On January 12th, a series of earthquakes measuring 6.5 to 7.3 on the Richter scale devastated Haiti. There is now a critical shortage of essential supplies and support personnel to assist the people of Haiti through this crisis.

Although normally fiercely competitive, as members of the hosting community we know that the power we wield as a group is much more than we can wield individually. And so we’ve come together to help assist those affected by this disaster. With the generosity of all our combined customers, we hope to make a difference. And you can too. One dollar helps. One hundred dollars helps one hundred times more.

Please visit and consider supporting the Hosting for Haiti project today – Read more at http://www.hostingforhaiti.com/

Lagniappe Internet LLC has a new half-page ad appearing in the Ping! magazine. See the Oct-Nov 2009 issue page 32.  The pup in the photo is one of our own… Doug. We’re pleased to be partnering with Ping! and are looking forward to a long relationship with them. As part of the partnership,  all existing and new U.S. based customers are getter a free subscription to Ping! after they’ve been with us for a month.

I know you’ve worked hard to get your Google positioning where you’d like, or are in the process of attempting to do so… time to start re-doing it. Google has announced “caffeine” their new search engine technology. You can play with caffeine at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/  and there’s a cool tool that let’s you compare the existing results to the new engine’s results at http://www.comparecaffeine.com/

Google’s Matt Cutts had this to say

“The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

Part of the revision is said to address the growing implications of social networks on search results. Supposedly it is also faster. Come claim twice as fast. I personally never really had an issue with Google’s speed. I suspect speed matters more to Google themselves as more efficient typically means less hardware required. Less hardware means less expense in capital as well as operation, administration, etc. down the line. That means more money is Google’s pockets. So I could see how they would want that…

Included in the new list of the 500 fastest growing private companies are many technology and internet business. But we wanted to point out that at # 239 is HostGator.com with 896.4% increase! Hostgator is not new to the list either… This just goes to show that it is possible to build the webhosting business by defining your services well, and taking care of your customers. Congratulations to HostGator – Keep up the good work!