| Type | Public Company |
|---|---|
| Traded as | TSX: PIX |
| Industry | Hosting |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Headquarters | 1000 - 555 West Hastings Street Vancouver, BC V6B 4N5 |
| Key people | Lance Tracey and Mark Teolis, Co-founders Fabio Banducci, CEO Gary Sherlock, EVP and CFO Robert Miggins, SVP of Business Development Ted Smith, SVP of Operations Tricia Hollyer, VP of Human Resources Jad Jebara, VP of Finance Jay Newman, VP of Sales Ryan Murphey, VP of Datacenter Ops Rajan Sodhi, VP of Marketing Dominic Monkhouse, UK Managing Director Tim Varma, VP of Product Engineering |
| Website | http://www.PEER1.com |
Peer 1 Hosting provides Internet hosting services that include managed hosting, dedicated servers, colocation, and cloud computing.[1][2] The company is headquartered in Vancouver, BC, Canada and the stock is traded on the TSX under the symbol PIX.[2] The company serves more than 10,000 customers from 17 data centers located in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, Canada; California, Florida, Georgia, New York, Texas, Virginia and Washington states, and in London, UK.[3]
Notable Peer 1 Hosting customers include Plenty of Fish, Virgin Gaming and Wordpress.com, and former customers included Club Penguin, since acquired by Disney, and YouTube, which was acquired by Google.[4][5]
Contents |
The company was founded in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1999 by Lance Tracey and Mark Teolis.[6] From the beginning, the co-founders targeted small- and medium-sized business customers.[6]
In 2004, Peer 1 Hosting acquired ServerBeach, a dedicated hosting provider located in San Antonio, Texas, for $US 7.5 million in cash, a management services contract, and other bandwidth services. ServerBeach had been started by Richard Yoo, who had served as the CEO of Peer 1 Hosting competitor Rackspace, who returned to RackSpace after the acquisition.[7]
Through the ServerBeach acquisition, Peer 1 Hosting served as the hosting provider for well-known video hosting company, YouTube, which began leasing two servers in the Peer 1 Hosting San Antonio, Texas data center, then as demand multiplied the founders expanded to hundreds of servers and related maintenance services, illustrating how small businesses can scale using Internet hosting services. After YouTube was acquired by Google, the former customer migrated its operations to Google data centers.[8]
In 2007, Peer 1 Hosting introduced an incubation program that combined discounted hosting services with consulting assistants to entice independent software vendors and startups to make the move to an on-demand model for providing applications to their customers.[9]
In 2010, Peer 1 Hosting responded to customer demand for more efficient data centers by building a new energy-efficient and green data center located just outside Toronto [8][10] which was followed by opening in November 4, 2011 of another green 58,000 sq. ft. data center located in Portsmouth near London, UK.[11][12]
To provide Internet users with a different visual perspective into online traffic flows, the company developed a Map of the Internet, a graphical image that depicts the layout of all the networks that connect to form the Internet in advance of the South by Southwest Conference in 2011.[13][14][15] These various networks are run by Internet service providers (ISPs), university networks and networks owned by corporations such as Google Inc. and Facebook.[13][14][15] Much of the data was collected from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA). The image shows a graph of 19,869 autonomous systems, joined by 44,344 connections.[13][14][15]
Peer 1 Hosting has grown through acquisitions that have included the purchase of ServerBeach in 2004 and Interland in 2005.
The purchase of ServerBeach included its customers and a data center in San Antonio, Texas.[16][17] ServerBeach was a hosting provider, offering dedicated servers, bandwidth, automation tools and technical support to start-ups and small to mid-sized businesses.[18] ServerBeach was started in 2002 by Richard Yoo, the former CEO of Rackspace. In 2004, it was acquired by Peer 1 Hosting for $US 7.5 million in cash, a management services contract, and other bandwidth services.[19] Following the acquisition, Yoo left ServerBeach and returned to Rackspace.[20]
Video sharing website YouTube hosted its site at ServerBeach until November 2007, when the last of its architecture was migrated to Google. ServerBeach responded to the move by posting a humorous video to YouTube detailing the difficulties it had experienced with YouTube as a client.[21]
Following the acquisition, Peer 1 Hosting acquired ServerBeach's 10,000 servers and network with data centers and network points-of-presence locations in 17 cities across North America and Europe.[22]
In 2005, Peer 1 Hosting acquired Interland’s dedicated server business for $14 million. Through the deal, Peer 1 Hosting gained a large customer base, staff, 8,300 dedicated servers and 115,000 square feet (10,700 m2) of data center space in facilities in Atlanta, Miami and Fremont, California.[23][24]
The company has expanded its presence in North America and the United Kingdom, opening new offices in Southampton, England and a data center in London in 2009.[25] In 2010, the company built a new, energy-efficient data center just outside of Toronto.[10][26]
Peer 1 Hosting offers colocation, dedicated servers, managed hosting services, private cloud services, cloud storage, hosted email and cloud-based graphics processing to its customers.[27]
Peer 1 Hosting Colocation services allow customers to set up their own servers within a large data center facility to take advantage of the power, network redundancy and physical security advantages of a large data center, while full management control of the servers.[28]
Dedicated server hosting is available from Peer 1 Hosting subsidiary ServerBeach, which gives customers the option of selected servers to lease in dedicated racks, benefiting not only from the added computing capacity, but also outsourcing network security and infrastructure management to the data center. At the same time, the customer manages all applications installed on servers.[29]
Peer 1 Hosting Managed hosting services provide comprehensive cloud computing customers that includes deploying, configuring and managing all leased servers and infrastructure.[30]
Peer 1 Hosting introduced Private Cloud services based on the VMware Service Provider Program to allow organizations of all sizes run their Web applications, and protect their data, systems, and services using VMware virtualization technology in 2010.[31]
Built on EMC's Atmos storage platform, Peer 1 Hosting Cloud Storage services provide flexible, pay-as-you-go online storage for data files and rich media. Customers can upload, store and manage unlimited data through a Web-based control panel or a standards-compliant Application Programming Interface for file management and application deployment.[32]
Peer 1 Hosting Cloud-based Email services are offered through a partnership with Microsoft to provide a hosted email platform for small and medium-sized businesses that includes sharing and accessing calendars, tasks, contacts, public folders, groups and global address book and synchronize data from their PCs, mobile devices or the Web.[33]
In the summer of 2010, Peer 1 Hosting introduced Cloud-based Graphics Processing services featuring high-performance graphics rendering, quantitative processing, and video compression, in partnership with graphics processing semiconductor company Nvidia. The cloud-based service uses servers outfitted with NVIDIA’s Fermi-based Tesla GPU’s and RealityServer from Peer 1 Hosting data centers, and targets at animators, product designers and architects working in high-definition 2D and 3D images.[34][35][36]
In November 7, 2011 Peer 1 announced launching its new cloud division Zunicore, a separate brand featuring customizable resource pools versus preset virtual machines, and hands-free auto-scaling. [37][38]