Hivelocity Blog

Hivelocity Adds 3 More Liebert CRAC Units to Data Center Floor!

steve — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:31:30 +0000

Hivelocity has recently purchased 3 new 20 ton Liebert CRAC (computer room air conditioning) units to add to its data center floor. The Hivelocity data center is N+1 with its air conditioning already and maintains the facility at 72 degrees or less at all times with the existing 160 tons of air conditioning already in the facility. These 60 additional tons has been added to accommodate for future growth projected over the next year. With the additional 3 Liebert CRAC units Hivelocity will have a
total of 220 tons of cooling power and maintain its status as an N+1 facility throughout the addition of 1800 new servers in 2012.

Liebert is the world’s leader in precision computer room cooling systems. Liebert’s cooling systems maintain optimal temperature and humidity standards for many of the worlds largest data centers.

The delivery and installation of these new units was documented on the Hivelocity Twitter page @Hivelocity. To start a slide shot please visit- https://twitter.com/#!/HIVELOCITY/status/166999328534175744/photo/1

Hivelocity Launches New Affiliate Program

steve — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:42:39 +0000

To view the original article please visit- http://www.pingzine.com/hivelocity-launches-new-affiliate-program/

Hivelocity launches the newest and most simple affiliate program in the hosting industry this week. This new program by Hivelocity is expected to be one of the most rewarding affiliate systems offered by any hosting company. Hivelocity will pay a 10% monthly commission for every referral customer its affiliates send over. What makes the Hivelocity affiliate program unique and attractive is the fact it not only pays a high rate at 10% but it pays this commission for the life of the account.

Affiliates who sign up for the program will gain access to a growing library of over 30 banners of all shapes, sizes and formats. Affiliates will then add these banners or text links to their site(s) and Hivelocity handles the rest. Hivelocity will track all traffic generated from an affiliate and pay 10% of the monthly billing for any referral customer that signs up for any dedicated server or cloud service offering. Hivelocity hopes its simple formula is a welcome change from the complicated structures with limited terms other hosts have offered.

“As with our new myVelocity portal, we spent a lot of time looking at what our competition was offering for an affiliate program and set a goal to simplify and improve upon it. The commission rate and range we chose is simple math for anyone. 10% month one, 10% month two, 10% month three, 10% month twenty and so on, indefinitely. Unlike the rest of the affiliate systems, we will pay commissions for as long as the referral customer stays with us. Since our services normally garner anywhere from $50-$2000 per month the amount someone can accumulate in monthly commissions from us is pretty awesome,” says Hivelocity Sales Manager Drew Adams.

Hivelocity has added 30 affiliates in the last week with zero promotion of the new offering. Hivelocity has plans to launch a marketing blitz over the next few weeks regarding the affiliate program with hopes to have several hundred new affiliates within the month. Hivelocity has a goal of paying out a million dollars in affiliate commissions in 2012.
For more information about the new affiliate program please visit http://hivelocity.net/affiliate-system/.

Hivelocity Launches New Customer Portal, myVelocity

steve — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:26:44 +0000

To view the original article please visit- TheWhir

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting provider Hivelocity announced this week that it has launched its new customer management portal, myVelocity, a few weeks after releasing a preview to its Twitter followers.

After three weeks of beta testing, which followed the preview, the company says it has officially launched the new portal.

For non-customers, a preview of the new interface is available at the Hivelocity website. Without any experience with the company’s previous control panel, myVelocity appears to be aimed at simplicity, employing some of the same stylistic choices as the recent Gmail redesign, or the uncluttered interface of services like Twitter.

The screenshots also appear to be from the hosting account of Gordon Freeman, fictional scientist and protagonist of the Half-Life series of video games.

The company says the new portal was developed in-house, from the ground up, by Hivelocity’s development team. The tool provides customers with a full range of account controls, including server and account management, billing and payment, support access, remote server reboot, service monitoring and other activities.

According to the Hivelocity website, the tool also incorporates an “extensive server knowledge base.”

Hivelocity says the development process for the control panel included several months of research into what customers (existing and potential) looked for in a management portal.

“When we started the myVelocity project, the goal was to build the best looking, most intuitive and most powerful portal in the industry,” says Hivelocity General Manager Steve Eschweiler, quoted in the press release. “Some of our competitors have good looking portals but don’t have many tools to offer customers, others have a ton of features but the interface is a maze of mess. myVelocity takes the best of both worlds and empowers our customers with a ton of tools while looking beautiful and clean at the same time. We believe myVelocity will be the new standard for hosting portals,”

According to the announcement, the company is already planning an update to myVelocity some time in December. Version 1.2, says the company, will include a cloud-hosted DNS manager, a messaging and notification center and an integrated affiliate system. Another major release will not be far behind, says the company, and will offer cloud integration and remote server installation.

Eschweiler discussed the then-still-in-development myVelocity with the WHIR via an email interview back in August of 2011.

New 3500 Gallon Diesel Tank Installed Today- documented live on Twitter

steve — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:14:53 +0000

Earlier this week we had some contractors out to lay a cement slab in preparation for the extra diesel fuel we are adding. I arrived to the office today to find a huge crane parked behind our facility. An hour later our 3500 gallon tank arrived and we were ready for install.

As of 30 minutes ago our new 3500 gallon tank is sitting on its cement slab. Once we connect this tank to our generators out back we will have roughly 6-7 days of run time on back up generator power. This is an exciting day for Hivelocity and just another landmark of our achievements.

The play-by-play of this installation was documented on Twitter with photos of the action added every few minutes.

1. Crane parked and ready- http://twitter.com/?photo_id=1#!/HIVELOCITY/status/137186025112993793/photo/1

2. Tank has arrived- http://twitter.com/?photo_id=1#!/HIVELOCITY/status/137191610776690688/photo/1

3. We have lift off- http://twitter.com/?photo_id=1#!/HIVELOCITY/status/137194239229571072/photo/1

4. Gently guiding the tank to its new home- http://twitter.com/?photo_id=1#!/HIVELOCITY/status/137195483994136578/photo/1

5. Final measurements- http://twitter.com/?photo_id=1#!/HIVELOCITY/status/137196359815151616/photo/1

6. Touch Down!- http://twitter.com/?photo_id=1#!/HIVELOCITY/status/137197496895152129/photo/1

Follow us on Twitter @Hivelocity for the latest news and updates with everything Hivelocity.

How Will Thailand’s Floods Affect the Hosting Business?

steve — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:19:40 +0000

As you may know Thailand has been ravaged with flooding throughout September and October. What you may not know, is much of the worlds hard drives are manufactured in Thailand. The monsoons have barely let up and as it stands many of the biggest names in hard drive production are very much feeling the effects. Western Digital and Seagate both have a considerable amount of factories underwater and their ability to produce drives has grinded to a hault.

Suppliers like Newegg.com have limited the amount of hard drives you can buy to 1. You read correct, you can only buy 1 hard drive from NewEgg right now. To make matters worse, that 1 drive you are able to buy will cost you TWICE the normal price you paid just 1 week ago. For instance, a 500GB Sata drive which normally retails for $40-$50 is currently selling for $99-$120 today. A 600GB SAS drive which sold for $350 last week is now going for $575. Huge server providers like Dell and Supermicro are no better off. Currently both Dell and Supermicro will only sell a Hdd if you buy an entire system along with it. So if I only need 20 x 600GB SAS drives, I will need to buy 20 chassis, 20 boards and memory as well. That takes what is normally a $7000 purchase up to a $20,000+ purchase.

Luckily, Hivelocity was aware of the situation well before last week when things started to go crazy and we stocked up on everything we need. As it stands we have at least a couple of months worth of surplus drives in our stock room. If other hosts were not made aware of the situation in advance they will be struggling to find hard drives for one, and they will be paying an arm and a leg for the drives they are able to acquire. It would not surprise me if we see an uptick in pricing by some hosts over the next few months.

Opinions vary and the extent of the damages these floods will continue to have is still unknown. Yesterday PC World told us not to worry about it only to publish an article today that says maybe we should worry about it. From my research most in the know seem to think there will be shortages of hard drives for at least the next 2-3 months with many saying the computer world will be feeling the effects for another 6 months.

Pricing of hard drives increased at a general rate of 15% per day last week. The good news is pricing from yesterday to today is unchanged. We can only hope that pricing does not increase further and Western Digital and Seagate are able to increase production from their Chinese plants to offset Thailand.

One more thing to look out for is an increase in offerings of Solid State Drives by hosts. SSD are not mass produced in Thailand and these drives are so far unaffected by the situation. As it stands, SSD are readily available and pricing has not changed. Of course, the folks who do manufacture SSD are very aware of the situation and you better believe that if they see demand for SSD go up they will take advantage and raise pricing as well.

All we can do is wait and see what happens and hope that the floods soon recede and Thailand gets back to normal. In today’s global economy, a flood on the other side of the world can have profound affects on how things operate everywhere. Hivelocity has plenty of drives so we invite you to buy as many servers with as many drives as you want!