Alpha Hosting

There’s often talk in the business world about how to capitalize on the popularity of social media. Will have facebook pages or twitter accounts help your business do what it is trying to do. Whether that’s selling shoes or designing web pages - the success of social media in aiding those efforts can vary. Today, however, there is a great article about how a non-profit uses social media to promote their cause. How WWF is Using Social Media for Good #FindingTheGood.

“Social media allows us to open dialogue with multiple people at once and respond to their interests,” says Sarah Desilets, who manages social networking outreach for the WWF in the US. For example, after a Facebook poll revealed that nearly a third of fans named dolphins as their favorite marine animal, the WWF was able to appeal directly to those people by pointing them to a recently developed report on endangered Mekong dolphins. By creating that more personal connection, the WWF is able to get more people engaged and grow awareness of their agenda.

Social media offers an assortment of powerful tools, especially if you already have an online presence. Check out the article to see how the WWF makes it work for them.

Since Wordpress is an open-source CMS, it is a very popular tool. This means there are a lot of plugins developed for it and a lot of commentary given about it from people who feel like their knowledge could help others. This is seen in this article which talks about a new e-book and tutorial for Wordpress novices. The authors has this to say about the product -

I use WordPress myself, though with a slight difference I’ll explain below. I cannot count the days, weeks, months even I’ve spent learning just how WordPress really works and how to bend it to my purposes. I have three guidebooks on WordPress that I turn to continually. but it’s still been a task. I wish this package had been available when I started out.

We can not provide any insight as to the usefullness of this specific package above anything else, but we do think it’s something Wordpress users might want to look into.

VMware, the company behind the cloud hosting packages at Alpha Hosting, is forming a partnership with Cisco.

Cisco and VMware have announced a partnership designed to dominate corporate datacentres with the combination of VMware’s virtualisation tools and a new Cisco platform that brings together computing, network and storage hardware.

This move will make Cisco a VMware Authorised Consultant partner, putting it in competition with IBM and HP. Only time will tell what effect this partnership will have on the current virtualisation market.

This week VMware announced that they were launching a partner university.

VMware Partner University will offer all VMware partners access to the latest, high quality training and education on VMware products, services and solutions to help partners deepen their knowledge on the solutions they’re already selling and expand their knowledge in areas they might not have much experience with…

The education paths vary based on the partnerships themselves as well as skill level of those taking the training. There will be options for beginners as well as continuing education for those already certified in many of the programs.

Scott Drummonds with VMware has written at the VMware blog about recent performance testing/experiments done to demonstrate the superiority of VMware.

This submission is an incredible first for us: not only have we shown that we can circumvent limitations in web servers, but we posted a world record performance number in the process. Of course, if any of you have seen Sreekanth Setty’s presentation at VMworld on his ongoing work on SPECweb2005, this result wouldn’t surprise you.

You can see the graphs of the results at the article itself, demonstrating why VMware is the top of it’s field. These results come on the tail of the successful fascinating testiment of performance with 16,000 Exchange mailboxes on 1 Server.

VMware was just declared the Best Cloud Platform and Best Overall Cloud Product at 2009 Cloud Computing Conference & Expo. We are proud of that award as that is why Alpha Hosting has chosen the product as the platform for our own cloud hosting options.

All delegates at the 1st International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in San Jose, California, were offered the opportunity to vote for their favorite cloud computing solutions in five highly competitive categories: Best Overall Cloud Product, Best Cloud Platform, Best Cloud Storage Solution, Best Cloud Management Solution, and Best Cloud Application. The results of the voting by delegates - many of whom are directors of engineering and infrastructure, senior architects, IT directors and managers - were announced recently by SYS-CON Events.

It seems like a panel of that stature would really know what they were talking about, so Alpha Hosting congratulates VMware for being recognized in this manner.

VMware has launched a Knowledgebase Blog from their site. The blog is launched and managed by the same team that is behind the very excellent knowledgebase that VMware offers online. However, the blogs is set up to…

…bring you, our customer, closer to us and engage in a way that helps us all. We are keenly interested in your opinion and take great pride in our ability to act quickly. Over the last year we have focused a great deal of time and energy into making VMware’s Knowledge Base accurate and up-to-date and plan to continue that effort.

As a partner with VMware, Alpha Hosting is very excited to see this new facet added to their excellent support online.

We’ve received notification of the dates of the 2009 VMWorld. This year it’s going to be August 31 – September 3, 2009 at The Moscone Center, San Francisco. AlphaHosting was proud to have representatives at the huge gathering in Las Vegas last year and we plan on attending this year too. If this something you’re interested in, make sure you register here so that you can receive email notification when the online registration is open.

Varien just released the news that their Magento™ eCommerce platform had been downloaded 500,000 times from their magentocommerce.com website.

“The next half-million downloads are on track to come at an even faster pace,”said Roy Rubin, CEO of Varien, the Magento company.“With the ecosystem of partners, consultants and professionals that we’ve developed, an enormous pool of Magento knowledge and experience is now available in the marketplace. Businesses that are ready to enhance their online shopping experience with a flexible, scalable and feature-rich eCommerce solution will have ready access to all the resources they need.

If you’re looking for a good hosting company to run Magento for your e-commerce business, SimpleHelix advertises fast Magento-optimized hosting.

VMware, the company Alpha Hosting partners with to bring you cloud hosting, is starting a new MVP-type process where they look for the best and the most knowledgeable VMware experts around.

VMware is very proud to introduce the VMware vExpert Awards. The VMware vExpert Awards will be given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the overall community of VMware users over the past year, either online or offline. You might be contributing online to blogs, forums, wikis, or other online sites. You might be organizing VMUG meetings or otherwise getting the word out to local IT professionals. You’re helping spread the word about virtualization and making people successful in deploying this game-changing technology. We want to thank you.

Finally, those people who spend hours helping in the forums or using their products can be recognized in the VMware community.  If you know your own vExpert, feel free to nominate them here.