So some of you may not realize this, but Laughing Squid also offers cloud-based web hosting services via Laughing Squid Web Hosting. We’ve been hosting websites since 1998 and the revenue generated from our web hosting services helps support this blog and our other projects. One of our main focuses is hosting WordPress blogs, in fact we are one of the web hosting companies officially recommended by WordPress. So if you are looking for a web host, check us out!

After the attacks of 9/11 we learned that one of our web hosting customers, Mark Bingham, founder of PR company the The Bingham Group, had died aboard United Airlines Flight 93 that went down in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Mark was one of the flight’s heroes who attempted to storm the cockpit and helped divert the course of the flight. In his honor, we posted a tribute to Mark at the top of our web hosting website which remained their through the end of 2001.

The Mark Bingham Foundation, a nonprofit organization setup in honor of Mark and his heroic efforts aboard Flight 93, continues to promote the causes he supported.

September 2001 screenshot via Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Here are a few photos from our January visit to the headquarters Rackspace in San Antonio, which is located in converted shopping mall. We use Rackpace’s data centers and cloud hosting infrastructure for our web hosting services.

We’ve been to Rackspace several times over the years. Here are photos from our 2005 and 2009 visits.

photos by Scott Beale

Laughing Squid Web Hosting has joined forces with the web hosting community for the launch of Hosting For Haiti, to help support the relief efforts in Haiti.

Help spread the word by following @hostingforhaiti and using the hashtag #hostingforhaiti. All money donated goes directly to the American Red Cross.

Last month I traveled to Texas to visit Rackspace Hosting the company we lease our web hosting servers from, along with The Rackspace Cloud which provides the cloud infrastructure for our new Cloud Hosting service.

I started off in downtown San Antonio at Weston Centre where The Rackspace Cloud is located and general manager Emil Sayegh gave me a full tour of their operations.

Next I met up with our account manager Sergio Manzo who took me over to visit Rackspace Datapoint. I made a trip there back in 2005 as well.

After that we went over to “The Castle”, the new Rackspace headquarters located inside of an old shopping mall. Last year Robert Scoble did a video tour of The Castle. While there Robert James Taylor took me on a tour of impressive new offices.

In the middle of The Castle office they have restored the original escalators from the department store, adding new translucent panels to the sides to show that Rackspace believes in “transparency” when it comes to their business.

Next to the escalators is “The World’s Largest Word Search” featuring 3000+ hidden words.

Finally I made my way up to Austin where I visited the new Rackspace office there.

Photo Gallery: Rackspace

Humor is pretty rare in the web hosting industry, but Host Chopper is here to kick some ass and save the day. Proudly proclaiming that they are “The only hosting company with a fucking chopper”, their updates on Twitter are pure comedy gold.

photo by Scott Beale

On May 12th 1999 our very first server, the now retired squid1, went online at Rackspace. We’ve been leasing Linux servers in their data centers ever since. We started off using the now defunct Cobalt RaQ servers, evolving over time to our current line-up of Dell PowerEdge servers running Parallels Plesk. A couple of weeks ago we launched our new cloud hosting services on Rackspace’s cloud infrastructure.

Rackspace has been an amazing partner over the last decade and a critical component to the success of our web hosting operations. We look forward to the next 10 years working with them as we both move further into the cloud.

We have just launched our new cloud hosting service, for more info check out our new cloud hosting site:

http://laughingsquid.us.

With cloud hosting, data is stored on clusters of servers, instead of a single stand-alone server. This provides increased reliability, reducing the risk of downtime by removing a single point of failure. It also allows for better scaling of resources when there is high traffic or load spikes.

Here are some of the advantages cloud hosting offers over our standard web hosting services.

Laughing Squid has partnered with Rackspace, whose servers and data center we have been using for 10 years, to offer our new cloud hosting service on The Rackspace Cloud.

Alan Abel is a prankster of legend and arguably one of the finest of all time – just check out his hoaxes timeline. The documentary “Abel Raises Cain” by Jenny Abel and Jeff Hockett shows his fascinating personality and outragous pranks.

“Abel Raises Cain” is an unprecedented glimpse into the life and bizarre career of Alan Abel, the infamous underground media prankster who has made a name for himself several times over with stunts that are just ridiculous enough to be believable, especially to a media that feeds on salacious, far-fetched stories. In this loving portrait of an eccentric father, Alan’s daughter, Jenny, tells her firsthand account of what it was like growing up with a prankster. “Abel Raises Cain” takes the audience on a roller coaster ride through the myriad of elaborate hoaxes and schemes that Abel pulled off over the years, all of which were designed to provoke and amuse…while at the same time, make people question everything that they see, hear and read.

You can watch the entire documentary on Hulu, or better yet, buy the DVD or download the movie directly where 75% of the money goes directly to the filmmakers.

via Link TV

Today Rackspace Hosting, the company that we use for our web hosting servers, announced a series of new cloud hosting services at a special live streamed event in Austin. The new services join Mosso (now renamed Cloud Sites), their existing cloud hosting service under the new name Rackspace Cloud Hosting.

Here’s what Rackspace announced:

- They have acquired Slicehost, which offers VPS hosting using Xen virtualization software. This will be Rackspace’s new Cloud Servers service.

- They launched Cloud Files, a new web-based file storage service aimed at the cloud storage market pioneered by Amazon S3.

- They have acquired Jungle Disk, a desktop app for online storage.

More Coverage:

- Rackspace

- Slicehost

- Jungle Disk

- GigaOm

- Robert Scoble

- ReadWriteWeb

- TechCrunch

- InformationWeek

Rackspace, the data center where we host our servers, is going public. Their IPO auction website just went live today. The IPO is expected to take place the week of August 8th, 2008, where they will be auctioning off 1,500,0000 Shares Common Stock at a price range of $12.00-$16.00 (Symbol: RAX).

Rackspace is an great company that served us well for almost a decade (we are one of their oldest customers, hosting there since 1999). We wish them all the best with their upcoming IPO.

Robert Scoble recently launched his new video series Scobleizer TV, which is part of the new FastCompany.TV. One of his recent videos features a great interview with Rackspace about how they are moving their offices and 1,400 employees into a million square-foot mall in San Antonio.

San Antonio’s RackSpace is about to take over a million-square-foot mall in a bad part of town. Why? Well, in this two part presentation, Graham Weston, chairman, Dirk Elmendorf, Chief Technology Evangelist and Founder and Lew Moorman, SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development, tell me why, give us a tour, and discuss the future plans of its business. Hear how Weston convinced 1,400 people to move after they all were against the idea.

Laughing Squid is one of the oldest customers at Rackspace, we’ve been hosting our servers at their data centers since 1999. They’ve been a really managed host, living up to their pledge of “fanatical support”. Back in 2005 I visited their offices and shot a few photos. I’m looking forward to seeing their new headquarters once they move in.

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day. Big thanks goes out to our new sys admin Michael Biven and his predecessor Barry Abrahamson for keeping the Laughing Squid servers up and running smoothly.