RimuHosting News and Updates
2008-06-11: RimuHosting release results of its 2008 customer survey
RimuHosting marked its fifth anniversary of hosting with a survey of customers.
The survey was completed by current customers as well as customers who had hosted with us at some point in the last few years. We had 107 responses to the survey at the time of writing, five days after the survey was created.
We had some really good responses from people. With some great suggestions and feedback for us that we are working on implementing.
We most of our customers are really happy with the service they receive from us (and we will work darned hard to make sure that always remains the case). 84% are delighted with our support, 26% were 'merely' happy. Our goal is to delight customers with our service. To do that we always try to do a little bit more than expected, with the goal of actually surprising people with the help they get from us.
Most of our customers are quite 'technical'. 70% are software developers, 20% of respondents used ruby on rails, 95% have a 'technical' (computer-related) occupation.
We have posted a summary of some of the survey data as we think it helps show the kind of company we are (the service we provide, how we stack up to other hosting companies, and the kind of customer we can best serve).
2008-06-06: RimuHosting offering London-based dedicated servers
RimuHosting has been offering London-based VPS hosting since March 2006.
We have fielded a few inquiries about dedicated servers based out of London. So we are now happy to also be offering London-based dedicated server hosting including a 1x Xeon CPU model and a 2 x Quad Core Xeon model.
2008-06-03: RimuHosting Seeking More Staff to Fill New Offices
Over the last year we have more than doubled our staff numbers. And we continue to grow rapidly.
To help ensure that we can maintain the same level of quality support and respond quickly to customers we are seeking more Linux-passionate sysadmins to help our customers.
If you are able to work from Cambridge, NZ, then please check out the job post.
2008-05-25: RimuHosting Renovating New Offices
RimuHosting's support 'head quarters' has been a small office the main street in Cambridge, NZ for the last 4 years.
We have started to outgrow our space there so we went and leased the whole floor.
We are now in the process of taking it from 20 year old decor, closed offices, dark and cold to a more open, well heated/cooled/lit space.
We are removing a couple of offices to open up some space. Then planning on putting in heat pumps, new carpet, new lighting and repainting the place.
Peter posted some 'before' photos of the new office space.
2008-05-19: RimuHosting Exhibit at CeBIT Sydney
RimuHosting exhibited at the 2008 CeBIT show in Sydney. CeBIT is one of Australasia's largest conference/expos. With over 250 exhibitors and 30,000+ visitors.
Carl and Peter were there to talk to people and meet up with a few of our Australian-based customers. Peter posted some photos on Flickr of our stand.
Plus we got to visit Global Switch, one of the Sydney-based data center we use.
2008-02-01: Welcome to Ivan And Glenn
Ivan and Glenn joined us at the Cambridge, NZ office doing sysadmin work and helping out our customers. Both guys are really bright, super-capable and Linux-mad. RimuHosting is lucky to have them.
2007-10-01: RimuHosting listed on the Deloitte/Unlimited Fast 50 index
The Deloitte/Unlimited Fast 50 is rapidly becoming an index of successful, established New Zealand businesses that are growing the NZ economy at staggering rates.
Deloitte ranked RimuHosting as the 25th fastest growing company in New Zealand, the highest listing for a Linux-focussed hosting company in New Zealand. RimuHosting's revenue grew 289%.
The 2007 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific index ranked RimuHosting the 179th fastest growing company. This index covers the fastest growing companies in Australia, China, Korea, Singapore, Japan, India and New Zealand.
Peter Bryant, RimuHosting founder, says "We work hard to provide support worth raving about and believe this dedication, our brilliant staff and the growing popularity of Linux and virtualization helped us achieve this formidable growth rate."
2007-05-24: Quad Core Harpertown Xeon Servers Available
We have added some
great new dedicated server options
to the Dallas data center dedicated server lineup. We now offer servers with
2 x dual core Woodcrest CPUs and servers with 2 x quad core Clovertown CPUs (upgraded to Harpertown CPUs since early 2008).
2007-05-23: High Data Transfer Options at The Dallas Data Center
Traditionally the data transfer allowances at the Dallas data center have
been relatively low (at least compared to the inflated values offered by
some hosts). Most people do not actually use much bandwidth, so we have
instead focused on providing the absolute best quality
bandwidth we can offer (rather than quantity).
Some customers want the great hardware and facilities we can offer at the Dallas
data center, but have high traffic requirements that would be costly to meet
using the premium network.
So we have gotten an extra network feed of 'cheap and cheerful' Cogent
bandwidth. We are making this available as an option on
dedicated servers at the Dallas data center, permitting us to offer 1000GB and
2000GB data transfer allowance options.
This Cogent bandwidth is separate from the premium network. We
will continue to use the premium network as the default network option.
2007-05-22: New Distros Ahoy! Centos5, Debian 4.0 (Etch) and Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) Now Available
Carl here has been busy prepping up new file system images. Amongst them are
Centos5, Debian 4.0 (Etch) and Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty). These distros can now
be ordered for new VPSs or dedicated servers, or on server reinstalls.
2007-03-15: John Joins Us At The RimuHosting Office
John has
emigrated from Chicago to join us full time and is working from the
Cambridge office.
Yves
has been impressing customers with his great Linux-foo and friendly and
professional manner. So much so that we have grabbed him
full time. He will be one of the main support guys during the
'overnight' period here in New Zealand.
Over the last few months we have added a number of new staff, who have been
needed to cope with our great continual month-on-month growth. We are
extremely pleased to have been able to attract support staff of this
caliber.
2007-03-01: Dallas-based Dedicated Server Offerings
We have added some Dallas-data center
based dedicated server options. These
initial servers are fast Core 2 Duo/Quad workhorses.
For the last couple of years we have setup most of our dedicated servers over
at the NY data center where we lease the hardware and hook the servers up to the data
center's switches. This has worked out well, with the exception that
sometimes we wanted more control over the hardware used and networking setup.
For the Dallas-based dedicated servers we have gone and bought
our own servers, put them in our own cabinets, and hooked them up to our
Cisco network switches. This extra control means we can use the
best hardware available, offer affordable pricing, and it lets us
be more likely to meet the frequent 'out of the ordinary'
hardware/networking requests we get.
2007-02-19: Yves and Brandon Join The RimuHosting Staffing Ranks
A few months of good growth later and we needed a few more support folks. Yves,
Brandon, and David
have now joined us.
2006-07-29: Welcome To Two New Support Staff Members
We work hard to respond quickly (and well) to any customer inquiries. We know how frustrating it can be waiting days for a reply from someone.
Recently we decided to add more support staff to reduce support response times during our 'overnight' (here in New Zealand) period.
With just a little bit of advertising (e.g. in our forums) we received an almost overwhelming number of applications. We were frankly humbled by the number of so well qualified people that wanted to work for us. Thank you to everyone who applied. And sorry that we did not have more work to offer.
We have ended up bringing on board Fernando and Pablo. Both of them have been providing support over the last few weeks. And already they are quickly
coming up to speed with our systems and our focus on working hard to provide great support.
2006-06-25: Introducing the RimuHosting Ruby On Rails (RoR) Hosting Stack
Want to host a Ruby on Rails app? Not sure how to go about installing all you need? Not sure whether
to go with Apache, Mongrel or Lighttpd as your webserver? Then let us setup the RimuHosting
Ruby on Rails Hosting Stack. We will install the latest versions of Ruby, Rails, Gem, Lighttpd, Mongrel
and Apache with fastcgi. Then you can select the web server that best suits your needs.
See http://bliki.rimuhosting.com/space/knowledgebase/linux/miscapplications/ruby+on+rails for details.
2006-03-29: Fedora Core 5 (FC5) now a RimuHosting Distro Option
Hankering for one of the freshest distros out there? You can now order a VPS from us
with a Fedora Core 5 distro. Included in the distro are goodies such as Apache 2.2,
MySQL 5 and PHP 5.1. Not sure which distro to use??? See our distro selection guide.
2006-03-29: London- and Brisbane-based VPS Hosting Now on Offer
Are your customers in Australasia? Or Europe? Then we can now provide VPS hosting on a
server located within a few milliseconds of them. Find out more about our Brisbane- and
London-based VPS offerings.
2005-09-08: Introducing bliki.rimuhosting.com: Our New Linux Knowledgebase
Working on Linux servers every day (as we do) we constantly pick up new things all the time: how to secure proxy servers; how to get ruby on rails up and running; how to enable disk quotas; how to install xxx; how to identify and resolve problem yyy; etc.
We end up having text files pages long filled with notes from past server fiddlings and we end up dipping into these files frequently in order to answer some support question or another.
We decided to make our notes a bit more public so we setup http://bliki.rimuhosting.com our Linux knowledgebase which will be a cross between a blog and a wiki.
http://bliki.rimuhosting.com is pretty bare at the moment. We will be adding new snips to it this week and then hopefully you will find useful pages showing up there on a regular basis. So please drop by and see if anything there is of help to you.
2005-11-30: Ubuntu now a RimuHosting Distro Option
We have added the Ubuntu distro to our distro
lineup. This distro is based on the Debian packages, but will generally have newer versions of
applications than Debian and new distro releases will occur every 6 months with Ubuntu (c.f. every 1-5 years
with Debian).
2005-07-14: Now Offering The Awesome Performance of Xen-based VPS Hosting
RimuHosting was one of the very first providers to offer UML-based hosting
way back in 2003. Now we are pleased to become one of the first providers
to offer Xen-based hosting.
Xen is a VPS technology. In benchmarks and everyday use it has demonstrated
its ability to out-perform any other VPS software. While a relatively new
technology it is already up to version 2.0 with 3.0 just weeks away. And it is already
included in some distros like Fedora Core 4.
We have spent the last couple of months testing the Xen software and updating our control
panel and host server scripts to work seamlessly with the new Xen interfaces. In addition we
have been successfully running some key in-house systems on Xen servers (with great reliability and
performance).
With this testing behind us, we believe that Xen is now ready for prime time. We
have launched a set of new MiroVPS plans. We looked hard at what features are available on
other hosts and made sure that the MiroVPS plans are unmatched for price, features,
performance and the geek-famous RimuHosting service.
We have added a RedHat™ Enterprise Linux 4-based distro to our distro
lineup. This distro offers very recent RPMs (for example MySQL 4.1). It also offers the
very nice Postfix/Dovecot pairing of mail
servers. Like all the enterprise Linux based distros, it has a support life of several years.
We have added the Fedora Core 3 distro to our distro lineup. This
distro will be the default for new Fedora Core setups rather than the 'old' Fedora Core 2 one. We have posted a howto
for upgrading from FC2 to FC3.
We have added a backup mail server feature to the control
panel. This is a free service to help ensure that your email is always delivered and
without senders receiving delivery failure emails.
We have added a 'remote FTP backup' feature
to the control panel. This is a free service to give you extra
control over the backing up of files on your server. In addition to the regular backups made by
RimuHosting.
We have built a set of fault tolerant and replicating name servers. And provided a
web based UI for current customers to add and manage multiple zones.
You can find out more about the DNS Hosting
setup and give us some feedback in the forums.
Order a VPS, Semi- dedicated or Dedicated server in Dallas, London or Australia.
