In case you haven’t heard the news (but we’re pretty sure it spread like the oil slick in the gulf), Contegix announced our forthcoming expansion into Europe with a state-of-the-art data center. All of the support and infrastructure management will still be handled from the St. Louis, MO USA offices.

There has been some buzz around the subject of possible satellite offices in Boston and San Francisco. This is not confirmed yet, but as soon as we know more, we’ll be announcing it here. What we can tell you is this: our St. Louis offices will be growing substantially not just in terms of square footage, but in terms of staff,  as well.

Our announcement was given at the Atlassian Summit in San Francisco, which we helped to sponsor this year, by our Co-Founder and CTO, Craig McElroy, during the Launch Pad Competition.

We had the opportunity to meet lots of developers and other Atlassian-pasionate people from across the globe, and catch up with our friends at Atlassian, as well. In short, the Summit was a great success and we’ll be looking forward to next year’s Summit. Who knows what big changes we’ll have by then. Take a look at our blog for our Summit Recap! Lots more information there and plenty of pictures!

Each month, Contegix will spotlight one of the many, unique clients that call Contegix home for their internet infrastructure.  They range across industries  – from innovative tech start-ups, to software giants and Fortune 500 companies. You’ll learn what challenges they faced while growing, and just how technology plays a crucial role in their daily operations. We’ve also opened the floor to our clients to ask us a question of choice – from the serious to the somewhat silly, but all informative. Enjoy! 

FIRST UP: Widgetbox  –

Co-founder and CTO, Giles Goodwin

Contegix: Why was Widgetbox started?

Giles:

In 2006, content was highly available through feeds like RSS, Atom and JSON, but we believed content syndication should be the building blocks of websites, blogs, and profiles–not just consumed in feed readers. So we built Widgetbox to provide a gallery of Widgets – tools for developers to build widgets, and a platform for anyone to wrap that feed content up in attractive and interactive mini-applications called widgets. Our widgets can be used as building block components to add content to sites and applications ranging from interactive content rich ads to mobile sites optimized for iPhone and Android devices.

Contegix: What are some of the challenges that Widgetbox faced while growing?

Giles:

The two biggest challenges we’ve faced are keeping up with the fast pace changes in the internet -like the shift users made from MySpace to Facebook, and the emergence of the iPhone-and keeping up with the growth of our user base. We grew from a few thousand widget impressions a day, to nearly a billion a month over the last three years. Both of these challenges mean scaling up our technology to work with multiple other systems to be reliable for all our users.

Contegix: How has technology played a role in the success of Widgetbox?

Giles:

The natural re-usability of widgets has been key for us. We use the same underlying widget components and infrastructure to serve ads to the world’s largest online websites as we do to provide small businesses their html5 iPhone sites. This means we can develop new products and features quickly and they scale well without any extra work. We also have a very productive product organization. Our process for building software works well, and we release new code to users each week. Finally, we take advantage of lots of open source projects such as MySQL, Memcached, and Spring, like many other internet companies, bringing big advantages to development and operations.

Contegix: What made Widgetbox decide to go with us?

Giles:

We needed a managed hosting provider who could provide us with very good reliability and work with us to understand the specifics of our software. I asked around and Contegix was recommended by 3 different CTOs or Ops Leads at various other companies we worked with. My initial meetings with Matthew and Craig were great, and they actually helped us out with some issues we were having with our previous provider.

Contegix: How do you see us fitting into your technology strategy now and in the future?

Giles:

Contegix has proved to be great at both supporting us day-to-day and managing our growth. We recently doubled capacity of one of our services over a weekend. They handled that very well, and came up with creative solutions to specific issues that would have blocked other hosting providers. We’ll use them more as we grow because we know we can count on the service they provide and they’ll own the problems with us, not provide us with new ones along the way.

Contegix: What other companies in the tech field (and beyond) do you admire, and why?

Giles:

The obvious ones are Apple for design, and Google for scale; also Amazon for turning a book selling business into a revolutionary technology company. There is also a slide deck floating around the web about Netflix’s values, which is pretty impressive and full of things I hope we can claim when we’re as big as they are.

Contegix: Fair Game: Ask us a question. Serious or silly. And we’ll answer. What would you like to know about us? (Question will go to a tech person or management member for answer.)

Giles:

What are your long-term goals for Contegix? How do you plan to reach them?

Answered by Matthew Porter, Co-Founder and CEO of Contegix:

“Long-term goals are often difficult to reach in any business, especially in technology. Therefore, we believe the goals must always be based around our core value.  For us, that is pushing technology and our delivery of technology to meet the customer’s needs.  We make steps on a daily basis to achieve these goals.  This is what caused us to deliver on the promise of an enterprise-grade cloud in 2009.  In the next few months, our customers will hear of a few exciting announcements that will allow us to better serve them in a big way.”

USA Tech Company Contegix Expanding Services to the European Market.

SAINT LOUIS, Missouri (June, 2010) – Contegix, a privately held technology firm specializing in Internet infrastructure services, announced plans today to begin the process of expanding globally to Europe, at the 2010 Atlassian Summit being held in San Francisco.

Everyone at Contegix is excited and thrilled to be expanding on our capabilities by having a data center in Europe. It also signifies a period of tremendous growth and expansion for our company. We’ll be adding to our staff and will be expanding the size of our corporate and support divisions to handle the growth. We’ve already had several notable clients express an interest in having data managed in our state-of-the-art center in Europe,” said Matthew Porter, CEO and Co-Founder of Contegix.

Contegix provides Internet infrastructure services for a variety of companies – from innovative tech start-ups, to widely recognized brands such as Live Nation, and Six Apart, as well as some non-disclosed Fortune 500 companies. Clients are driven to Contegix seeking reliability in customer service and advanced engineering support to handle complex security challenges – all areas that set this unassuming, Midwestern firm apart. “We’ve built our business directly from referrals of happy clients. That’s a pretty big testament to the quality of our work,” said Porter.

The announcement comes in the wake of last year’s groundbreaking news – that Contegix would offer cloud services to its customers. The Contegix cloud is now virtually unmatched by any other cloud service, public or private, in the industry when it comes to reliability and performance.

“We decided that now is the time to expand and make ours a global company, allowing us to offer more data security diversity to existing and new clients. We’ve also considered opening additional satellite offices in San Francisco and possibly Boston – but those options are still being considered at this point in time. First things first – Europe” stated Porter.

News of the forthcoming expansion was announced by the CTO and Co-founder, Craig McElroy, at the Atlassian Summit’s Launch Pad event. “A lot of careful planning and work went into these efforts. It’s a long time coming. We are ready to grow and be positioned to offer our services to more clients across the globe. We are appreciative that Atlassian permitted us to make the announcement at the Summit, which we helped to sponsor this year,” said McElroy.

Contegix holds expertise in high security managed hosting, cloud computing, applications management, colocation and Internet infrastructure intelligence. Their award-winning service is delivered by a staff of Tier-3 engineers from their headquarters in St. Louis, MO. To find out more, please visit www.contegix.com.

Contegix Announces Sponsorship of Jasig

St. Louis, MO (June 3, 2010) – Contegix, a leading provider of Internet infrastructure intelligence and hosting management services, announced its sponsorship of the Jasig not-for-profit organization, which provides a collaborative environment to foster the development of open source technologies and software for higher education.

Contegix will be providing hosting and managed support of the Jasig Internet infrastructure. This will allow the organization to focus on its core business – the development of their software products and supporting the growing community. The new Jasig infrastructure is built on Contegix’s stable platform and is fully managed by 24×7 Contegix engineers.  Thus, it will greatly reduce the time spent doing troubleshooting and support internally.

“A few years ago, many people still questioned the use of open source software in higher education,” says Matthew Porter, CEO and Co-Founder of Contegix. “Organizations such as Jasig are showing that through collaboration amongst institutions and commercial parties, open source software and related projects can enable future advancements in the higher education environment. Jasig’s projects enable many global educational institutions to benefit from the contributions of a highly technical community and we are proud to support this endeavor.”

As a company, Contegix believes strongly in the open source community, the Linux community, and the power of the entrepreneur in the social web since it was founded. For this reason, mixed with the desire as an organization to give back to the community, they sponsor individuals, organizations, and their respective projects for the betterment of all.

“We’re very pleased that Contegix has joined us as our newest Partner,” said Jonathan Markow, Executive Director of Jasig.  “We have already migrated our infrastructure applications to their facilities, and they have more than lived up to their excellent reputation for technical know-how, project management skills, and customer service.  We couldn’t be more satisfied with their support.  We welcome Contegix to the Jasig community and look forward to working together with them.”

Contegix is a technology firm known for delivering exceptional customer service and Internet infrastructure intelligence. Their dedicated staff of engineers provide solid solutions to complex business challenges in the areas of hosting, cloud computing, co-location and infrastructure management services. Founded in 2004, Contegix was listed as the Linux Journal’s Reader’s Choice Award for Favorite Linux-Friendly Web-Hosting Company, and has built a solid industry reputation entirely based on delivering peace of mind to valued clients. They serve clients in range of industries – from innovative technology start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.

About Jasig

Jasig is a global consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates sponsoring  free and open source software projects for higher education.  The group aims to attract, advance, and sustain communities developing enterprise-level, open source software that helps institutions fulfill their goals. Jasig connects people, provides infrastructure, and sponsors events that foster innovation and collaboration.  Flagship projects include uPortal, an enterprise portal; CAS, the Central Authentication Service used for single sign-on and secure, proxied authentication; and Bedework, an enterprise calendar used for public events and personal and group calendaring. Jasig also manages a Project Incubator designed to mentor new open source projects in building community, increasing collaboration, and achieving sustainability.  For more information, visit the Jasig website at www.jasig.org.

Here at Contegix we take pride in the superb team of technical engineers we have on staff.  We have a great team of dedicated engineers who truly enjoy the work they do each and every day for our customers.  We have a team of superstars, and we thought some of our customers might be interested in learning a bit more about what makes our engineers really tick.   Therefore, we give you the opportunity to “Meet the Contegians” through Q&A sessions with our engineering staff.

First up, Mark Rogers, technical support lead.

Mark, where we you born?

St. Louis, MO

What is your favorite open source project?

Pylot, www.pylot.org.  I’m pretty biased though, considering I’ve contributed code to it in the past, and I am listed as a contributor.  It is a sweet load testing application that works in Windows or Linux though.  It is definitely worth checking out if you ever need to do some load testing.

What is your favorite Linux tool?

There are a few items in the land of Linux that firmly cement me in my operating system of choice.  Some I can get elsewhere I suppose, but I can’t live without Klipper, Grep, and BASH.  Sure, I can get most of these in OSX, except for Klipper.  I know there are knock-offs available, and that I could install the KDE stack if I had to, but it’s just not the same.  Klipper managing my clipboard is the best tool I’ve ever used.  With how much copying and pasting I do in my day-to-day life, it’s nice to see the last 300 or so items that I’ve highlighted on a whim.  It comes in handy just way too often.

What is your favorite operating system?

I’m a big fan of Ubuntu.  It’s stable, has deep repositories, and has a ton of community support.  At work I need a distro that is stable, but I also need to be able to install random, off-the-wall packages at times for the various needs I have at work.  Plus, I love to play with new applications all the time as well.  The chances of finding an RPM seem to always be small, but finding Debs is generally easy.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

Well, I blog www.f4ntasmic.com and like to write code.  My personal language of choice is Python, and thus I’ve been playing with Django a LOT lately.

Any personal projects you are currently working on that you would like to talk about?

Well, when I was learning Python I decided to write an application that wraps the Confluence Remote API’s xmlrpc calls.  It is actually handy at times since just about anything you can do in Confluence; you can do via this application remotely.  You can add users, remove users, update posts, add new posts, and so on.  This can all be done without ever loading a browser.  You can find it at Confluence Remote Manager.

What are you currently running system-wise?

I’m running an Acer Aspire right now.  Specs are as follows:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHZ
3GB of RAM
250G hard drive
Nvidia GeForce 9500 (I think.  I could be wrong, but its’ nice.)

What books, magazines, and journals are you currently reading?

I’ve had a subscription to PC Gamer for about five or six years now, so I’m always reading that.  Even though it’s recently jumped the shark in my opinion with this new EIC.  Bring back the editorial columns please!!!  Not really reading any books right now.  I have a stack of Ruby books I need to read, along with some stuff on PyGame.  They’re just staring at me, begging to be read.  If only I could just suck the knowledge out via osmosis or something.

What was the last book you read?

Python Web Development with Django.  It was a decent read, and it got me rolling with Django.  The online docs for Django are great and all, but I learn so much better from books.  Plus, this was one of the few books already updated for Django 1.0.

What is your favorite book of all time?

Fahrenheit 451.  Amazing book, terrible movie.  I personally feel everyone should read the book at least once, so that they can see the dangers of law by opinion and censorship in general.

What music and movies do you enjoy?

I enjoy all sorts of music genres like rap, death metal, hair metal, anything from the 80’s, a bit of country, some pop, and other random stuff.  My favorite bands in rotation right now though are the White Stripes, 3OH!3, and Mindless Self Indulgence (only their first CD.)  Movie –wise I enjoy most of the David Lynch films (Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway), and other movies that tend to make me think.  That’s not to say I don’t love mindless comedies and action flicks though.  I’m a huge fan of parody movies like Scary Movie, Airplane, Naked Gun, etc.

What was the last movie you saw?


Yes Man with Jim Carrey.  Pretty funny overall.  It’s Liar Liar, but this time he has to say, “Yes” to everything instead of not lying.  Incredibly original and creative.  ☺

What is your favorite movie of all time?

That’s tough.  It’s one of three:

SLC Punk
The Jacket
Pulp Fiction

I don’t think I could pick just one.

What was the last concert you attended?

It’s been awhile since I’ve been to a concert.  I think the last one might have been Nine Inch Nails like eight or nine years ago.

What is your favorite band of all time?

If I had to pick just one, it would be Nine Inch Nails.

What do you like most about working at Contegix?

I get to play with random cool technology just about every single day.  I never know what the day has in store for me, and for the most part, no two days are the same.  It helps keep life rather interesting.

What do you like most about our customers?

That’s a tough question.  Customers are so unique, that it is hard to find a global reason on why I like all of them.  We are home to some major open source projects and players, and I love that.  I love to see customers building a business with open source software, and to contribute to the open source community in the process.  We also have customers that are building applications that you can see the potential in, and that I find myself browsing at times.  I guess I just enjoy that a lot of our customers are very creative and seem to be living the dream of doing what they enjoy.  I’m glad to be a part of that in whatever capacity that might be.