PEER 1
Encyclopedia
Peer 1 Hosting provides Internet hosting services that include managed hosting, dedicated servers, colocation
Colocation
Colocation is the act of placing multiple entities within a single location.Colocation is often used in the data sourcing industry to mean off-site data storage, usually in a data center. This is very important for businesses since the loss of data can be crucial for companies of any size...

, and cloud computing
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

. The company is headquartered in Vancouver, BC, Canada and the stock is traded on the TSX under the symbol PIX. The company serves more than 10,000 customers from 17 data centers located in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, Canada; California, Florida, Georgia, New York, Texas, Virginia and Washington states, and in London, UK.

Notable Peer 1 Hosting customers include Plenty of Fish
Plenty of Fish
Plenty of Fish may refer to:* PlentyofFish.com - a website* An episode in the Canadian television series Being Erica...

, Virgin Gaming and Wordpress.com
WordPress.com
WordPress.com is a weblog hosting provider owned by Automattic which opened to beta testers on August 8, 2005 and opened to the public on November 21, 2005. It is powered by the open source WordPress software...

, and former customers included Club Penguin
Club Penguin
Club Penguin is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game involving a virtual world containing a range of online games and activities, by Club Penguin Entertainment . Players use cartoon penguin-avatars and play in a winter-set virtual world...

, since acquired by Disney, and YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

, which was acquired by Google.

History

The company was founded in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1999 by Lance Tracey and Mark Teolis. From the beginning, the co-founders targeted small- and medium-sized business customers.

In 2004, Peer 1 Hosting acquired ServerBeach, a dedicated hosting provider located in San Antonio, Texas, for $US 7.5 million in cash, a management services contract, and other bandwidth services. ServerBeach had been started by Richard Yoo
Richard Yoo
Richard Yoo is an American entrepreneur, the co-founder and former CEO of the popular web hosting company Rackspace, and the founder and former CEO of web hosting company ServerBeach.-Personal Life and Education:...

, who had served as the CEO of Peer 1 Hosting competitor Rackspace
Rackspace
Rackspace US, Inc. is an IT hosting company based in San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Australia, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Hong Kong, and data centers operating in Texas, Illinois, Virginia, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong in late 2008...

, who returned to RackSpace after the acquisition.

Through the ServerBeach acquisition, Peer 1 Hosting served as the hosting provider for well-known video hosting company, YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

, which began leasing two servers in the Peer 1 Hosting San Antonio, Texas data center, then as demand multiplied the founders expanded to hundreds of servers and related maintenance services, illustrating how small businesses can scale using Internet hosting services. After YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

 was acquired by Google, the former customer migrated its operations to Google data centers.

In 2007, Peer 1 Hosting introduced an incubation program that combined discounted hosting services with consulting assistants to entice independent software vendors and startups to make the move to an on-demand model for providing applications to their customers.

In 2010, Peer 1 Hosting responded to customer demand for more efficient data centers by building a new energy-efficient and green
Green hosting
Green hosting or eco-friendly hosting is Internet hosting which involve green technologies to reduce environmental impact.Green hosting include Carbon offsetting, planting trees, plants and grass around and over Data Centers and more day to day activities such as energy conservation and the use of...

 data center located just outside Toronto which was followed by opening in November 4, 2011 of another green 58,000 sq. ft. data center located in Portsmouth
Portsmouth
Portsmouth is the second largest city in the ceremonial county of Hampshire on the south coast of England. Portsmouth is notable for being the United Kingdom's only island city; it is located mainly on Portsea Island...

 near London, UK.

To provide Internet users with a different visual perspective into online traffic flows, the company developed a Map of the Internet, a graphical image that depicts the layout of all the networks that connect to form the Internet in advance of the South by Southwest Conference in 2011. These various networks are run by Internet service providers (ISPs), university networks and networks owned by corporations such as Google Inc. and Facebook. Much of the data was collected from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA). The image shows a graph of 19,869 autonomous systems, joined by 44,344 connections.

Acquisitions and Growth

Peer 1 Hosting has grown through acquisitions that have included the purchase of ServerBeach in 2004 and Interland in 2005.

The purchase of ServerBeach included its customers and a data center in San Antonio, Texas. ServerBeach was a hosting provider, offering dedicated servers, bandwidth
Bandwidth (computing)
In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...

, automation tools and technical support to start-ups and small to mid-sized businesses. ServerBeach was started in 2002 by Richard Yoo, the former CEO of Rackspace
Rackspace
Rackspace US, Inc. is an IT hosting company based in San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Australia, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Hong Kong, and data centers operating in Texas, Illinois, Virginia, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong in late 2008...

. In 2004, it was acquired by Peer 1 Hosting for $US 7.5 million in cash, a management services contract, and other bandwidth services. Following the acquisition, Yoo left ServerBeach and returned to Rackspace.

Video sharing
Video hosting service
A video hosting service allows individuals to upload video clips to an Internet website. The video host will then store the video on its server, and show the individual different types of code to allow others to view this video...

 website YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

 hosted its site at ServerBeach until November 2007, when the last of its architecture was migrated to Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

. ServerBeach responded to the move by posting a humorous video to YouTube detailing the difficulties it had experienced with YouTube as a client.

Following the acquisition, Peer 1 Hosting acquired ServerBeach's 10,000 servers and network with data centers and network points-of-presence locations in 17 cities across North America and Europe.

In 2005, Peer 1 Hosting acquired Interland’s dedicated server business for $14 million. Through the deal, Peer 1 Hosting gained a large customer base, staff, 8,300 dedicated servers and 115000 square feet (10,683.8 m²) of data center space in facilities in Atlanta, Miami and Fremont, California.

The company has expanded its presence in North America and the United Kingdom, opening new offices in Southampton, England and a data center in London in 2009. In 2010, the company built a new, energy-efficient data center just outside of Toronto.

Products and Services

Peer 1 Hosting offers colocation, dedicated servers, managed hosting services, private cloud services, cloud storage, hosted email and cloud-based graphics processing to its customers.

Peer 1 Hosting Colocation services allow customers to set up their own servers within a large data center facility to take advantage of the power, network redundancy and physical security advantages of a large data center, while full management control of the servers.

Dedicated server hosting is available from Peer 1 Hosting subsidiary ServerBeach, which gives customers the option of selected servers to lease in dedicated racks, benefiting not only from the added computing capacity, but also outsourcing network security and infrastructure management to the data center. At the same time, the customer manages all applications installed on servers.

Peer 1 Hosting Managed hosting services provide comprehensive cloud computing customers that includes deploying, configuring and managing all leased servers and infrastructure.

Peer 1 Hosting introduced Private Cloud services based on the VMware Service Provider Program to allow organizations of all sizes run their Web applications, and protect their data, systems, and services using VMware virtualization technology in 2010.

Built on EMC's Atmos storage platform, Peer 1 Hosting Cloud Storage services provide flexible, pay-as-you-go online storage for data files and rich media. Customers can upload, store and manage unlimited data through a Web-based control panel or a standards-compliant Application Programming Interface for file management and application deployment.

Peer 1 Hosting Cloud-based Email services are offered through a partnership with Microsoft to provide a hosted email platform for small and medium-sized businesses that includes sharing and accessing calendars, tasks, contacts, public folders, groups and global address book and synchronize data from their PCs, mobile devices or the Web.

In the summer of 2010, Peer 1 Hosting introduced Cloud-based Graphics Processing services featuring high-performance graphics rendering, quantitative processing, and video compression, in partnership with graphics processing semiconductor company Nvidia. The cloud-based service uses servers outfitted with NVIDIA’s Fermi-based Tesla GPU’s and RealityServer from Peer 1 Hosting data centers, and targets at animators, product designers and architects working in high-definition 2D and 3D images.

In November 7, 2011 Peer 1 announced launching its new cloud division Zunicore, a separate brand featuring customizable resource pools versus preset virtual machines, and hands-free auto-scaling.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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