With the passing of 2016 it has now been 15 years since the birth of Hivelocity. Every one of those 15 years has included its share of accomplishments and fond memories. As the years have passed the accomplishments have become grander and the memories sweeter. Back in 2002 we celebrated our very first customers. In 2003 we celebrated the hiring of our 10th employee. In 2004 we sold our first dedicated server. Every one of these were landmark events for Hivelocity and worthy of celebrating with cheap beer. Today we have customers around the world, hire new employees all the time and deploy a few hundred servers every month. The measuring stick on what is considered an achievement is a little longer these days. With that, let’s look back on 2016 and see what events were worthy of a few beers…only the good stuff nowadays (Dales Pale Ale, Lagunitas IPA and anything from Victory Brewing to name a few of our favorites.)
The first drink worthy event was the completion of our new 30,200 square foot TPA2 data center. The build out of TPA2 began in Q4 of 2015 and after what seemed like an eternity to our Sales Team, opened its door for business this past November. In just 2 months, our TPA2 data center is already the home to hundreds of new customers and over 1000 physical servers. Cheers!
As you may know, we have always maintained a fairly significant presence in Atlanta with more than a few racks at TELX (57 Marietta). While TELX is one of the most well connected buildings in the world it’s not ideal for larger footprints like Hivelocity’s. So in Q1 of 2016 we began building out a new data center pod in downtown Atlanta just a few blocks away from TELX on Peach Tree St. With ATL1 going online in July we now have 50+ racks in downtown Atlanta to offer our full suite of private cloud, colocation, dedicated server and management services. If you couldn’t guess, building a data center is a huge undertaking. Launching 2 new facilities at the same time is just plain silly. I can personally account for the stock symbols EXDRN and PEPTO going up 28% last year and I was quoting the movie Airplane pretty much every week.
With no shortage of motivation to make our lives easier, in Q2 last year we chose to make Solid State Drives or SSD the default drive included with every dedicated server and virtual server we sell. We had been offering SSD as an upgrade option for years but because of perceived extra costs had continued to make traditional spinning disks our base offering. As it turns out, we have experienced a failure rate of near 0% with our SSDs resulting in lower operating costs while providing our customers with a much faster and reliable solution. Check this out! Last year we deployed over $500,000 in Micron SSDs and as of today we have yet to RMA even one of them. NOT ONE! As luck would have it, we did have one possibly fail just a few days ago but we are not done testing it yet which means it has not been RMAd. I do, however, reserve the right to amend my statement of “NOT ONE” to “ONE”.
By this point your jaw is likely on the floor from amazement or because I have put you to sleep. So let me throw a few more acronyms at you and completely blow your mind or put you in comatose. In addition to TPA2, ATL1, SSDs with no RMAs, we launched our CDN! OMG, you heard right. In December, we quietly launched our new Content Delivery Network with POPs scattered across 5 continents. We intend to make a much bigger deal of this product launch in the very near future so prepare yourself accordingly. Did you introduce any other acronyms Steve? Funny you should ask. In November we added GPUs and PCIe SSD to our available server add-ons.
More, more, more! In my head I can hear you all clamoring for news of more acronyms. Just as I did last October 14th, as I accepted the Tampa Bay Tech’s Industry Achievement Award for Excellence in Service in front of hundreds of people from over 150 competing companies, I ask that you “please quiet down and know how honored I am to be a part of this.” Seriously though, Hivelocity winning this award was a BFD. Salute!
I will close by telling you what is likely our most important achievement of the year. In 2016 we resolved 47,101 trouble tickets for our customers located in 137 countries worldwide. The opportunity to perform this work for you all is truly what makes us most proud.
We look forward to continuing to offer our customers the most dependable and reliable hosting infrastructure around. We will be introducing new and innovative solutions that help foster your success with ease of use, simplistic scale and our expertise accessible to you at whatever level you need it. Thank you for helping making 2016 another great year in our company’s history. Shots!!
