Hi.  Every now and then we send out a newsletter.  The last one was in December 2009.

Since then we have added a lot of cool new features and services that you may find helpful.

8 years old and lots of recent improvements

RimuHosting just passed its 8th year anniversary in March (that’s 1000 years in binary!).

We have been pushing hard to improve our hosting service and provide even better value and support to our customers.

New RimuHosting control panel features

Over the last couple of months there has been a flurry of dev coding and we have added a ton of great new features to the RimuHosting control panel:

• On-demand disk image snapshots.
• An improved VPS reboot page.
• A data transfer usage page for VPSs and dedicated servers in Dallas.
• A VPS upgrade page which checks your host server for ‘spare’ memory and often lets you get a free upgrade.
• We added live chat which we man most hours and days of the week. It is great for quick questions, or getting a status update on the progress of a support request.
• Plus we are always tweaking and honing our control panel pages to make them easier to use, faster and more bulletproof.

Beefed up resources for most VPSs

The server hardware we use has changed over the last 8 years.  Pentium 4’s with up to 2GB of memory are no longer state-of-the art VPS host servers.

Some of our new host servers are absolute behemoths.  72GB of memory, dual Nehalem CPUs and terabytes of RAID-10 disk space.  So we have gone and bumped up the resources you can get for your dollar on almost all host servers, particularly the newer ones.

We think the current resource allocations, particularly for high-memory VPSs, are some of the most generous and flexible in the VPS industry.

Try out our brand new VPS ordering system (complete with sliders and AJAX-y goodness) at http://launchtime.ri.mu/ .

Also note that existing customers and servers are not left out.  You can use the VPS upgrade page to get the best possible resources on your current VPS host.  Or if there are better resources available on a different host, then you will be offered the move page.  And on a lot of hosts we can move your disk image to a newer, bigger server without the need to even change your IP address.

Launchtime.ri.mu: Our new VPS-focused website

With the new ordering system we also launched http://launchtime.ri.mu .  It is a simplified, VPS-focused skin on our regular RimuHosting website (so your referral links and logins all work the same as normal there, and if you log in there you get access to all your current http://rimuhosting.com servers).

If your friends need a VPS point them over to: http://launchtime.ri.mu and we will work to get them setup on a great new server.

25 Mail St: for managed email hosting

At RimuHosting requests to configure, troubleshoot or setup mail servers are amongst some of the most common tasks we help with.  Our customers often struggle to setup or maintain a mail system for their own email domain and its users.

So we were very happy and proud to launch http://25mail.st , our managed email hosting service, last week.

It lets you run a solid, simple, fully managed email server for 1 or more of your own domains for 1 or more email users.  Complete with webmail, web-based self-serve control panel and spam and virus filtering.

For more info see our 25 Mail St. launch post.

InboxHarmony our email collaboration tool

Support has always been at the core of what we do at RimuHosting.  And most of our support is done via email.

‘Raw email’ just does not work however.  Too many issues with two people grabbing the same email.

We didn’t want a traditional ticket system.  We wanted something that naturally integrated with our email inbox.  But something that let our support team collaborate on responses.  Something that let our team share notes on an email thread, set due dates/times, assign urgencies and priorities and tag things so we can do trend analysis.

The result was http://inboxharmony.com/

This service is now available to anyone who has a team that needs to share an inbox.  Whether for customer support, or sales, or even simple project management.

Try it out.  It may be just the support ticket alternative you didn’t know you needed.

Bakop.com: off site server backups

We added a new service, http://bakop.com.  It is an FTP server service.  You can use it to store offsite FTP backups of your VPS data.  Or even use it to backup your office servers.  For more details see the launch post on our blog.

Bakop is the standalone version of our integrated RimuHosting backupspace service.  Complete with rsync and support for SSH (mv, cp, df and other file commands).

The value of offsite backups hit home for a lot of Christchurch-based businesses here in NZ after the recent earthquakes.  The central business district was closed for safety reasons meaning many businesses were without access to vital business records.

Zonomi Managed DNS Hosting

The DNS manager in the http://rimuhosting.com control panel has been popular with a lot of our customers.  We setup a standalone managed DNS service at http://zonomi.com which has proved popular with a lot of customers.  Particularly with hosting resellers who use our name servers and API to manage their customer’s DNS records.

Lots of new services, a new ‘hub-site’

As you can see, over the last 12 months or so our dev group has been busy launching a number of great new services targeted at website owners.

Our goal is to help take the hassle out of running a website.  Things like backups, DNS, email, monitoring, email-based support and, of course, hosting.

With our current offerings we are working to become a fully featured infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider.

We launched http://ri.mu as the central hub in our growing IaaS empire. It summarizes and links to our rapidly multiplying set of websites and services.

The http://ri.mu homepage includes our ‘fat footer’ (way down the bottom there) which includes key news from our blog, as well as short updates and news from the twitterverse.

Dedicated server specials

We currently have some special pricing on strictly limited set of Dallas-based Core2 servers.  See our blog post for the details.  Get in quick before those servers are snapped up.

We also have a special on a London-based dedicated server.  2 months free on a 24 GB dual Xeon server.

Keep up to date with Twitter and Facebook

If you want to hear about new features as we release them as well as specials and offers then I’d invite you to follow us at:

http://twitter.com/rimuhosting

And ‘like’ us on Facebook at:

http://www.facebook.com/rimuhostingcom

And point your RSS reader at out blog feed: http://blog.rimuhosting.com/rss

Then you can keep up with new features as we add them and be the first to hear about any special offers and pricing.  (Plus you’re welcome to say hi there!)

Link to us and earn hosting credits

Are you happy with the service you get from us? Then tell the world and get hosting credits as a reward for spreading the good karma. Get a referral id, link to us on your homepage or in a blog post, and get $15 hosting credit every time someone orders a server with us.

All the best.

Regards, Peter Bryant

http://ri.mu – Internet Infrastructure as a Service: VPS, dedicated servers, DNS, monitoring, backups, email hosting, email collaboration