Introducing Imperia

This is going to be huge.

Since my last several blog posts, there have been many changes that have taken effect at IX Web Hosting. We’re rapidly building our support team of “Personal Heroes”, we’re participating more in external social media so we can keep in touch with you, and we’re building an internal community of customers so you can put your collective voice together and be heard about the things that matter.

But what I’d like to talk to you about today makes all of that turn just a shade pale in comparison.

One of the top-secret projects we’re developing right now is one we call Imperia (seriously, this is ultra-sensitive, so I have to watch what I say about it). Essentially, it’s an entirely new way of running and managing your website. There’s a lot of technical aspects to it, but suffice it to say it will have beautiful effects on how successful your site will be and how much it will do for you.

The best part is: It will be available to you for FREE. I’ll go into more detail in a second but first… I need your help. And it’s urgent.

We have only 24 hours left.

Imperia’s technology is built on cutting-edge open source software from a wee little company called Red Hat (just joking, they’re actually huge). They hold an annual contest to determine the year’s best innovators, and guess what? Imperia, your soon-to-be new hosting platform, just won the Red Hat Award for Outstanding Open Source Architecture! We now also qualify for the overall Innovation of the Year Award.

This directly affects you.

Winning this award would be of tremendous benefit to you. Should Imperia win, Red Hat will invest significant resources into the project to make it even better. We’re competing with the likes of Geico, Verizon, Whole Foods, etc – giants compared to us. Luckily, the big award is open to public voting – that’s YOU – for the next 24 hours. I hope you’re with me on this.

If you are willing to give me your vote (it only takes 10 seconds of your time), please go here:

http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/269267/2c6a/

Vote for: “Ecommerce Inc. + Vizuri — Outstanding Open Source Architecture” at the top and the bottom and hit “Submit.” That’s it. (Ecommerce is our parent company name. That’s why it doesn’t show IX Web Hosting on the page).

Here’s a screenshot that shows you what to select and how to vote. (Of course I know you’d have figured that out yourself. But I wanted to show you that we’ve made every possible effort and even prepared a screenshot!)

I would REALLY appreciate your vote! This is about you, after all!

IMPORTANT: VOTING ENDS THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, SO PLEASE HURRY!

By the way, to read more about how Imperia works technically, take a look at this:

http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/awards/ecommerce_vizuri.html

Ok, now that I have your vote, let me show you exactly what Imperia will will do for you. If you didn’t vote yet, go do it right now!

Imperia will bring you:

Profoundly stable websites. We are legitimately expecting the coveted 99.999% uptime goal. Check out this blog post I wrote about “How will we blow you away, exactly? Or: Please help us transform our company and build a second-to-none IX customer experience (Part 1 of 3)”.

A really easy to use interface. I know what you’re thinking – ugg – but seriously this is going to break the mold, just wait. Build your websites faster, manage emails/FTP/databases more easily, the list goes on. We’ve been getting hundreds of comments from customers testing Imperia about the unmatched beauty and gymnastic flexibility of the interface, but we know that most important is providing you with a control panel that doesn’t tie your shoelaces together every time you turn around (talk about annoying). This really will save you tons of time. Here are a few screenshots:

Environmentally friendly. This is TRULY exciting: the new system will reduce our data center electricity usage by over 70%. Yep, you read that exactly right. That’s something we can all get behind, right?

A breathtakingly fast hardware infrastructure. We selected HP to provide the equipment at Imperia’s core, and these machines are SWEET. Featuring the latest blade server technology along with HP’s newest storage solutions – EVA 8400 disk arrays – Imperia runs on a highly dynamic computing grid consisting of thousands of energy-efficient Xeon cores, more than 3 terabytes of RAM and over 600 terabytes of high-speed fibre-channel disk storage. Comparing apples to apples, we’re seeing more than a 10x fold increase in performance and efficiency from the new hardware alone!

What this means for you? Well, instead of being assigned to a single server and suffering the fate of that single machine (or group of machines), your website flows in a fluidic fashion across the grid, never being impacted directly by singular hardware or software glitches. This means no more localized disk failures, RAID rebuilds, slow server response, overload impacts, etc. In a nutshell, it makes your website’s life pretty much great. And as a consequence, hopefully yours too, if only in a small way!

You may be a technically interested like I am – so if you are curious to learn more about how Imperia works, read on.

Imperia Technical Background

Last year, it became clear that the H-sphere Control Panel software we use to provide web hosting services was way too outdated. We reviewed other control panels such as cPanel or Plesk – but those too suffer from inherent flaws that lead to downtime, and are sometimes difficult to use. I felt that to really improve, we were going to have to develop our own new system; from SCRATCH. Enter center stage, Imperia.

At its core, Imperia is a combination of state-of-the-art hardware, leading software solutions, innovative command and provisioning logic and an intuitive user interface. That’s a really fancy way to say that Imperia will bring many amazing features together to create the ideal hosting platform. I already elaborated a little bit on the hardware that we will use above.

To utilize this hardware to the fullest extent possible, Imperia was designed using the latest Enterprise-class software including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBOSS, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, Zimbra and Windows Server 2008. Together with Vizuri, a Red Hat-preferred award-winning development company in Washington D.C., and our own internal development guys, we are able to coordinate these applications to work in beautiful harmony. These software solutions are being tied together in a super-streamlined customization (dubbed Imperia Command) to make them all sing, and I do mean sing.

Imperia Command is a business-decision based intelligence system for running large super-computer grids and data centers. Some may call this a “cloud” architecture, but we don’t. Clouds mean rainy days. We prefer to think of this as “ionosphere” architecture, or something else much more cool than a rainy day.

Imperia Command actively senses thousands of metrics for all of the services and nodes operating within the grid and continuously applies the results against a set of rules for action. This built-in “intelligence” gives Imperia Command the ability to move services across servers as needed to eliminate downtime and DRAMATICALLY improve speed and performance.

And what’s even better is this is all going to happen soon.

In the coming weeks we will be in touch with you about Imperia’s development and the cool features it’s going to bring you. Beginning in late October, Imperia is scheduled to go into a limited beta-release, with full migration likely occurring by the end of the year. Our goal is to make the transition as seamless as possible, so all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the improved features and performance.

And hey, thanks again for being an IX Web Hosting Customer!

Until next time.

Fathi Said, CEO

IX Web Hosting

Psst…remember to vote! http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/269267/2c6a/

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