Surpass News : Your Voice
In January 2007 we created a “I wish Surpass would” board in our forum. As of today the board has received 1,176 bits of commentary. The point behind this board was to collect suggestions from our clients to improve their Surpass experience. So far it has been one of the most valuable things we have done for the future of the company.
In early 2008 we had a thought to upgrade the idea and create a Digg-style page to replace that board. The page would have been separate from the forum, thus gaining more exposure, and everyone could vote the most wanted features to the top. This was not released yet but remained a very important idea that we needed to develop. To our surprise, we found a company that is offering this service already which is really impressive. It’s called UserVoice and is exactly what we were going to do in-house. But we like to use and promote third-party services as much as we can if they are truly useful and innovative. UserVoice definitely belongs to that category.
You can find our new suggestion board at surpass.uservoice.com. The feedback button has been placed throughout our website. We are now more open to suggestions than ever before and can keep track of them much better.
Thank you for your feedback and attention. We invite everyone to submit ideas right away.
Haiku Contest : Win a Kindle
We’re feeling peaceful and zen like.
Give us a great haiku about Surpass Hosting and win an Amazon Kindle to further enjoy poetry and reading.
“The most common form for Haiku is three short lines. The first line usually contains five (5) syllables, the second line seven (7) syllables, and the third line contains five (5) syllables. Haiku doesn’t rhyme.” Here is an example haiku:
i love you surpass
you make my sites go so fast
happy webmaster
Just post your entry in this thread, then on August 29th we’ll all vote for the winner. It’s a community feeling.
(Haikus don’t have to just be about love, maybe you’re mad at us right now for some reason, like how we ran out of shirts. : ( We’ll get through it if so. Just be honest in your ‘ku and you will be rewarded.)
Come Relax On Our Balcony!
We needed a serene little place to relocate our minds. But you won’t catch us out here often - we promise.
Claim Your Surpass T-Shirt!
There’s only 20 so email me as soon as possible. We are sending shirts via postal mail to any country. Please do not get a shirt if you intend on skipping out on the photo. 
If this goes well we will certainly do this again! (Email the photo to us after received, or you can post the photo in our Facebook or Surmunity.)
Please send to : First and last name, mailing address, the domain you have hosted with us, and if you need medium or large. I will update here when the shirts are spoken for!
UPDATE: 7/22 11:30 A.M. We still have a lot of medium shirts left so feel free to email me!
UPDATE: 3:00 P.M. We ended up getting in about 30 requests so have to order more shirts. We will make another shirt post in August. Thanks everyone! I will email everyone when the shirts ship.
New 3G iPhone : Purikura Style
The only way to show our love towards the iPhone that Dennis waited in line for this morning, was to surround it with hearts and stars. It’s very fitting, we think. (While the inferior iPhone is in smoke and flames.)
Purikura is a style of printing found in many Japanese photo booths. The kitten mousepad? Always a special added touch to such occasions.
Happy Birthday, Roxy!
Everyone wish our Roxy a Happy Birthday!
What Powers Our Blog? Candy!
Over 14 different candies here. Now we’re ready to blog.
The Messy Desk Transformation!
Since today is Leap Day, we knew we had to do something fun. It would be easy for all of us to have a “Messy Desk Contest” but the winner here will show us the best transformation.
Just take a before picture of your messy desk and the area your computer is in. Then after it’s all cleaned up, post the before and after photos here. (Must be a registered user/logged in.)
The most amazing transformation will win a dedicated server for one year (from April 1, 2008 until April 1, 2009).
We apologize that everyone with clean desks are not allowed to participate!
You can prepare for and post your entry of this defining moment from today until March 19th. Public voting here in Surmunity will take place on or before March 31st. Brooms and flashlights ready? Go!
P.S. If you happen to be in the middle of purchasing a server during our current sale, you can hold off and participate in this contest if you think you can win! Or if you already have a server, and happen to win this contest, you’ll win ANOTHER server free for one year! But please remember, any bandwidth overages unfortunately will not be free.
Only current Surpass customers allowed to participate.
Surpass Forum Awards 2007
PHP5 and MySQL5 Full Force
We snuck up on you with this one!
The following servers have PHP5/MySQL5 and do not have PHP4 available as default…
Bacon
Pass79
SH132
Pass80
SH133
... and all new servers will be built the same.
Now we don’t know why you’d want to use PHP4 since it’s so eight years ago, but you can still use it.. if you really want.
For the rest of us, steam ahead with 5!
So far there is one important thing you should know about PHP5 on Surpass: php.ini. You’ll need to be friends with this guy. Not to bore you with details, just grab the file right here, and upload it into your directory if you experience any errors, such as memory faults. This is because now you are really in control of your PHPing, more than ever before, and this file is like the steering wheel.
We’ll come back to the details soon!
Jump on the Surpass Train
We hope that you had a wonderful holiday season and that your new year has started off right! We plan to really generate some steam this year in the hosting industry! But first we have to repair some loose tracks.
As many of you know, we never finished voting for Surpassies 2007. Truth be told, there were just not enough votes and as the year chugged along, we sadly got distracted from this fun event. We would like to ask everyone if they can please submit their votes again for the same categories so this time we can get this done and send out prizes. But this also means we’ll be having Surpassies 2008 soon after. We will hold the 2008 voting at the end of October.
Here is the page to vote for the most interesting and helpful forum members of 2007 - just please do not vote for any staff members (those in blue). (Mentors, users in orange, can be nominated though!) If you do not vote, then well, I will have to pick everyone myself and that isn’t fair. But if I have to…
Choo choo!
Surpass Holiday Cards!
Maybe this year you’ll receive one! Let us know if you have (post in the forum please or comment here)!
Five Years Cheers!
To all of the members of Surmunity - the Surpass Hosting Forums,
As I sit here in front of the screen as usual, I am trying to grasp just how five years went by so quickly. It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope filled with scenes of a “hosting life” - fast moving technology, spinning hard drives, new applications, industry changes, crazy ideas, logical ideas, happiness, frustrations, and all of the people we can’t live without: our employees and members of Surmunity.
Some of you pop in occasionally to join a bouncing conversation or lend a hand with topics that catch your attention. But some of you are always logging in, you are members in the most true sense.
I’ve noticed something on other hosting forums: many are calling their community a family. Sometimes I think it is just a trend - I don’t think they understand it like we do. For example, we’ve missed the company of some of our first Surmunity members for a year or more, but they always come back to check on us. Even with the extended absence it feels like they never left at all. You know, it reminds me of The Moken “Sea Gypsies” of the Andaman Sea.
The Moken don’t know how old they are. “Time is not the same concept as we have. You can’t say for instance, ‘When.’ It doesn’t exist in Moken language.”
While CBS 60 Minutes was on a Thai Moken island, a flotilla from Burma dropped by. They didn’t seem terribly excited by this. But visits from relatives, and they’re all relatives, happen all the time. And since there is no notion of time, it doesn’t matter if the last visit was a week ago or five years ago. There’s just a constant commingling.
So there’s our world culture lesson for the day. Anyhow, what I really wanted to say the most was just: Thank You. What would this forum be without you? It wouldn’t be anything. We’ve had our good times and bad times, celebrations and arguments. It does seem like a family, doesn’t it? It’s interesting how any concept or idea can find itself duplicated on the Internet. Crazy Internet.
We love you. 
Sincerely,
Kayla and all of the Surpass team
Free WHM Complete Solution License!
For reseller, VPS and dedicated clients only. Read all about it here!
To sign up for your free license you have to be in our new billing system. If you signed up after June 1, 2006 then you should definitely be there (billing area is located at client.surpasshosting.com). If you are not familiar with that area of the site, then you are likely in our old billing system. Over time we migrate everyone into the current system (such as when there are upgrades/downgrades) but for now you can open a ticket in our Accounting Division to request that your accounts be migrated into the new system. Then you will be able to sign up for your WHMCS license without issue. (The sign up script checks account validity in our current system and keeps a tidy record of your license.)
Hey, it’s a small amount of work to do for a free copy of WHMCS. Plus it helps our accounting department get you organized, while you organize your customers as well! Spring cleaning at its best!
Love Nest
We’re having a contest at Surmunity that is all about sharing your love for hosting knowledge. Or make that, the MOST hosting knowledge! Three winners will be picked who have the most posts from now until May 19. (They’ll win prizes and free hosting!) The posts must be extra insightful! We’re looking for quality posts on security, site maintenance, web editors, and more. Gather your knowledge into the nest!
If you’re joining this contest, a sure fire way to win is by creating new threads about different applications (from blogs to xhtml editors) or general ideas and thoughts you have about hosting. That way you’ll spark up conversations in topics you are already familiar with. Then you’re in control! And good luck on an easy way to win hosting!
Servers and rabbits and cakes, oh my!
Rabbits (and cupcakes, system administrators, data..) are running wild around here! Guess what else is hopping? The Surpass Community! Haugland awarded two free Mint licenses to essay contest winners: jordanriane (topic: Visitor Statistics and Tracking) and twirp (topic: Software Communities).
They are surely enjoying Mint goodness right now. Many thanks go to Haugland for sponsoring the contest.
We’ve also had fun weekly contests and the winners so far have been Geoff, musicman2059, room203, Rick, CoasterBGW, Gaia, cowboy, lonelydreamer, and puckchaser. Congrats to everyone!
We also must tell you that a particular rabbit friend of ours wants to invite you to a cool party. The place is Twitter. Hop over to the site, in a rabbit like fashion, and follow us (twitter.com/surpass). It’s a fun blogging community that lets you post messages fast from your browser, IM or your cell phone. You’ll be hooked immediately, so if you’re ready for that - participate now! We promise it’s fun, otherwise we wouldn’t be so excited. And we really, really are.
Drives, drives, drives!
At Surpass we only use fresh, delicious drives for new builds. When we recycle servers we send the drives back to the manufacturers (Seagate and Western Digital) as RMAs.
But if you happen to need a drive, we can sell you one! There are 240 in that photo alone.
Inquire within and act quickly to receive an authentic Surpass drive.
Inspiring Quotes
We found these on the CareerRamblings blog, hope they inspire you!
Albert Szent-Gyorgi on Innovation: “Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”
John Wayne on Being Brave: “Courage is being scared to death - and saddling up anyway.”
George Eliot on Goals: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
Nido Qubein on Potential: “Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go - they merely determine where you start.”
Alfred North Whitehead on Action: “Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.”
Lou Holtz on Learning: “Everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.”
Martin Luther King Jr on Courage: “Our lives start to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
A Serendipitous Update
PHP Updates: Right on the heels of our last PHP update, new releases appeared the same day. We are beginning to update the shared servers to the newest versions of PHP4 and PHP5. This is announced in the forum here. Dedicated server and VPS clients will need to request the upgrade via ticket.
Forum Notes: 1. Voting for the coveted forum awards will begin in April. Stay tuned for the official dates! See the past winners and prizes here. 2. Forum Member of the Month is coming back and we will post the interviews here in the blog. 3. Haugland’s Mint Giveaway ends February 27. Submit your entry as soon as possible! Here’s information on the giveaway.
Welcome To The Blog
With such a happening community that’s done a fantastic job at keeping Surpass users in touch, we never thought a blog was necessary. During the past couple of months we’ve seriously been weighing our options and we decided to go for it. 2003 was the year of the forum. 2007 will be the year of the blog. Sure, blogs aren’t a new concept by any means - we’ve been hosting them forever! But a blog is yet another tool to keep us connected, so let’s use it!
And why do we need to stay connected? Well, hosting with Surpass is not just about going to a website, picking out an amazing hosting plan, and working on a site for the world to see. Surpass is a community. We’re all here to help each other learn and prosper on the web. Surpass customers keep the creative flow.. flowing! It doesn’t stop, it’s 24/7, and it’s worldwide.
So from now on we will use this blog to share cool web services with you, and share what’s happening at Surpass in the now.
Thanks for joining us!
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