to Automattic, West served as executive in residence at Andreessen Horowitz, where he advised the firm and its portfolio investments.
For the past four years, West served as vice-chair of the board of Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit behind Wikipedia. West previously worked as CFO for Kno and Tivo, and as CSO and head of corporate development for InfoSpace.
Siemenski has been practicing law as a corporate and securities associate at Gunderson Dettmer. He specializes in representing emerging growth and technology companies.
Talk back: Are you tapping into the growing WordPress market with your hosted offerings? Does WordPress’ growth surprise you? Let us know your thoughts in a comment.
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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Cloud Storage and Backup Provider Symform Raises $11 Million Funding Round
Symform raises $11 million funding round to grow cloud storage and backup
Cloud backup and storage provider Symform announced on Wednesday that it has closed an $8 million Series B investment round to fund the global expansion of the Symform Cloud Storage Network. It has closed $8 million, and reserved up to $3 million to add a strategic investor in 2012.
Led by WestRiver Capital, the series includes full participation from existing investors OVP and Longworth Venture Partners. As part of the investment, Erik Anderson of WestRiver Capital joins the Symform board of directors.
This news comes as Google launched its cloud storage service Drive after years of speculation that it would enter the cloud storage market alongside Box, DropBox, and others. So while the cloud storage market is becoming increasingly competitive as the big guys like Google move in, there is still a need for additional cloud services like cloud backup, which is part of what Symform provides. Web hosts can offer their clients cloud storage, but can upsell clients additional services like backup as well. Recently, Symform released a study with StorageCraft that shows more companies are using cloud to backup files and store data.
Symform has active users in 138 countires, up from 46 countries at the end of 2011. In the first qurater of 2012, it grew customer accounts by more than 100 percent quarter-over-quarter, and the number of data files stored on its network jumped by 50 percent during that same period.
According to the press release, Symform also announced the launch of a new Advisory Board that includes Jon Gacek, CEO of Quantum; Dimitris Achiloptas, professor of computer science at the University of California Santa Cruz; and Grant Peterson, CTO and vice president of engineering at DocuSign. (DocuSign is one of the third-party apps available through Google Drive).
Symform responded to the Google Drive launch in a blog post, identifying a few key points on why it won’t change cloud storage, including the fact that the only way to get data into Google Drive is through uploading it through a browser, which “can be a painfully slow process if you have big files.”
“Symform is a fundamentally superior way to store data in the cloud, and our continued strong growth and access to growth capital further validates that Symform is uniquely positioned to permanently disrupt the global cloud storage and backup market,” Matthew J. Schiltz, CEO, Symform said in a statement. “We have an amazing team of employees, investors and advisory board members who are building Symform into a global standard for cloud storage and backup.”
With its Series B funding, Symform has raised a total of $20 million.
Talk back: What do you think of this announcement? What is your opinion on what the impact of Google Drive will be? Let us know in the comments.
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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Web Hosting Sales and Promos Roundup – April 27, 2012
In the week ending on April 27, 2012, web hosting companies offered a range of sales and promotions on their hosting plans.
In the week ending on April 27, 2012, EuroDNS is offering .CH registration for €7.99, IXWebHosting is offering 20 percent off its hosting, KnownHost is offering 75 percent off the first month of its VPS plans, and CrocWeb is offering 50 percent off its Litespeed-powered reseller hosting plans.
EuroDNS Offers .CH Domain Name Registrations for €7.99
European domain registrar EuroDNS is offering registrations for all .CH domain names for €7.99 until May 8. Users can redeem their discounted .CH domain when they enter the promo code PRCH12A within the next two weeks.
IXWebHosting Offers 20 Percent Discount on Hosting
KnownHost Offers 75 Percent Off First Month of VPS Plans
Web hosting company KnownHost is offering 75 percent off the first month of its VS2 or higher plans, followed by a 10 percent lifetime discount on the VS2 or larger (hybrids included). This allows customers to start with VS2 and have the freedom to upgrade and still be eligible for the 10 percent lifetime discount on the remaining span of the contract. Discounts on monthly subscriptions will only be applied to the VS2 plan or larger. Customers can redeem the discount when they enter “KHBESTUPTIME” in the promo code field at checkout for VS2 Plans or higher.
CrocWeb Offers 50 Percent Off LiteSpeed Reseller Hosting
Canadian web hosting company CrocWeb is offering, for a limited time, 50 percent off its web hosting packages. All of its packages include a range of features including 24-hour technical support, 60 day money back guarantee, nearly uptime guarantee, LiteSpeed Web Server, latest cPanel/WHM with Softaculous, CloudLinux, CloudFlare CDN Plugin, latest PHP 5.3, RVSiteBuilder Pro, daily, weekly and monthly R1Soft CDP backups, free hosting billing software, white-label hostname/rDNS, private nameservers, FFMPEG, free migration, MySQL now powered by SSDs. The WebHostingTalk exclusive offer can be redeemed when customers enter “halfcrocweb” in the promo code field at checkout
Justin Lee has been a staff analyst with theWHIR since 2004. He writes about a range of web hosting and IT-related issues facing the industry on the WHIR website, as well the print version of the WHIR magazine. Follow him on Twitter @Justin_theWHIR.
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Internap Launches New Web Hosting Service Built with Voxel Cloud Technologies
Internap’s new hosting solution is built on technologies from its acquisition of Voxel
Web host and content delivery provider Internap announced on Thursday the immediate availability of its Agile Hosting services, and a new online configurator for users to customize and provision their IT infrastructure.
Agile Hosting is the first key technology deliverables resulting from Internap’s acquisition of cloud and hosting provider Voxel in December 2011. Internap paid $30 million for Voxel, citing its dedicated hosting and cloud products, as well as its automation technologies, as drivers behind the acquisition.
The new hosting offering builds upon Voxel’s automated and unified dedicated and cloud hosting platforms, and has been deployed globally in five markets: New York, Dallas, Santa Clara, Amsterdam and Singapore. Internap opened its 55,000-square-foot data center in the Dallas/Fort Worth market in Plano, Texas in December 2011.
Given that the acqusition only took place four months ago, the integration of services has been swift, and Voxel’s hosting and automation technologies have been integrated into this new offering to make it easy for customers to provision dedicated and virtual servers. The bespoke, on-demand nature of Internap’s new product leverages Voxel’s technology to create customized hosting solutions for a wide-range of customer needs.
“The Internet has become mission-critical for almost every business. Infrastructure must be high-performance, cost-effective and flexible to meet enterprises’ increasingly demanding needs,” Raj Dutt, senior vice president of technology at Internap said in a statement. “Our global Agile Hosting offering builds upon our world-class data center and network foundation and layers on full pricing transparency and automation, all backed by world-class support and availability guarantees.”
The online storefront allows customers to immediately self-provision servers, and customize the servers by selecting from a range of hardware, drive, network, storage and custom configuration options. While pricing varies depending on the configuration, hourly pricing is available.
This news comes a month after Internap announced that it was the official web hosting and CDN provider for the Formula One racing team Sahara Force India.
Talk back: Are your hosting customers after a customized hosting solution? How have you integrated technology after an acquisition? Let us know in the comment section.
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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Ubuntu Linux 12.04 Supports OpenStack, Adds Cloud Features
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release will be supported until 2017
Canonical released its long term support server Ubuntu 12.04, codenamed Precise Pangolin, on Thursday. Ubuntu 12.04 is the fourth LTS release and introduces several new features over the previous release, 10.04 LTS, particularly around cloud, a report by ServerWatch says.
According to the report, Ubuntu 12.04 includes the OpenStack Essex release, and since it is a LTS release and Canonical will support it for five years, it plans to backport support for the next four upcoming releases of OpenStack to 12.04. While SUSE and Red Hat support OpenStack too, neither vendor has made a similar commitment in providing long term support as Ubuntu has. OpenStack released Essex at the beginning of April.
Canonical says it has worked with OpenStack contributors to offer configurations for creating hybrid clouds.
Web hosts that support OpenStack may find this signficiant, as it allows access to the latest features of OpenStack without having to change the underlying platform, according to Mark Baker, server product management at Canonical.
Ubuntu 12.04 will be the first LTS Linux release that features support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology. This technical compatibility means that an Ubuntu guest can be run on Hyper-V.
The new release introduces metal-as-a-service, which deploys workloads onto bare metal as if it were a cloud – spinning up physical machines on demand and recycling them for use with different workloads later. It is used in infrastructure projects like big data and cloud deployments.
Ubuntu 12.04 has an updated version of the Juju orchestration tool, which automates deployment of services like Hadoop or OpenStack using best practices.
InfoWorld says Juju now supports 70 other applications and tools in the area of devops.
“Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS brings together leading cloud, deployment and service orchestration technologies into a stable platform that will be supported on the most popular hardware in the long term” Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical said in a statement. “As institutions move to private cloud for new infrastructure, this release has everything required to become a mainstay of the enterprise computing environment.”
To download Ubuntu 12.04 and see the full list of certified hardware, go to the Ubuntu website.
Talk back: What do you think of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release? Do you think the OpenStack support is a good move? Let us know in a comment.
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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