We’re happy to announce our all-new customer community forums. We have upgraded our forum software to the VBulletin software which makes it much easier for our users to communicate with our staff and each other. Another great thing about this new software is it prevents spam unlike the other system which was unfortunately cluttered with useless topics and inappropriate posts from time to time.

The new forums can be found at http://forums.hostnine.com

We highly suggest registering for all of our customers as you will find important announcements such as Network News, Server Updates, Outages, and more.

Last week Rob Mac pointed out that HostNine’s got customer all over the world, not just in the US. In particular, he mentioned the UK. Since then, 46 British resellers have joined us. You’re soooo right, Rob!!

From Portsmouth and Dover to Aberdeen and the Shetland Islands, our new resellers have got the UK covered. Manchester’s currently in the lead, just like they are in the Barclays Premiership. And while Newcastle trails Liverpool by 25 points football-wise, they’re 2 customers ahead in this week’s HostNine championship.

Of course, *everyone* wins when you sign up for a HostNine reseller plan. You get a great deal, not to mention free ModernBill, Fantastico and SiteBuilder. Your customers get super reliable hosting. And we get the opportunity to work with you - which really means a lot to us!

Well as it turns out our designer logged in to his cPanel account on his HostNine server and felt the X theme was lacking that and I quote “HostNine Feel”. So this morning I come to the office and find a new header and style sheet for our Shared Hosting cPanel X Skin (Unfortunately we’re going to have to break the bad news to our designer that cPanel 11 is coming out soon and it will have to be redone).

We hope you all enjoy it! Here is a screen shot of the all-new H9 X Skin

(click to enlarge)

HostNine got Twittered; how cool is that? BlogPaul calls HostNine the best host he’s ever had! Can you believe it??

Paul’s been developing websites since the early ’90s. Now he writes Networthless, a technology blog, SupDad, a parenting blog, and BlogPaul, of course. He’s also the guy behind the Two Cent Blog, where you, too, can chime in - about anything! And he made Twitterami, a neat tool that shows Twitter members’ locations on a map.

Paul says it’s about time that someone caters to his every need. And he doesn’t even have to take us to the movies or buy us presents. If you, like Paul, are a happy customer and you do want to send us gifts, our address is right here

This Web Hosting Talk review really made our day. LiamW, who’s been in the web hosting business for 6-7 years, signed up with HostNine last fall after reading an interview with Rick, our CEO. He says we’ve delivered on value, uptime, service and support - and he’d recommend us to anyone!

Thanks for giving us a chance, Liam! And happy 6 month anniversary!!

By the way, if you think you might possibly be interested in HostNine but aren’t 100% sure, here are some factors we hope you’ll consider:

1. Many hosting companies offer live chat and toll free phone lines just for sales inquiries. Not us! You can reach HostNine in real time, any time, both before *and* after you become a customer. We’re available 24/7/365, by live chat, phone, email and Yahoo!/MSN/AOL IM… At the moment, we don’t support courier pigeons. But we’ll consider adding that after moving to our new office next month.

2. As far as we know, HostNine is the only reseller hosting provider that takes care of migrating not just your website but your customers’. For free!

3. We won’t nickel and dime you. Our reseller hosting packages include *everything*. A free domain name. Free ModernBill. Free SWSoft SiteBuilder. Free Fantastico. We think it’s so not cool that some hosting companies charge you extra for each of these items!

4. We’ve got a special offer going on - use the “H9″ coupon code and get 50% off your first payment. We’re sure you’ll be as happy as Liam has been, but if for any reason you’re not totally satisfied, we offer a no-questions-asked 45-day money back guarantee.

So won’t you join us? Please?? We promise: you’ll be glad you did!

Here’s a map of HostNine’s 50 newest US-based resellers. Welcome, everyone! As our reseller community continues to grow, we wanted to get a sense of where you’re located. Maybe we’ll get a chance to meet in person during HostingCon or another web hosting industry event. Maybe we’ll organize a HostNine get-together! Stayed tuned…

By the way, there are HostNine customers on just about every continent (no North Pole or South Pole, no Antarctica - but check out this Wired article on Antarctic connectivity. They’ve get VoIP and 11 hours of high speed Internet access per day). This past weekend alone, new resellers joined us from 21 different countries, including Australia, Bolivia, Canada (Alberta, Nova Scotia, Ontario & Quebec), China, the Dominican Republic, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Qatar, Panama, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the UK. Thank you very, very much for choosing HostNine!!

If you’re visiting our site for the first time, we hope you’ll consider putting yourself on the HostNine map. If there are any questions we can answer, please contact us any time. We’re available 24/7/365, by phone, email, IM, live chat… And we’d love to hear from you!

Ben Gabler, our Operations Manager, was a speaker at the ModernBill Administrators’ Workshop in Louisville last week.

He and Sharon Koifman (far left), CEO of Empire Host, led a session on reseller hosting. Here they are with (left to right) Carlos Caneja, CTO of Applied Innovations, Dan Kimball and Sean Stafford from ModernBill, and Steven Mizrahie, the Head Honcho at both InsiderHosting and HTTPme.

After the first day of sessions, everyone headed over to The Pub at 4th Street Live. Here’s a picture of cPanel Swiss Army Knife (that’s his title; it says so on his card!) Eric Gregory (left) with Dave from ModernBill. They’re the reason why cPanel and ModernBill work so well together. Thanks, guys!!

And here are Ben and Sean with Devin White (far left) from PingZine. If you’re in the web hosting business, you might want to subscribe to PingZine.

As the conference was wrapping up, the ModernBill folks gave us a tour of their HQ. Check out the sign above their developers office.

Lifehacker.com says two monitors can increase productivity by 20-30%. ModernBill’s developers get three. It’s no wonder they’re always announcing new features.

The event was a great chance to learn about our vendors’ development road maps (Microsoft, SWSoft, Ensim, Register.com and Enom were there, too) and network with ~100 other web hosting providers. Next month, we’re heading to Orlando for ISPCON, and Houston for the cPanel Training Seminar. If you’re planning to attend either event, please let us know!

If you walked into HostNine’s office on any other day, the music you hear probably wouldn’t be a symphony. But this afternoon we came across composer and pianist David Sosnowski’s website. Since he’s a customer of ours, we thought we’d check out his MP3s. We really like The Realization of Light. And Piano Sonata #7. And Lucifer and Gandhi.

Writing music is hard work; David says each minute of The Emergence of Time took over 24 hours to compose! Listening to his recordings made us really proud that we’re able to play a tiny role in making his music available to his many fans.

David’s been with HostNine since January. He says he’d high recommend us to other musicians because of our “uptime, support, technical excellence and value”. Thanks, David!!

Last month was HostNine’s best month ever (!!!), so first and foremost, we’d like to thank each of you for your support. Have we told you lately that we really, truly appreciate your business?

While going through our signup stats, we noticed that 48% of the folks who joined us in March did so using a Firefox browser, versus 45% Internet Explorer. (The remaining 7% were split between Mozilla, Safari, Opera, Camino and Netscape.)

By the way, 77% of the Firefox contingent have upgraded to Firefox 2, while only 46% of MSIE users are on MSIE7. If you’re using an older browser version, you might want to consider downloading Firefox 2 here, or IE7 here.

In terms of operating systems, Windows XP was the clear winner (83%), followed by Vista (5%) and MacOS (4%). The remaining 8% were split between Linux, Windows 2003, Windows 2000 and Windows Me.

Why did we look up this information? Because the more we know about the tools you’re using, the better position we’ll be in to help troubleshoot any problems you might be having.

Speaking of which, are we doing a good job? If you’ve been happy with our service, it’d make our day if you could leave a comment or post a testimonial. If there’s something you’re not so pleased with, we’d love to hear that too, so we can make it right. Thanks!!

Are you a new web hosting reseller? If so, you’ve got to meet our friend Ben over at Reseller Guide. His site offers lots of great tips on growing your hosting business.

For instance, as a startup, the first challenge you face is creating an attractive website. You want to project a professional image, but without breaking the bank. And ideally, you’d like to get something up and running yesterday so you can start selling. Being the nice guy that he is, Ben put together 12 free templates you can use. Our favorite is #8. Incidentally, 8 rhymes with profitable in Chinese