Business Posts

If you had to order a new cloud server right now, how would choose it?

I’ve worked in the hosting industry for the better part of a decade, and I can safely say that I’ve either observed or been a part of the buying decision for a few thousand hosting customers — from small business owners getting a website online for the first time to established platforms that are now getting tens of millions of visits every day. While each of those purchasers had different requirements and priorities, I’ve noticed a few key deciding factors that are consistent in a all of those decisions:

How much will the dedicated server or cloud computing instance cost? What configuration/technology do I need (or want)? Which hosting provider should I trust with my business?

Every website administrator of every site on the Internet has had to answer those three questions, and while they seem pretty straightforward, they end up overlapping, and the buying decision starts to get a little more complicated:

The natural assumption is that everyone will choose a dedicated server or cloud computing instance that falls in the “sweet spot” where the three circles overlap, right? While that makes sense on paper, hosting decisions are not made in a vacuum, so you’ll actually see completely valid hosting decisions targeting every spot on that graph.

Why would anyone choose an option that wouldn’t fit in the sweet spot?

That’s a great question, and it’s a tough one to answer in broad strokes. Let’s break the chart down into a few distinct zones to look at why a user would choose a server in each area:

Zone 1

Buyers choosing a server in Zone 1 are easiest to understand: Their budget takes priority over everything else. They might want to host with a specific provider or have a certain kind of hardware, but their budget doesn’t allow for either. Maybe they don’t need their site to use the latest and greatest hardware or have it hosted anywhere in particular. Either way, they choose a cloud solely based on whether it fits their budget. After the initial buying decision, if another server needs to be ordered, they might become a Zone 4 buyer.

Zone 2

Just like Zone 1 buyers, Zone 2 buyers are a pretty simple bunch as well. If you’re an IT administrator at a huge enterprise that does all of your hosting in-house, your buying decision is more or less made for you. It doesn’t matter how much the solution costs, you have to choose an option in your data center, and while you might like a certain technology, you’re going to get what’s available. Enterprise users aren’t the only people deciding to order a server in Zone 2, though … It’s where you see a lot of loyal customers who have the ability to move to another provider but prefer not to — whether it’s because they want their next server to be in the same place as their current servers, they value the capabilities of a specific hosting provider (or they just like the witty, interesting blogs that hosting provider writes).

Zone 3

As with Zone 1 and Zone 2, when a zone doesn’t have any overlapping areas, the explanation is pretty easy. In Zone 3, the buying decision is being made with a priority on technology. Buyers in this area don’t care what it costs or where it’s hosted … They need the fastest, most powerful, most scalable infrastructure on the market. Similar to Zone 1 buyers, once Zone 3 buyers make their initial buying decision, they might shift to Zone 5 for their next server or cloud instance, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Zone 4

Now we’re starting to overlap. In Zone 4, a customer will be loyal to a hosting provider as long as that loyalty doesn’t take them out of their budget. This is a relatively common customer … They’ll try to compare options apples-to-apples, and they’ll make their decision based on which hosting provider they like/trust most. As we mentioned above, if a Zone 1 buyer is adding another server to their initial server order, they’ll likely look to add to their environment in one place to make it easier to manage and to get the best performance between the two servers.

Zone 5

Just like the transitional Zone 1 buyers, when Zone 3 buyers look to build on their environment, they’ll probably become Zone 5 buyers. When your initial buying decision is based entirely on technology, it’s unusual to reinvent the wheel when it comes to your next buying decision. While there are customers that will reevaluate their environment and choose a Zone 3 option irrespective of where their current infrastructure is hosted, it’s less common. Zone 5 users love having he latest and greatest technology, and they value being able to manage it through one provider.

Zone 6

A Zone 6 buyer is usually a Zone 1 buyer that has specific technology needs. With all the options on the table, a Zone 6 buyer will choose the cloud environment that provides the latest technology or best performance for their budget, regardless of the hosting provider. As with Zone 1 and Zone 3 buyers, a Zone 6 buyer will probably become a Zone 7 buyer if they need to order another server.

Zone 7

Zone 7 buyers are in the sweet spot. They know the technology they want, they know the price they want to pay, and they know the host they want to use. They’re able to value all three of their priorities equally, and they can choose an environment that meets all of their needs. After Zone 6 buyers order their first server(s), they’re going to probably become Zone 7 buyers when it comes time for them to place their next order.

As you probably noticed, a lot of transitioning happens between an initial buying decision and a follow-up buying decision, so let’s look at that quickly:

Regardless of how you make your initial buying decision, when it’s time for your next server or cloud computing instance, you have a new factor to take into account: You already have a cloud infrastructure at a hosting provider, so when it comes time to grow, you’ll probably want to grow in the same place. Why? Moving between providers can be a pain, managing environments between several providers is more difficult, and if your servers have to work together, they’re generally doing so across the public Internet, so you’re not getting the best performance.

Where does SoftLayer fit in all of this? Well beyond being a hosting provider that buyers are choosing, we have to understand buyers are making their buying decisions, and we have to position our business to appeal to the right people with the right priorities. It’s impossible to be all things for all people, so we have to choose where to invest our attention … I’ll leave that post for another day, though.

If you had to choose a zone that best describes how you made (or are currently making) your buying decision, which one would it be?

-@khazard

Last week, the SoftLayer team attended ad:tech San Francisco. It’s pretty unbelievable to think that it’s only April, and this show was the seventh I’ve attended this year. 2012 has already been a HUGE year for SoftLayer in terms of growth, and our trade show and conference schedule has provided a fantastic outlet to share some of the good news. In addition to the seven shows I’ve attended, SoftLayer has exhibited at six more, and each has it’s own unique focus and audience — ad:tech in particular.

At most shows, the conversations I have can be best described as “technical.” I’ll field questions about our network capacity, hybrid environments, API functionality and data center pod architecture. The attendees that stop by and talk to us are typically technical members of IT teams familiar with their hosting needs and interested in learning about our cloud and dedicated environments. At ad:tech, the attendees that I talked to were more interested in “big picture” differentiators and the non-technical value that SoftLayer provides, so I got to tell the SoftLayer story in a fresh way.

Most of our ad:tech conversations were in a theme of managed hosting, flexibility, short-term resource availability and scalability. The attendees that stopped by our booth were no less qualified as customers than the IT administrators we might meet at other shows, but they couldn’t be won over with the industry-leading numbers we would normally share … They were more interested in hearing about the Super Bowl campaigns we’ve supported, the streaming media services we host and some of the high-profile clients that attest to platform’s ability to handle anything they can throw at us.

The messaging on our booth graphic set the stage perfectly:

Our Platform.
Your Vision.
Build on a global cloud infrastructure at Internet scale. Blur the lines between physical and virtual. Bend infrastructure to your imagination. We’ve created the platform on which you’ll create tomorrow.
Build the future.

The most surprising observation I made at ad:tech was that despite the “big picture” conversations I tended to have with attendees, they were all equally (if not MORE) interested in our Server Challenge:

During the two-day conference, these “non-technical” attendees completed the challenge with an average time of 1:37, and this show’s Server Challenge champion, Rany Grinberg, walked away with a “new iPad” after recording a blazingly fast 0:58.34 time. They might not have been able to tell you what all the pieces in our server rack did, but they could definitely put it back together quickly.

I had a blast meeting all the attendees who stopped by our booth. If you happen to be one of those people, thank you for visiting us … Now start studying and practicing to take on the Server Challenge again at our next show!

-Summer

We hosted our first quarterly networking event in Singapore yesterday, and as I spoke with the partners, prospects, customers and SLayers in attendance, I heard some incredible stories about struggles with scaling infrastructure and how SoftLayer has revolutionized the way our customers look at their physical and virtual infrastructure. As we talked about our experiences, one of my own “war stories” came to mind, and I got to share it:

10 years later, I can’t believe how much things have changed.

SoftLayer automates almost all of the manual processes, and we’re able to provision a dedicated servers in 2-4 hours. While that’s a pretty impressive feat, it’s even more amazing when you consider that we can bring up 20, 50 or 100 dedicated servers in the same time frame. Just look at what OMGPOP was able to do when their “Draw Something” app was downloaded 36 million times. That’s what automation is all about. Anything that we can automate, we automate, and that makes for an unbeatable user experience.

If someone came to us today with the an urgent order similar to the one I dealt with in 2002, the entire interaction above would boil down to, “What specs do you need? *typing* Here’s your order number. You can expect the machines to be provisioned within 4 hours.” We’d be off the phone by about 7:20am, and by noon, all of the servers would be online and hosting the game. The craziest part is that we’re not even satisfied with that turnaround time yet. Our commitment is to continue to innovate, automate and empower our customers through our customer portal and APIs, and because our goals are to get better and serve our customers faster, the carrot will always be in front of us … the same way UPS has a philosophy of “constructive dissatisfaction.”

I want to thank everyone who came to our networking event yesterday. I hope you learned a little something about SoftLayer because I certainly learned a lot about our customers in the dozens of conversations I had. If you weren’t able to attend and want to see what you missed, we posted a few pictures on Flickr: SoftLayer Singapore – Quarterly Networking Event – March 28, 2012

Do you have any infrastructure horror stories from the past like mine?

-Michael

“If you build it, he will come.”

I hope I’m not alone as I find myself whispering those words in my head as I read them. If you’ve seen Field of Dreams*, you know that Kevin Costner mysteriously hears and sees things no one else can see, and he seems like a lunatic when he follows the instructions of his invisible guide. He builds a baseball diamond on his farm land, and famous baseball players like Shoeless Joe Jackson come to play from the afterlife. He took a risk to build something with faith that it would yield results.

It’s a lot like the way most visionaries and entrepreneurs take risks to make their marks on the world.

Taking an idea from inception to market is much like building a baseball field in the middle of your farmland. You can factor in all the “knowns” (size, shape, materials, etc.), but in the end, you have to trust that consumers will come. Faith in a product or service drives the concept forward, and second-guessing it or working at it halfheartedly can destroy its slim chance of success. As a company so keenly focused on innovation ourselves, we find that other innovators are drawn to us, and because I’ve had the unique opportunity to work with many of our extremely successful companies, I thought I’d put together a few simple questions you might ask yourself as you transition from inspiration to action:

1. Is your idea possible to execute? Will it be easy for the market to understand and adopt?
2. Are there technologies available to deliver the idea or will you need to build your own?
3. Are the resources you’re using to build the product the best you can leverage?

If you answered, “No,” to the first question, you might want to hit the drawing board to come up with a new strategy or approach as you aim to meet the unmet needs of the market. Don’t get discouraged at this point … By spending more time simplifying and clarifying your idea, you’re saving an exponentially greater amount of time that you’d waste having to redefine or reposition your product down the road. If you answered, “Yes,” move on to Question 2.

Question 2 will start setting a baseline of the amount of effort required to get your idea to a functional state. You might hang on Question 2 for a while as you learn more about available technologies or lay the groundwork for your project, but by doing so, you’ll have a more concrete estimate of the timeline you can expect. Once you feel confident and comfortable with the answers to Question 1 and Question 2, the last step you need to take is to Question 3.

Question 3 can be pretty far-reaching — people, technologies and even hardware/software. These are some of the “knowns” that I referenced earlier. Note that “the best you can leverage” is not necessarily going to be “the best available.” Startup ideas generally are equipped with startup resources. Cost, expertise and comfort are going to play a huge role in the adoption of resources.

One of the big roadblocks many budding entrepreneurs run into is that they have trouble preparing for success. Build your product with the expectation that it will be successful. Know what you can do to accommodate the spike in demand you’ll see when Oprah and Bono give you a shout-out.

SoftLayer has been successful because we did our best to answer with those three questions, and as we continue to grow and succeed, we live and breathe innovation. We’d like to think that we’re some of “the crazy ones” Apple referenced in its epic “Think Different” campaign, and we want to empower our customers to be a little crazy themselves.

-Clayton

*If you haven’t seen Field of Dreams yet, you should find a way to watch it immediately, if not sooner.

What would you do if your business received $50,000-$100,000 with no strings attached and no equity given up? Spend it to market to new customers? Invest in your infrastructure to scale your application? Use it lease office space that doesn’t sit above a bowling alley? Buy all of your employees puppies? It’s a dilemma that every startup on the planet would love to face, and with the launch of this year’s MassChallenge Startup Accelerator and Competition, that “dilemma” won’t just be theoretical.

If you haven’t heard of MassChallenge before, here’s the quick rundown: MassChallenge is the largest startup accelerator and competition in the world, and the first to support high-impact, early-stage entrepreneurs with no strings attached. Participants are invited to a three-month accelerator program with world-class mentorship and training, free office space, access to funding, media and more. 15-20 startups are selected as winners of $50,000-$100,000, totaling $1.1M in cash awards. $4M+ in-kind support is provided (including some hosting goodness from SoftLayer). It’s open to all: Any startup can enter, from anywhere, in any industry. No equity is taken. No restrictions apply.

Every entrant, not just the winners, will receive access to workshops, mentors, executives, other team members and sources of funding. Experts from the Massachusetts tech ecosystem will identify the highest potential startups, which will receive cash prizes and will qualify for privileged access to funding sources from across Massachusetts.

Why is MassChallenge important to SoftLayer? Well SoftLayer Loves Startups, and as an expression of that love, SoftLayer’s Catalyst Program — our technology entrepreneur mentorship initiative will provide $25,000 cash to MassChallenge in addition to $1,000 per month of credit for qualifying participants to use on the SoftLayer platform (servers, cloud instances, storage, etc.) for one full year … Which is reason enough to participate, right?

We’re no strangers to the startup scene, and the reception we’ve received from organizations like MassChallenge, TechStars Cloud and Beta have only reinforced our commitment to communities created to foster entrepreneurship and innovation. I can’t count the number of killer startups I’ve met in the past month (much less the past year), and I’m blown away by the portfolio of startup companies already in the Catalyst Program … That’s not a reason to be satisfied, though. We’re not resting on our laurels; we’re speeding up.

What does it mean for you as an entrepreneur? Easy: You need to sign up immediately, if not sooner. The deadline for applications for the 2012 competition is April 11, and if you apply before March 15, you’ll be eligible for a $100 discount on the application fee. Visit masschallenge.org to learn more and get the ball rolling.

-@PaulFord

It’s been a long time since I put fingers to keyboard to write a blog, so I reckoned it was about time that I resurfaced on the interwebs. While this post won’t announce any huge news like my last post about SoftLayer going live in Amsterdam, it might provide an interesting insight into what it’s like to work for a dynamic, growing company.

My time at SoftLayer has been marked by change at rapid pace — more revolution than evolution, I suppose. This has been true both in terms of my professional development and the trajectory the company has taken in the past 18 months: I have gone through a merger that more than tripled the size of the company, watched the expansion of our footprint in the United States (a new data center in San Jose and new pods in Washington, D.C. and Dallas) and participated in our expansion overseas when I worked on the Amsterdam launch … And if that list wasn’t action-packed enough, I’ve been a part of some fantastic product launches (Flex Images and Object Storage being the two most recent examples).

When I joined SoftLayer, I kicked off fledgling analyst relations program, transitioned to corporate communications, and then seized the opportunity to serve as SoftLayer’s EMEA general manager (temporarily until I found Jonathan Wisler to run the ship). Today, I’m responsible for driving our international operations in Amsterdam and Singapore, and so far, the work has gone according to the plan. Both facilities are up and running, and we have in-region folks in place to run the data centers and drive the region’s business. As with every other DC under the SoftLayer hood, the Ops teams continue to knock it out of the park, and our business teams are just getting wound up.

Our early success in the new international markets speaks volumes about the support our customer base has given us as we’ve expanded, and now that we’ve got fully fledged dedicated teams to run in-region sales and marketing in Amsterdam and Singapore, we’re expecting the result to be akin to throwing gasoline on an already-roaring fire. Users in Europe and Asia can look forward to seeing a lot more from SoftLayer over the coming months as we ramp up our events schedule and start to push the SoftLayer message throughout both geographies.

Suffice it to say, I am very excited about what lies ahead … I suspect our competitors might not share the same enthusiasm.

-@quigleymar

SoftLayer data centers are designed in a “pod” concept: Every facility in every location is laid out similarly, and you’ll find the same network and server hardware connected to the same network. The idea behind it is that this design makes it easier for us to build out new locations quickly, we can have identical operational processes and procedures in each facility, and customers can expect the exact same hosting experience regardless of data center location. When you’ve got several data centers in one state, that uniformity is easy to execute. When you open facilities on opposite sides of the country, it seems a little more difficult. Open a facility in another country (and introduce the challenge of getting all of that uniformity across an ocean), and you’re looking at a pretty daunting task.

Last month, I hopped on a plane from Houston to London to attend Cloud Expo Europe. Because I was more or less “in the neighborhood” of our newest data center in Amsterdam, I was able to take a short flight to The Netherlands to do some investigatory journalism … err … “to visit the AMS01 team.”

Is AMS01 worthy of the SoftLayer name? … How does it differ from our US facilities? … Why is everything written in Dutch at the Amsterdam airport?

The answers to my hard-hitting questions were pretty clear: SoftLayer’s Amsterdam facility is absolutely deserving of the SoftLayer name … The only noticeable differences between AMS01 and DAL05 are the cities they’re located in … Everything’s written in Dutch because the airport happens to be in The Netherlands, and people speak Dutch in The Netherlands (that last question didn’t get incorporated into the video, but I thought you might be curious).

Nearly every aspect of the data center mirrors what you see in WDC, SEA, HOU, SJC and DAL. The only differences I really noticed were what the PDUs looked like, what kind of power adapter was used on the crash carts, and what language was used on the AMS facility’s floor map. One of the most interesting observations: All of the servers and power strips on the racks used US power plugs … This characteristic was particularly impressive to me because every gadget I brought with me seemed to need its own power converter to recharge.

When you see us talking about the facilities being “the same,” that’s not a loosely used general term … We could pull a server from its rack in DAL05, buckle it into an airplane seat for a 10-hour flight, bring it to AMS01 (via any of the unique modes of Amsterdam transportation you saw at the beginning of the video), and slide it into a rack in Amsterdam where we could simply plug it in. It’d be back online and accessible over the public and private networks as though nothing changed … Though with Flex Images making it so easy to replicate cloud and dedicated instances in any facility, you’ll just have to take our word for it when it comes to the whole “send a server over to another data center on a plane” thing.

While I was visiting AMS01, Jonathan Wisler took a few minutes out of his day to give a full tour of the data center’s server room, and we’ve got video and pictures to share with more shots of our beautiful servers in their European home. If there’s anything in particular you want to see from AMS01, let us know, and we’ll do our best to share it!

-@khazard

P.S. Shout out to the SLayers in the Amsterdam office who offered their linguistic expertise to add a little flair to the start of the video … From the four employees who happened to be in the office when I was asking for help, we had six fluent-language contributions: English, Italian, French, Dutch, Polish and German!

**UPDATE** After posting this video, I learned that the “US” server power plugs I referred to are actually a worldwide computer standard called C13 (male) and C14 (female).

Bringing server hardware to a “Cloud Expo” is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. Why would anyone care about hardware? Isn’t “the cloud” a magical land where servers and data centers cease to exist and all that matters is that your hardware-abstracted hypervisor can scale elastically on demand?

You might be surprised how many attendees at Cloud Expo Europe expressed that sentiment in one way or another when SoftLayer showed up in London with the infamous Server Challenge last week. Based on many of the conversations I had with attendees, some of the most basic distinctions and characteristics of physical and virtual environments are widely misunderstood. Luckily, we had a nice little server rack to use as a visual while talking about how SoftLayer fits in (and stands out) when it comes to “the cloud.”

When we didn’t have a line of participants waiting to try their hand at our in-booth competition, we were able to use it to “show and tell” what a cloud hardware architecture might look like and what distinguishes SoftLayer from some of the other infrastructure providers in the industry. We’re able to show our network-within-a-newtork topology, we explain the pod concept of our data centers and how that streamlines our operations, and we talk about our system automation and how that speeds up the provisioning of both physical and virtual environments. Long-term memory is aided by the use of multiple senses, so when each attendee can see and touch what they’re hearing about in our booth, they have a much better chance to remember the conversation in the midst of dozens (if not hundreds) they have before and after they talk to us.

And by the time we finish using the Server Challenge as a visual, the attendee is usually ready to compete. As you probably noticed if you caught the Cloud Expo Europe album at Facebook.com/SoftLayer, the competition was pretty intense. In fact, the winning time of 1:08.16 was set just about twenty minutes before the conference ended … In the short video below, Phil presents the winner of the Cloud Expo Europe Server Challenge with his iPad 2 and asks for some insight about how he was able to pull off the victory:

Being the international debut of the Server Challenge, we were a bit nervous that the competition wouldn’t have as much appeal as we’ve seen in the past, but given the response we received from attendees, it’s pretty safe to say it’s not the last time you’ll see the Server Challenge abroad.

To all of the participants who competed last week, thanks for stopping by our booth, and we hope you’re enjoying your “torch” (if you beat the 2:00.00 flashlight-winning time)!

-@khazard

I’ve always enjoyed SNL’s satirization of those infomercials where a guy is slightly inconvenienced by a product that just doesn’t seem to work to his satisfaction. As a result, it shows him getting frustrated and pulling his hair out … But it doesn’t stop there. He then gets into his vehicle, drives recklessly down the one-way street going the wrong way and ultimately crashes into a cable tower, knocking out the “big game” for the whole town. Of course, this causes a riot among the angry football fans who then ravage the whole town. Havoc is wreaked because this guy was using a standard toothbrush instead of the all new, Electric Brush-a-thon 2100.

The funny thing is, I don’t think SNL is too far off on how these infomercials represent real life. I can’t help but think of these parodies when I think about the effects that SOPA would have had if it passed as law:

The first business to die a slow, horrible and expensive death as a result of the legislation might have been Google. Because it’s connected to virtually every website on the planet (legitimate and non-legitimate alike), the amount of time spent severing connections to sites in any way related to a site that was merely assumed to be performing illegal activities would stall Google’s growth and innovation endeavors. This would cause thousands of people to lose their jobs … And it’s not out of the question to think one or two of those people might start a riot.

Small- and medium-sized businesses would not have escaped the legislation … Theoretically, a single anonymous comment that linked to a site with pirated versions of Pirates of the Caribbean (*fitting title as an example*) would make that site subject to being shut down if proper actions weren’t taken. All these innovative companies would spend their time playing big brother instead of creating the next new technology that will make our lives easier (or at least more fun) … And along with stifling innovation, don’t forget the riots.

To wrap up our “what if” scenario, we’d have Google failing and SMBs going out of business. The Internet would become a wasteland, and it would be like World War 10 in the streets (we skipped 3 through 9 because all of these riots would make the resulting “war” so momentous).

How’s that for a satirical worst-case scenario?

I bring this up in the wake of SOPA and PIPA being tabled because the legislators who proposed those controversial bills merely stopped pursuing their goals in the form of those bills … We can’t let the idea that “we’ve won the battle” distract us from potentially losing the war.

Many technology companies, including Google and Wikipedia, publicly spoke out against this bill by “blacking out” their sites. Due to all the negative responses from the tech community, the bills’ sponsors in Congress decided they didn’t want the blood from World War 10 on their hands.

We need to continue the momentum from the Internet’s response to SOPA and PIPA — not only to pay attention to attempts at similar legislation in the future but also to proactively help create and shape laws that protect intellectual property and copyright holders.

Also, anything we can collectively do to prevent riots in the streets is a good thing.

-Philip

The Internet community’s rallying cry has been heard by the United States Congress and Senate. Last week, we reported that SOPA was temporarily being put on the shelf, but now Congressman Lamar Smith has pulled the bill altogether, stating that “until there is wider agreement on a solution,” the bill will not be reintroduced.

On the Protect IP Act (PIPA) front, Senator Harry Reid also announced late last week that he’s postponed the schedule vote on the legislation that was originally slated for today. In a statement released on Friday, Senator Reid went on to say:

“There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved. Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year, with the movie industry alone supporting over 2.2 million jobs. We must take action to stop these illegal practices. We live in a country where people rightfully expect to be fairly compensated for a day’s work, whether that person is a miner in the high desert of Nevada, an independent band in New York City, or a union worker on the back lots of a California movie studio.”

As a hosting provider, we wholeheartedly agree that counterfeiting and piracy are a primary focus, and our opposition to the bills drafted to protect copyright holders and intellectual property owners is in response to the verbiage in the legislation and the potential dangers in the proposed means of enforcement. Having SOPA pulled and PIPA put on the shelf is an important step, but it’s not exactly a time to celebrate. The Internet community needs to remain vigilant and engaged with Congress to help create legislation that reinforces the freedom of the Internet and protects the rights of intellectual property owners.

These bills have not been forgotten by the members who introduced them for consideration and vote, and they will likely evolve into new proposals with the same intent.

Our legal team and management team will maintain our steadfast opposition to these two bills in their current form, and as similar legislation is proposed, we will fill you in on what’s being considered. In the meantime, take a few minutes to visit http://savehosting.org/ and TechAmerica to learn more about what our industry is concerned about.

-@toddmitchell