Rodney Payne

By William Toll

NaviSite sponsored, presented at, had a large booth and employee participation at Cloud Expo 2010. It was held at the Javits convention center in NYC this week. The show was lively and widely attended with vendors and enterprise corporate IT teams coming from around the world.

I had great conversations with many corporate IT personnel that were either just starting their cloud research or just wrapping it up and writing recommendations for their path forward. It struck me that there seems to be several categories that predict an enterprises current propensity to move to the cloud. First and foremost are their comfort levels with a particular technology and their overall philosophy and consideration of the outsource model. Simply stated enterprises that have a portion – large or small of their infrastructure virtualized are more likely already experimenting or about to transition portions of their IT applications and infrastructure to the cloud.

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By David Snead

By now everyone is aware of the recent decision in Comcast v. FCC. At base, the U.S. Court of Appeals held that the FCC does not have the authority to require all businesses to adhere to network neutrality rules. Regardless of your personal view about network neutrality, I think this decision is good for hosts, and, honestly, the Internet.

Looking at this from the perspective of hosts, it’s a good decision. In its purest sense, network neutrality means that all traffic must be treated the same. This means that one customer’s traffic cannot be favored over another’s. The debate about this issue has been framed from a consumer perspective: what if Comcast enters into a deal with Yahoo and makes Google’s page load slower? This is a very important issue. However, very little consideration is given to network issues from an infrastructure perspective.

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By William Toll

In the last two weeks we had the pleasure of sponsoring two live Webinars with the Microsoft ISV community. The focus of the Webinars was to help ISVs understand the Microsoft S+S Incubation Center program and how managed hosting can accelerate their transition to SaaS (Software as a Service). NaviSite, SaaS-IT Consult and Microsoft sponsored the Webinars.

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By David Snead

I’m taking a one post break from legal issues to blog about a discussion I had last night during my dinner at Webhostingday. My dinner companions consisted of three men and one woman. Everyone at the table, with the exception of me, was from the Netherlands. We were talking about networking at hosting events. We all felt that it can be difficult to meet new contacts. One of the Dutch men voiced his opinion that women have an easier time in sales because they have a natural advantage breaking the ice since, at least in the tech world, the industry is so dominated by men.

This set off a lively discussion. My opinion is that while women may have a bit of an advantage breaking the ice, this is actually a net disadvantage since the conversation, at least from the point of view of the other party, is based on the fact that the other person is a woman. So, in essence, it is based on sexual attraction. As a result, I took the position that woman actually must overcome that bias in order to make sales, while men, in a heterosexual world, don’t need to do so.

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By Rick Wilson

When I look around both the technology industry as a whole and the hosting industry specifically, I see an interesting phenomenon that’s become the “norm”.

Many of us got into tech and hosting because we liked technology and wanted to use the latest and greatest hardware and that led to an expertise and we monetized that expertise by building businesses in this space.

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By William Toll

NaviSite and Microsoft hosted an educational event for Web Design and Development professionals at the very cool Microsoft New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts this past week. The event, organized by the Microsoft Communications Sector team in collaboration with NaviSite, was extremely well received as a full day of educational sessions and interactive discussions. The event left the audience with an excellent understanding of the power of the Microsoft Expression Suite and Windows as a Web platform. The majority of attendees were from small and medium sized companies whose business is built with Microsoft developer tools and Websites and Web applications hosted on servers running Windows Server 2008 and SQL 2008. Represented were Web designers for SMBs, application developers for regional retailers, system integrators, and Web 2.0 companies.

As a hosting provider, it’s always a wonderful thing to have the opportunity to connect with customers at a local level as invaluable insight is gleaned both during the scheduled sessions themselves as well as the informal breakouts that naturally occur during break and meal periods. Among other things, questions about running PHP on Windows, the MVC Framework on ASP.NET and Silverlight and BizSpark and WebsiteSpark Hosting surfaced and resulted in rich discussion and lots of excitement.

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By Rick Wilson

When I look around both the technology industry as a whole and the hosting industry specifically, I see an interesting phenomenon that’s become the “norm”.

Many of us got into tech and hosting because we liked technology and wanted to use the latest and greatest hardware and that led to an expertise and we monetized that expertise by building businesses in this space.

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By David Snead

The subject of early termination fees is frequently debated by hosts. On the one hand, hosts almost always include these fees in their term based contracts. On the other, hosts try to avoid them when they’re seeking to get out of bandwidth contracts that no longer make economic sense. Customers (and hosts) often try to argue that these clauses are “penalty” clauses that may not be part of a contract. A recent decision by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington dismisses this argument.

In Minnick v. Clearwire, the court reviewed an early termination fee in an ISP’s contract. The customer argued that the presence of the early termination fee made the contract void. Not only did the court dismiss this argument, stating that the presence of a penalty clause was a contract defense, and not a cause of action, but it also held that an early termination fee was a bargained for alternative payment provision.

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By David Snead

Virginia:

Conforms Virginia’s SPAM law to make it constitutional by addressing routing information, narrow the law to relate only to unsolicited commercial email. (HB 1)

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By David Snead

The two posters of defamatory material were ordered to remove the material from several websites. When they refused, the subjects of the defamation presented the websites with the injunction they received and asked the operators to remove the posts. All but one, ripoffreport, complied. The subjects of the defamatory statements sued ripoffreport on the grounds that the website had violated the injunction. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois held it could not compel a third party website to remove defamatory material based on an injunction against a user.

The defamed individuals argued that the hosting contract between ripoffreport and its user led to the conclusion that ripoffreport was “acting in concert” with its users. In order for a third party to be bound by an injunction, the third party must be acting in concert with the subject of the injunction.

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