Currently Rochen has all of our servers located in Dallas, Texas in the United States at a truly fantastic facility called Colo4Dallas. As many of you may be aware from discussions with our team at events like Joomla Day UK, a couple of months ago, and in threads at our own customer forums, we will be launching UK hosting services as well very soon. This means you will be able to choose to host on either a US or UK server with Rochen.

Yesterday we executed a contract to take data centre floor space, connectivity and power in a brand new facility near London, England with a highly respected provider called Gyron Internet. As is the case in the US with our UK hosting setup Rochen will own outright all of the servers and network switches we deploy, allowing us full end-to-end control over the service. Rochen very much focuses on “performance hosting” so this type of control is critical.

The new UK data centre uses the latest enclosed hot isle technology allowing for increased density per square foot and reduced environmental impact in line with our green hosting initiatives. All aspects of the new facility including connectivity, cooling and power are fully redundant to a minimum of N+1 or 2N standards. We will maintain redundant network drops using Cisco’s Hot-Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) to all cabinets (as we do in the US already) and will maintain dual Power Supply Units (PSUs) in every server connected to separate and fully redundant Power Distribution Units (PDUs) with A+B circuits.

Connectivity will be amongst the very best of any UK or European hosting offering with redundant fiber rings running from the data centre to both Telecity Sovereign House and Telehouse North in London Docklands. We will maintain bandwidth to Tiscali, Interoute, NTT/Verio and Global Crossing. Additionally we will have direct peering to the London Internet Exchange (LINX) and Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMX-IX). This means that you will be able to reach a website hosted by Rochen UK within one hop from virtually any major Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the UK or Europe.

When we got asked about pricing for the UK service a few months ago we didn’t really want to get into a discussion about it. This was mainly because we didn’t know what our own exact cost base was going to be at the time and also to try and keep expectations measured. Well I am pleased to announce today some extremely aggressive pricing for our UK offering very much in line with the US pricing. All of the UK plans will come with the same great features we include with our US offering including Rochen Vault managed backups.

Rochen UK Hosting Pricing (billed monthly in British Pounds) -

Starter Plan – £4.95

Multiple Domain Hosting Plan 1 – £8.95

Multiple Domain Hosting Plan 2 – £12.95

Multiple Domain Hosting Plan 3 – £17.95

Reseller Hosting Plan 1 – £19.95

Reseller Hosting Plan 2 – £24.95

Reseller Hosting Plan 3 – £29.95

Reseller Hosting Plan 4 – £34.95

Reseller Hosting Plan 5 – £39.95

Managed Virtual Server (MVS) – £99.95

Free account setup. No minimum contract. Above pricing excludes VAT.

We expect to launch the Rochen UK hosting service around the second week of June. At that time you will see the Rochen website change slightly with a “UK version” released. Our entire team is extremely excited about this new offering and we look forward to working with everyone to grow our UK and European business over the coming months and years.

- Chris

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen, a web hosting provider specializing in providing a performance tuned hosting platform for dynamic database driven scripts.

Some members of the Rochen team have had the pleasure of attending and being the lead sponsor of three Joomla community driven events over the past few months. In addition to providing all of the joomla hosting services for the official Joomla websites, Rochen also sponsors many community organized events  around the world called Joomla Days.

Sponsoring Joomla Days  gives Rochen another way to help support the Joomla project and wider open source community as well as affording us a great networking opportunity to link up with both current and potential clients in the Joomla community. Meeting up in person adds an extra layer of value, although one that is hard to measure in pure dollar terms from a business prospective.

Brad Baker from Rochen’s team, who is also a member of the Joomla Core Team, attended Joomla Day Melbourne on February 7th and Martin Rouf and I attended both Joomla Day UK in Maidstone, Kent on March 13th and 14th as well as Joomla Day Las Vegas on April 4th. Rochen was the lead sponsor of all three events providing financial and logistical support to help keep the costs down for attendees.

Joomla Day Melbourne
Brad delivered a keynote presentation at the Melbourne Joomla Day on joomla security covering both the basics and more in depth steps you need to take to secure your Joomla site. It is worth pointing out that if you are hosting at Rochen then a lot of the security ground work is already done for you and you will not run into issues like file ownership or permissions problems here.

The organizers of Joomla Day Melbourne have not yet got the video of Brad’s presentation up, but you can watch his 2008 keynote here.

Brad Baker speaking at similar Joomla event in Vancouver. Sorry, we had no pictures of Brad from Melbourne. If someone has one please send it over.

Joomla Day UK ans Las Vegas
At the the Joomla Day in the UK I delivered a presentation to the whole group detailing the type of traffic Rochen handles for Joomla across the official sites (23 million page views for February 2009, in case you were wondering!) as well as some of the ‘cool’ things we are doing here at Rochen like our Rochen Vault Managed Backup system and our recent move into the green hosting arena. Both in the UK and Las Vegas Martin and I hosted a round table Q&A session on Joomla security answering people’s questions and addressing some of their concerns.  Rochen even managed to pick up a few new hosting and reseller hosting clients from the sessions which was pretty neat.

Chris Adams speaking at Joomla Day UK in Maidstone, Kent. Nearly 200 people attended!

Chris Adams talking to group at Joomla Day Las Vegas.

Rochen’s Las Vegas Dinner and After-Party!
To coincide with Joomla Day Las Vegas Rochen also organized a dinner at Valentino’s Fine Dining and an after-party at Tao Beach nightclub for any of our customers who wanted to attend as a way to say thank you for their business and also to gain valuable face-to-face feedback. We like to organize these type of events at least once a year and have hosted our customers in London, UK; Vancouver, Canada and  San Francisco, CA in previous years. In Las Vegas this year we had around 40 customers attend.

Rochen provided transportation to get our customers to dinner and the after party!

Rochen customers having dinner in private dining room at Valentino's in the Venetian, Las Vegas.

Rochen hired a private outdoor cabana at Tao Beach for the after-party. We look after our clients!

Jamie Foxx stopped by Tao!

Future Events?
We don’t have anymore Joomla Days on the Rochen calendar right now but we will keep customers posted via our forums when that changes. There is a good chance Brad will be attending an event in Vietnam later in the year and there is talk of a Joomla related event in New Orleans in late October. Likewise, we will keep everyone posted of the next Rochen dinner and after-party. Although not Joomla related Martin and I will be at HostingCon in Washington DC this August and PubCon in Las Vegas this November.

Special Thanks
That just leaves me with a few people to thank. Andy Wallace did a tremendous job with organizing Joomla Day UK, as did Toni Marie Swats with the Las Vegas event and Matthias Raab in Melbourne. Rochen provides the support we can for Joomla Days but these three people put hundreds of hours of work in to actually make these events happen with no financial return for themselves. Kudos to them all.

I also want to thank Allen Gunn (aka “Gunner”) from Aspiration for facilitating the Las Vegas event. I have been to two events that Gunner has facilitated now, the first being Joomla Day Mountain View at the Googleplex (Google’s HQ) in May 2007 and this event in Las Vegas. Both these events are amongst best I have ever been at. If you are looking for a facilitator for an open source event then drop Aspiration an email.

I want to give a quick mention to Matt Olander from IX Systems, Ryan Ozimeck from PICnet and Aaron St.George from The Uptime Institute for helping keep things on track at the Joomla Day and at the Rochen dinner and after-party. Aaron was our designated transportation coordinator towards the end of the night! Finally, a big thank you to everyone at Joomla and Rochen’s customers for making the trip to these Joomla Days and the Rochen dinner, we appreciate it more than you know.

So until the next Joomla Day and Rochen party…

- Chris

P.S. A lot of people at the events asked about Rochen’s Joomla security check list. You can find it here: Joomla Security Check-List.

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen, a web hosting provider specializing in providing a performance tuned hosting platform for dynamic database driven scripts like Joomla! Rochen has hosted all of the official Joomla! websites since the project began in August 2005.

You may have noticed a lot of web hosting providers promoting so called “green hosting” recently. This is a trend which has taken off in the hosting world within the past year and in no small way. While pushing to be greener is certainly commendable virtually every hosting provider I have seen promoting such things either isn’t telling the whole truth or is flat out misleading the consumer. This does nothing but damage the reputation of the industry as a whole.

The Problem

So here’s an example for you. One of the largest budget hosting providers advertises: “all of our shared and reseller servers are now 130% wind powered”. This is complete nonsense. I know this for a fact as I have toured the data center in Dallas, Texas where they have their servers located as it is five minutes drive from the facility where Rochen have our own servers. Their data center has zero wind power. Not even a single server is powered by wind. This provider is not alone, there are countless others who claim to be powered by wind or solar when they are clearly not or claim to offset carbon emissions but provide no proof.

Rochen have been getting more and more potential customers asking about “green hosting” so we wanted to do what we could to address this concern but at the same time do it in an honest way that wasn’t misleading and would have real benefits for the environment as well as our business. We didn’t want to go the route the above provider and most others have which is just an outright scam. Besides, Rochen have a well enough educated client base that would see right through it anyway.

Rochen’s Honest Solution. Green Hosting Done Right.

I am pleased to say that we have taken many steps over the past couple of months, including offsetting our carbon emissions (and we have the certificate to back it up) and making other technological improvements. We announced these to existing customers at the start of November. These changes apply for all current customers as well as new customers. Our reseller web hosting customers can also take advantage of this new marketing tool.

You can read full details about the steps Rochen has taken here: http://www.rochenhost.com/about/green/

Don’t get me wrong, Rochen’s new “green hosting initiatives” are partly clever marketing (which I have nothing against) and it is an area that we still need to improve in over time. I do however strongly believe that the way we have gone about this will have real benefit for the environment while showing potential customers that we are not just out there jumping on the latest bandwagon and trying to scam them. One customer used a nice term saying that most “green hosts” are simply “green washing” and they were pleased to see Rochen was not. I couldn’t agree more.

I would encourage you to check out the above link to see what we have done and then let me know your thoughts by posting a comment to this blog. So here’s to planet Earth, doing what we can to help while keeping our marketing honest. Thanks for reading.

- Chris