Viper Hosted, a Houston based company providing premium web hosting and SmarterMail hosted services, today announced the launch of its new Premium WordPress Hosting product, which combines the ultimate WordPress server infrastructure and Viper’s own WordPress trained customer support team. Leveraging its long time involvement and support with WordPress, Viper Hosted has extended one of the industry’s fastest WordPress platforms to deliver the most optimized, premium WordPress hosting solutions, a highly scalable and flexible solution that is optimized for developers, designers, and end users.

Viper’s solution is different than all of its competitors which is what make’s it so popular. Premium features include out-of-the box installation. All new signups, have the latest release of WordPress installed automatically with our most recommended plug-ins. Other features include automated WordPress updates, enhanced security, one-click-backups and access to Viper’s complete WordPress training videos and knowledgebase.

For a limited time, all new WordPress Hosting customers, get the added benefit of FREE access to ThemeCarte.com, a $39 value. ThemeCarte.com is marketed as “A one stop shop for everything WordPress.” Specializing in WordPress video tutorials, the company has added several other products to their arsenal, including premium themes, plugins, logo designs, and much more. “With Premium WordPress Hosting, ThemeCarte.com access, we offer a unique user experience for businesses, web developers, and users by providing them with all of the necessary tools to build the best WordPress websites possible.” Said the Marketing Director of Viper Hosted, Tricia Ali.

WordPress users who want to migrate their site to Viper Hosted can leverage the company’s migration service, which makes moving to Viper a breeze. Viper Hosted is also a premium SmarterMaill 12 solutions provider that runs all of its mail services on a solid state architecture, making it a snap for new and existing WordPress customers to upgrade to amazingly fast collaborative email system.

ABOUT VIPER HOSTED
Viper Hosted Inc. deliver’s premium web hosting and hosted applications like SmarterMail VPS Hosting, the leading MS Exchange alternative. Viper sets out to help companies communicate, measure, and support their worldwide business operations. Viper serves thousands of companies across the globe in a broad base of market segments, including those in the technology, financial, education, and hosting industries. Viper’s core products include Premium WordPress Hosting, Hosted Smartermail, and Expert Web Hosting. Viper has recently adopted its SmarterMail to a clustered environment utilizing Parallels Cloud solutions. At the same time Viper upgraded all of it’s servers to the latest version of Smartermail Enterprise 12. Viper’s goal was to offer customers a comparable alternative to MS Exchange at a fraction of the cost.

Optio Data announced today they have reached the Gold Partnership status awarded by Microsoft, demonstrating Optio’s “best-in-class” ability to meet customers’ evolving needs by distinguishing itself within the top 1 percent of Microsoft’s 640,000 partner ecosystem.

To earn a Microsoft Gold competency, partners must designate their Microsoft Certified Professionals to specific Microsoft competencies, ensuring certain levels of technical depth. In addition to demonstrating successful projects through customer references, Partners must also pass technology and sales assessments.

“Since Microsoft revamped their entire portfolio and made significant improvements to Hyper-V, the demand for Microsoft expertise has never been greater,” said Jeff Stevens, Executive Vice President of Optio Data. “We’ve got a lot of customers who need deep subject matter expertise on Microsoft’s product stack. Achieving the Microsoft Gold Certification reflects our continued investment in helping customers leverage the “better together” aspects of Microsoft’s portfolio.”

“By achieving a gold competency, partners have demonstrated the highest, most consistent capability and commitment to the latest Microsoft technology,” said Phil Sorgen, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Corp.

Attaining the Mid-Market Solution Provider competency demonstrates partner expertise in the latest infrastructure solutions based on Microsoft desktop, business-management and server technologies. Equipped with exclusive training, and the latest software and support, partners are able to implement solutions to meet customers’ unique business challenges and infrastructure needs.

About Optio Data:
With the support of a world-class professional services organization, Optio Data delivers efficiencies and flexibility through specializations in Cloud Computing, Data Management, and Technology Integration. Optio accomplishes this by leveraging a state-of-the-art proof of concept center and technology integration facility.

To learn more about Optio Data, visit them online at http://www.optiodata.com or call 888-981-3282.

Web hosting service TextDrive was founded in 2004 with a novel idea: providing lifetime web hosting for an up-front fee of $199. Unfortunately for many of the early TextDrive customers who hoped to never pay for hosting again, however, TextDrive is shutting down March 14, 2014.

In a message to customers, TextDrive founder and CEO Dean Allen said that recent efforts to revive the service were ultimately unsuccessful.

“It is disappointing to report that after a year and a half of uphill battles and unimagined setbacks, after several costly efforts to regroup and find another way, options to keep TextDrive growing have run out, and we will cease operations on the 14th of March, 2014,” wrote Allen. “For those who wish to know, details of what went wrong will be made available once shutdown operations have completed. Sorry to have let you down.”

Ugh, our hosting is going down and we have 10 days to migrate all of our sites. So much for the lifetime hosting we paid for.

— Jessie Mihalik (@jessiemihalik) March 4, 2014

Pls spread urgent word: TextDrive is going dead on Mar 14th. Owner has been AWOL for most of 2013. Now closing shop w/o notifying customers.

— Carina C. Zona (@cczona) March 7, 2014

Many customers were upset that TextDrive chose to break the news on its website less than two weeks before the service would close, rather than sending customers an email message earlier. Many are scrambling to backup their data and find alternative hosting services before their TextDrive storage is wiped.

Many in the TextDrive community don’t feel particularly bitter, given that they got essentially a decade of hosting for around $200. However, as TextDrive user David Foltz told Wired, TextDrive’s owner Joyent could have refunded customers their money when it seemed that it would be impossible to continue the service. TextDrive might have been able to treat this as the repayment of an initial investment – as though they were “mini-VCs”.

But as service continued to decline, many users felt slighted. As Bill Turner notes on his blog, there have been reports that over the last few months, TextDrive sites have gone down, support tickets have not been addressed, and that at least one employee was not getting paid.

The community of TextDrive customers, however, has quickly helped spread the word of the shutdown, and are providing ideas on what they should do next. For instance, a script has been shared for helping people backup their TextDrive data to StrongSpace.

A former TextDrive employee has also created an alternative to TextDrive called Kaizen Garden. Albeit, users have to pay between $25 and $100 per month. If this service gets enough support, Kaizen Garden hopes to hire another former employee to handle support tickets.

While TextDrive’s lifetime is ending, the TextDrive community may live on in one form or another.

Brought to you by Data Center Knowledge

It was a rough weekend for uptime, with significant outages at UK hosting provider FastHosts and the startup news portal Hacker News.

Customers of FastHosts were offline for up to seven hours Saturday after a utility power outage triggered connectivity problems. “Our datacentres switched over to UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) power whilst our backup generators started up for prolonged backup power,” the company said on its status page. “Mains power to the site returned after a few moments, however although power was quickly fully restored to both datacentres we experienced a network issue that occurred as a result of this interruption to service.”

Meanwhile, visitors to Hacker News have been greeted by timeouts and an error message  (“Yeah, that didn’t work. Try again, perhaps later?”). The outage began Sunday and the site remained down as of early Monday. The error message contains a reference to CloudFlare’s network, but the CDN says the problem is at Hacker News itself. “They’re having problems with their server,” tweeted CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince. “Not a problem on our network. We’ve been in touch to see if we can help.” Hacker news is a social news site operated by startup incubator Y Combinator.