Our friend, cartoonist Hugh MacLeod has just featured Laughing Squid in his latest comic, which is part of a series of comics he is doing on Rackspace (we have been using Rackspace since 1999). The comic is a reference to the fact that we don’t often mention our actual business, which is web hosting. Thanks Hugh, we’re honored!

If you like Hugh’s work, check out some of the awesome prints he has for sale in the Gapingvoid Gallery.

The March 2009 issue of Web Host Industry Review (WHIR) features an interview with me by the magazine’s editor Liam Eagle. It’s the most comprehensive interview I’ve ever done about our web hosting services. Liam did the interview by phone and there are a few areas were the transcription wasn’t quite right, but overall it came out really well.

“An Interview With Scott Beale of Laughing Squid”

In the article I talk about how we started out offering web hosting, our relationship with Rackpace (we are one of their oldest customers), our use of the Plesk control panel, how web hosts can take advantage of use social media like Twitter and our recent foray into cloud hosting.

In the same issue of WHIR, Wayne Epperson interviewed me for his article on “Hosts Explore Social Networks” on how web hosts are starting to use social networking.

Four months ago we started using the hosted help desk service Zendesk to provide support for our Laughing Squid Web Hosting customers. The service has been really great so far. It’s easy to configure and use, has a nice clean interface and they are always adding new features. In fact we’ve been working with the Zendesk founders to push through a few feature requests of our own and they’ve been really responsive.

Michael Folmer Hansen, Zendesk’s VP of Evangelism, is in San Francisco this week and is hosting a Zendesk Meetup on Thursday, October 16th at 21st Amendment.

photo by Scott Beale

The Website is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude, created by Josh Weinberg, is a hilarious look at the life of a tech support person versus the evil Sales Guy, presented in the same vain as You Suck at Photoshop, except voiced by chipmunks.

Laughing Squid Hosting would like stress this video is not an endorsement of of lackadaisical behavior in tech support and would never engage in this kind of tomfoolery when your website is down.

via Metafilter

I’ve just set up a Twitter account for the web hosting side of Laughing Squid.

So along with our main Twitter account, there is now one specifically for Laughing Squid Web Hosting, where we will be sending posts from our web hosting blog, occasional updates and replies to other Twitter users asking about our hosting.