We have some amazing news to share with our current and future customers as we continue to grow!

We just signed our agreement and will be moving our servers to Terremark’s NAP of the Americas in September; storing your data in one of the top datacenters in the country and the world. You will be in good company, it’s the same datacenter used by the US Govt’ and many of the major banks and telco companies.

The datacenter is designed to withstand and continue normal operation even if a category 5 hurricane (the strongest of hurricanes) hits the area.  It offers unrivaled n+2 redundant power and cooling. Apart from the military grade security and impressive power redundancy, the NAP of the Americas has direct backbone access as it sits on one of the most important network access points in the planet offering a direct connection to over 148 countries in the world. Miami has been ranked as one of the top-five best interconnected cities in the world, ahead of San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Terremark’s NAP of the Americas makes Miami the only city in the U.S. where Optical, Ethernet, MPLS, Voice and Internet traffic is handed off in a single location, and we are on it!

So seriously, apart from these awesome reasons, why are we switching?

First of all, our current datacenter offers only a single carrier. They are awesome and have been good to us, but as a rule of thumb we like to build in redundancy into our systems. When we switch to Terremark we will have three network providers: AT&T, Verizon Business and Level3. Needless to say, three is better than one and we know that we will not loose connectivity. In addition, we will be sitting directly on top of their network access point with direct backbone access; minimizing the hops your data packets have to take. In sum, we will be providing some of the best kick-ass connectivity out there.

Will our current clients move too?

Absolutely! Between September and November we will be moving all our clients to our new Datacenter and in the process we will be upgrading some of our hardware. We don’t expect any downtime and all our clients will get an email informing them of the migration process when the time comes.

If you want to learn more about Terremark and the NAP of the Americas, feel free to visit their website at: http://www.terremark.com/technology-platform/nap-of-the-americas.aspx

We are launching the VPS2000 and VPS3000 to accommodate the growing need of our customers for higher end VPS plans. The VPS2000 has 4GB of RAM and the VPS3000 8GB of RAM. Higher configurations are still available, ask us for a custom quote.

We wanted to give a big thank you to Jon Lebensold for the great work he is doing with Zendcasts. He is really helping the Zend Framework community with some of the best Zend Framework webcasts out there and we are very excited to be sponsoring Zendcasts for our very first episode on the topic of Doctrine Relations and Data Fixtures. Exciting stuff baby!

Check it out at zendcasts.com

We are offering a special promotion of 10% off using the coupon code “zc” on any hosting product to celebrate this occasion.

We are continually trying to improve our products and beginning this week a dedicated IP will be included with all VPS 100 accounts. If you are an existing VPS 100 customer you may request a dedicated IP at no additional cost by opening a support ticket. Keep in mind that your domain will have to be updated to point to the new IP address. This is really easy if you are already using our DNS servers.

Additional IPs for your VPS may still be purchased at $2 p/mo, as long as you provide a valid justification.

About the VPS 100

The VPS 100 is our entry level VPS offering 10GB Disk space, unlimited domains, 100GB data transfer, 256mb RAM burstable to 512MB. For $20 a month it is one of the best VPS offerings on the market fine tuned for running PHP frameworks & applications. It also includes DNS and Email service hosted in our servers outside your VPS so all the resources are used for your website hosting. For more information visit servergrove.com/vps

As some of you might have already noticed we updated our website last Friday. We hope you like the new design, while content heavy, it also contains a lot more information. We also streamlined our shared hosting product lines, more resources and more hosted sites. It continues to be a great product for a fair price with the support you have come to expect from us. Those of you who are already clients and wish to switch to a new product may do so at any time in our client area.

We also narrowed our service offerings to what we do best, which is PHP, Zend framework and symfony framework support. We have decided not to jump on the Django/Rails bandwagon and focus on the community and technologies love to work with. Supporting a framework we don’t believe in, or don’t like to work with is a true pain in the neck, and we don’t want to do it if we are not able to offer top-notch support for it. We believe that if we focus on what we do best and do it better than anyone else we will be a better hosting company.

As always, we are listening, honest feedback is always welcome.

OK, we know that 100 downloads in 3 days is not earth shattering, and there is still a long way to to reach Firefox download levels, but at least we did not bring down Graffletopia’s webserver and they thank us for that (I think).

We are glad to know it helped some people out there. Keep suggestions coming, I’ll update the template as soon as I have enough. In case you are a OmniGraffle user and have not seen it: http://graffletopia.com/stencils/485

Write an article or a tutorial about symfony, zend framework, php, wordpress or and other technology offered and supported by ServerGrove and we will pay up to $200 for accepted articles. To get involved read our guidelines and pitch your idea. If you have an idea for an article you think should appear in our blog, submit it to the comments area, perhaps someone will pick it up.

We are now open for questions on our brand spanking new discussion forums at http://www.servergrove.com/forum/

Some of you have asked for a screencast. Here it is. Send us feedback and feature requests, we are interested to know what you think.