With the end of 2010 fast approaching, it is time to start thinking about taxes and investing in bookkeeping software for the upcoming year. This doesn’t have to be a painful process. A simple solution is hosted QuickBooks; this service is very popular among businesses, CPAs, bookkeepers and financial companies.  

We spend a lot of time here thinking about networking. Usually it involves pondering things like bandwidth, low latency connections and routing. However there is another type of networking that is just as essential for companies. This would be networking in the traditional sense - forming face-to-face connections with fellow business owners, employees and community members. This kind of networking has a lot of advantages for the startup or small business owner. It can lead to new partnerships, new clients, and expanded knowledge. Plus as a startup, sometimes it is simply nice to get out of the office and meet other people who understand the challenges and joys of starting or working for a new company. With so many networking events Seattle it can be overwhelming to locate and find the most effective opportunities. I’ve created a list of my favorite networking events around the city. These are primarily technology, startup and entrepreneur themed meetups. 

A client emailed me curious as to what our recycled servers looked like. He imagined beat up cases, duct taped together. We were pleased to let him know that recycled servers look like any other server because they are a fully functional, cost saving options that are rigorously tested. Photographs of recycled servers by Nathan Eisenberg.

Blog Post by Nathan Eisenberg Virtualization offers resource consolidation, better asset utilization, and a hardware-agnostic environment for operating systems that traditionally don't appreciate sudden hardware changes.  By themselves, these are interesting and valuable features. But what is often overlooked is how virtualization can increase the availability of infrastructure and provide reliability.  

Mike Crill, Managing Director of Atlas Accelerator and a board member of Atlas Networks, spoke at the MITEF VLab Incubators and Accelerators event. It was an opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about funding and working with an incubator. For those who missed out there is a video recap available below. 

1. You don’t need to set up an Exchange server.  With Hosted Exchange the servers are located in a secure data center and they have been set up by a team of professionals. When you want to start using Exchange simply call or email the support team. They can quickly set up a new email account for you or transfer your existing accounts over. By not having to purchase, setup, or maintain an Exchange server you can avoid all of the hassle and decrease your IT costs. 2. Anywhere access and syncing across all devices.  Hosted Exchange allows you to access email from your computer, smart phone or any other internet device. The Outlook Web Application (OWA) is a beautiful, easy to use and functional web email portal.  

Blog Post by Neil Ayton Prior to working at Atlas Networks I had started two online companies, www.tipoff.ie and www.vavavouch.com. I had always been the customer of a data center without really giving too much thought as to what work was going on behind the scenes.

There was an interesting video posted yesterday on the Seattle 2.0 blog. Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio, spoke at StartupDay 2010 on making money with SaaS. The presentation did a great job explaining pricing models, and strategies to determine the market value of a SaaS product. Advice that benefits an entrepreneur interested in increasing SaaS revenue. However, another aspect of increasing profit is decreasing expenses. As profit is revenue minus expenses. One easy way for SaaS companies to decrease expenses is to host their software on dedicated servers at a data center. There are extremely high costs associated with setting up a server room for any business. With SaaS companies relying heavily on servers to distribute their service they can find incredible savings in using a data center. A quick look at the major expenses and hassles involved with setting up servers shows how pricey and time consuming the project can be.

SaaS is a common acronym in the technology sector. It stands for “Software as a Service.” The term “cloud computing” is also frequently used to refer to SaaS products. SaaS is defined as software that is installed on a server instead of a user’s computer. The user then accesses the software over the internet. Two examples of SaaS are hosted QuickBooks and hosted Exchange. 

A virtual private server, or VPS, allows multiple users to share the same server. Virtualization software, such as Parallels Virtuozzo, is used to segment the resources of a server so that multiple users can have independent instances running. Users do not have access to each other’s accounts and don’t know the other users on the machine. A VPS is an excellent platform for software as a service, such as hosted QuickBooks or hosted MS Exchange, and low traffic websites. Unfortunately, for more advanced operations there are quite a few disadvantages to a VPS. For example:

If you aren’t wondering what recycled servers are you should be! This great new product finds the perfect balance between cost-effectiveness and environmental friendliness. What are recycled servers? 

Casey recently started a new business. It has managed to survive the tough economy and even grow, but things are still tight. In addition to his other duties, the IT tech, Alex, administers the company’s servers, which store all of the company’s documents, data and email. As soon as Alex goes on vacation to Mexico, the servers go down and Casey doesn’t know what to do. The company is losing billable hours while Casey waits for a solution and the long distance phone calls aren’t yielding any results.I’m sure most of us have heard a story like Casey’s before. It’s the Murphy’s Law of office technology; as soon as the key person is unavailable all hell breaks loose. Now imagine what would have happened if Casey had hired a company to manage the servers. There would have been 24 hour, 7 day a week support; Casey’s wouldn’t have lost money or had to worry.When you hire outside specialists to administer your servers you get the benefit of having a team of professionals who are experts on servers and server management. You hire them because they can quickly fix anything that comes up, regardless of difficulty or time of day. This keeps your business running efficiently and productively. Which means you can stay competitive in a challenging market. Here at Atlas Networks we can provide you with 4 different levels of server management or a customized solution to fit your needs. Don’t end up like Casey, call us today!