Varial Technologies Blog
Varial strives to create products and services to enrich our lives and help us succeed both on and offline.
We’re Expanding in The Two Twenty!
We’re expanding and just signed a lease today for a larger office located on the main floor of The Two Twenty, just behind Collective Coffee. Construction is under way and we should be able to move into our new space at the beginning of March.
Here’s a spy shot of the construction to tide you over:
Ominocity Announces OMFEST
Ominocity, our local music blog, has announced OMFEST, an indie music festival to celebrate its first anniversary.
OMFEST takes place on Saturday, March 3, 2012 at Louis’ Pub (93 Campus Dr, Saskatoon, SK) and begins promptly at 6 p.m.
Advanced tickets are available exclusively at http://www.ominocity.com/tickets
Varial’s Highlights of 2011
Happy New Year! We wish you the best in 2012 and hope the holidays were full of cheer!
2011 was extremely kind to our business and we would like to share with you our highlights from the past year and thank you for your continued support.
- Like every year before it, 2011 was our biggest and best year. Our sales grew substantially over last year which we attribute to a lot of hard work, increased networking efforts, and the diminishing effect of the worldwide economic recession. A big thank you to our clients!
- We moved into a wonderful co-working space called The Two Twenty in September. We love it so much here that we will be expanding into a larger suite in the building later in the year. Check out a video tour of the building that was filmed during the wild grand opening party that was held in November.
- To celebrate the 8 year anniversary of our web hosting division, we revamped our hosting plans giving all customers a free upgrade featuring as much 5x the resources. We also implemented new hosting technologies in order to improve server stability and performance.
- We acquired our second hosting business in April, purchasing the customers of Collision Hosting, a small US firm.
- We launched Ominocity, a local music blog with accompanying iPhone and Android apps in March. 6 months later Ominocity was voted as Best Local Website in Planet S Magazine’s “Best of Saskatoon” reader poll.
- Varial was a sponsor again to the massive Halifax Pop Explosion music festival and also sponsored the YYJ Freelance Camp and BarCamp Saskatoon networking events. Ominocity staff even gave the closing presentation at BarCamp Saskatoon!
December Promotion: 50% off Web Hosting
We’re ready to ring in the holidays at Varial with one of our most popular money saving promotions!
Order a web hosting plan using the coupon code “HAPPYHOLIDAYS” and get 50% OFF your hosting fee on your first invoice. This promotion applies to all available billing cycles so if you decide to pay monthly, you will get 50% off your first month, however if you decide on an annual, biennual, or triennual billing cycle, you can get up to 50% off your first 3 years of service!
* Offer expires on December 31, 2011 and is valid for new orders only.
Office Grand Opening Video Tour
Thread Saskatoon put together an excellent video tour of The Two Twenty during the wild grand opening party that saw over 600 visitors on November 10th. Collective Coffee‘s Jackson Weibe gives a tour of the building and its notable tenants while the party was in full swing.
Office Grand Opening Party
The Two Twenty, the co-working building where our new office is located is having a grand opening party Thursday evening feature indie rock, DJ’s, and other artistic performances. Come get a tour of our new office and take in a very unique event!
Details on the grand opening party can be found at: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=299189296760939
BarCamp Saskatoon Reminder
Along with sponsoring the event, members of our staff will be giving the talk “How to Create an Award-Winning Blog in 6 Months” at BarCamp Saskatoon tomorrow from 12pm-9pm at VendAsta. If you will be attending the event, be sure to check out our presentation!
DDoS Attacks
We have been informed that the data center’s network has been the victim of a series of exceptionally large DDoS attacks. While a team of highly skilled network administrators and several automated prevention and mitigation systems are in place to address this issue, a small subset of clients may experience intermittent packet loss as a result of this high-intensity attack.
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused and appreciate your patience and understanding in this matter. If you are still experiencing any connectivity issues, please contact our support department.
Maintenance: Kernel Upgrades on Luna and Poseidon
Our Luna and Poseidon servers will be rebooted momentarily in order to apply an upgrade to their kernels. Services will be offline for roughly 5 minutes as the servers reboot. Thank you for your patience!
Ominocity v1.1 for iPhone and Android Released
We are pleased to announce that updates for our Ominocity mobile apps have just been released.
This update provides iOS 5 compatibility for the iPhone and several bug fixes to the Android app.
Download Ominocity for iPhone and Android at: http://www.ominocity.com/apps/