Hosting automation giant SWSoft announced yesterday that it had completed purchase of P-Soft, the makers of H-Sphere hosting panels. You can read the official announcemnet here

Only a few days earlier, SWSoft purchased another leading Control Panel called Ensim Pro Control Panel. You can read the press release for this purchase here.

“H-Sphere is a scalable multiserver web hosting solution. It has many advanced features and a sophisticated billing system to automate and improve your web hosting tasks.

H-Sphere was designed to work on many servers and can be scaled by adding more web, mail, database, and DNS servers without any downtime. It provides a simple, easy-to-use web interface that can be maintained from any computer with internet connection. H-Sphere was written in Java and works with any SQL-compliant database. It runs only industry standard software.”

“Ensim Pro is the industry’s leading single-server hosting automation and control panel solution for hosted Web sites, email, and online applications. It includes comprehensive tools that enable hosting providers to create, control, and deliver a variety of professional-quality hosting plans in minutes.”

It’s time for a solar update. As noted in our previous article, the solar panel racks were delivered to our site and we were waiting for the plans and such. Well, the time has come for installation.

A week ago, we hooked the solar-powered batteries back up to our main power line. There was a slight amount of down-time as we had to disconnect our power sources to ensure a safe transition.

Well after about 2 hours of grueling manual labor, we have delivered several tons of solar panels and racks onto our rooftop. Quite literally, we had a chain of hands going from the ground level up onto the roof. For guys accustomed to a nice cool office environment, working outside in the midday heat was indeed a “challenge”.

Well, what’s left now? There’s still a few boxes that need to go up to the roof but we’ll let the installers take care of that stuff. We’ve done about as much as we could. We’re trying to get them to come install it this weekend, but have not gotten a commitment from them yet. Worst case, they should be able to get up there next weekend to do the final installation.

We at Iron Mountain Hosting cannot wait to get them back up there on the roof. They’re a true sight to behold in the midday sun. Towers of power glistening in the sunlight, delivering pure, natural energy to our racks and servers.

We’ll post another update once the panels are back in place, until then we’ll get our cameras ready.

Nobody could have predicted the fall of several VPS providers during the months of July and August 2007. Many of our fallen comrades had been in the VPS business for years and their demise was quite a shock to the Hosting world.

We’ve tried to analyze the problems which caused this sudden turn of events for VPS powerhouses in an industry that is traditionally quite lucrative. The main cause seems to have been the recent occurrence of sub $10 VPS’ that are diluting the market. Some of these fallen companies started the trend and some jumped into the price-slashing fray a little later.

It is hard to sell VPS’ when you are selling one for $45 and your competitive upstart is selling the same VPS for $10. Such market pressure creates the demand for a quality product at a price lower than a provider can afford. But in order to sell, you must either slash prices or face slow sales.

Of course, although a company may slash the prices of its VPS’ offerings, the cost of hardware, bandwith and support remain constant. This is where real world business economics clash with the rabid competitiveness of the hosting industry.

It’s not un-common in this industry for companies to come and go more often than many people change their underwear. The start-up cost of a hosting company could be less than a dinner at a fine restaurant! The lure of instant profits keeps bringing people into an already saturated market.

So to all of those VPS companies who survived the burning months of August and September, we tip our hats off to you.

During the last few hot days of August 2007, Iron Mountain Hosting suffered intermittent network connectivity issues. Prior this, Iron Mountain Hosting had been running at 99.995% or better and these network issues drastically reduced our up-time numbers.

Rather than going into what happened and who to blame, we would like to focus on the supportive attitude of our valued clients. We received many emails stating that our clients were not happy with the down-time but were still supportive in our efforts to resolve the issue. We try to maintain a quality hosting environment at all times and we take these outtages personally.

Our network is back again in force and we even managed to expand our network bandwith capacity a bit.

We would like to thank all of our clients for sticking with us through these moments of unhappiness. We feel we have some of the finest hosting clients in the world and the recent support we received from them is proof positive of this!