Really liking this guy’s sound, check out “Search & destroy”:

And “Nearly Summer”:

More here on his YouTube channel or just search iTunes or Hypem.

United Internet is most likely the largest hosting company in the world, and since United Internet is a public company I decided to take a look at their 2008-2011 end of year summaries.

[disclaimer – I’m still learning how to read these reports, so I apologize for any mistakes. ]

Total Hosting Contracts. Keep in mind they use this term to identify any contract, so it doesn’t mean customers. Especially post 2009 when they switched the term to application contracts (which is a smart move given they are really a saas platform that introduces themselves to customers through a website proposition).

2008 – 3.62 Million
2009 – 4.14 Million

Customer breakdown out of the 2009 number:
Germany 1.95 Million (47%)
UK 1 Million (24%)
France 0.26 Million (6%)
USA 0.82 Million (20%)
Spain 0.11 Million (3%)
*This is interesting as I didn’t know they were so huge in Germany but not quite so big in the USA.

After 2009 they switched to measuring this per application contracts instead of “customer contracts”, which inflates the number a bit, or at least makes it more confusing to me…

2009 – 5.65 Million Fee Based Contracts
2010 – 6.13 Million
2011 – 6.59 Million

Total Employees:
2007 – 3,954
2008 – 4,565
2009 – 4,571
2010 – 5,018
2011 – 5,593 (3,701 of those for the hosting/app group)

Servers Reported:
2008 – 65,000
2009 – 67,000
*After that nothing mentioned.

A couple interesting points:

1. For 2011 out of their “Application” aka hosting / software group their profit margins were 25%. For 2010 they were around 34% (ebita).

2. They describe a lot of their internal hosting setup in these releases. For example they split their hosting setup into frontend servers and backend storage. And in the last couple years have moved to spread these over multiple data centers so that if one goes lights out the other should serve their clients pages (although a few glitches in this in 2011 it appears).

3. In 2011 34.7% of the entire companies gross revenue came from the Applications / Hosting group. It grew 7% over the previous year on a financial basis.

4. The only hosting acquisition I could find was their purchase of FastHost’s assets from Dollamore Ltd in 2008. You can find more on that sale here.

5. In 2011 the Applications / Hosting Group of the company generated around ~$874 Million dollars. Making them the largest hosting company in the world to my knowledge. With EIG/GoDaddy a close second and third.

You can download the reports here. Google search for the year + Annual Financial Report United Internet.

Wow check out this great post on gun control by Jason Alexanders. He makes some great points and I hope people listen and a constructive dialogue emerges. Which is unlikely :)

Having 14 people die at a movie theater sucks. Personally I’m torn on the issue. On one hand I like the cowboy violent psycho culture of the USA, I think it’s a big part of America’s culture and why we excel and fail at so many other aspects of our society. The notion that a citizen has rights to weaponry to defend themselves from a tyrannical government is pretty awesome. Sure it’s stupid right now, but in 50 or 100 years it might not be (highly unlikely but we (Americans) are also super bad at math/risk analysis).

But I can’t help to wonder that maybe it is time to take a step back. We loose so many people each year to gun violence and we are loosing the future those people could build. What if one of them cured cancer? Went into politics and changes the course of history? Was an amazing teacher that impacted hundreds of people? Started a new business? I’m just not sure the loss is worth it on society.

Maybe in order to own guns you have to attend a class every 6 months to be evaluated mentally. Or you have to be part of a “militia” that has similar requirements and seems to be what the constitution was more aimed at (who knows though what they meant?). What can we do to prevent 75% of the current gun fatalities?

Maybe it is time to scale things back and limit it to single shot bolt action hunting rifles only. Our national guard and army are made up of citizens, do we really think they would somehow rise up against us? Do we really think that at some point the fabric of what it is to be an American will so disintegrate that the individuals making up the military would turn on their own people? Not impossible but it seems so unlikely.