Yikes, almost 3 weeks since my last post. Things have been busy at HostNexus thanks to Godaddy calling it quits on their coldfusion hosting, but I haven’t been slacking off on AtomicVPS either. I’ve been chasing designers and researching data centers amongst other things.
Design Update
The designer I chose submitted his concept and it was very disappointing. There was absolutely nothing on it I liked so he said he’s try again. I decided to hedge my bets and contacted Ammar from Akdesigner to do a concept. I had contacted Ammar back in February when I last threatened to get AtomicVPS up and running but ultimately chose this other designer. Akdesigner is well-known in the hosting world and has done many sites which is why I decided against using them (as many of their sites have a similar “feel”). But Amarr knows hosting and experience is a big factor in my choice so it made sense in case this other designer failed to produce.
The first designer came back with a second concept that certainly had possibilities, but something was lacking. And then the next day Amarr submitted his concept and I liked it a lot:
So I have decided to pursue this design with Amarr of AkDesigner. 
As a sidenote, whilst dealing with a ticket at HN a few weeks ago I noticed a website in a client’s signature (aksol.com) and immediately saw a similarity in name (ak…) so I took a look and sure enough a link from their site took me to Akdesigner.com. I spoke to our client and he confirmed they are business partners – small world. 
Taking it as a sign and believing everything happens for a reason it was then that I contacted Amarr to do the concept and here we are. Synchronicity, baby! 
Logo
I’m not 100% satisfied with the current AtomicVPS logo. The overall concept is great but I want the “O” of Atomic to stand out a bit more. So I have contacted a few logo designers to work on that. Yep, I’m that pedantic when it comes to design.
Data Center
I was pretty much set to go with our current data center (DedicatedNOW) for AtomicVPS but now I’m leaning hard towards Dediserve for various reasons:
1) This blog is currently on a VM there and they are great to work with and I see nothing wrong with their cloud or network.
2) They offer public and private cloud hosting – public being you use all their hardware and everything is virtualised (VPDC – Virtual Private Data Center). This offers a web host less control and no SSH access to Hypervisors and means no sub-user access to OnApp (which sucks a little for VPS clients). However they are working on a WHMCS module that should offer all the OnApp utilities.
3) They have a UK cloud setup and I want to offer a UK cloud at some point. The public cloud VPDC would help keep costs down when branching out into this new market.
4) Their hardware quote comes in cheaper than DedNOW’s (by a big margin) and offers more SAN space and also NAS space to run R1Soft, snapshot backups and other backup systems.
So lots of things in the “Pros” column. Decision will be made within days.
