Local hosting startup FireHost continues its rapid growth and expansion by launching a new data center in Phoenix, Arizona. The company recently was focusing on a European expansion initiative after securing a $10MM Series B financing. This new data center continues in the same mold, providing customers with additional options and capabilities.

FireHost is one of few tech companies here in Dallas that has raised significant amounts of capital.

Here is their full press release:

(Dallas, Texas – March 14, 2012) – As part of FireHost’s global expansion, which saw the secure cloud host launch operations in Europe earlier this year, the company is now offering services at a state-of-the-art data center in Phoenix, Arizona. The Phoenix facility mirrors the innovative, secure cloud hosting environments FireHost has established in Dallas and London, and will allow customers an additional option in choosing where their servers reside. This is another step in a line of offerings the company provides to ensure customers have the flexibility and control they want for their environments. New and existing clients can now deploy secure cloud servers in any of the three locations directly through their MyFireHost customer portal.

“Phoenix is an ideal location for data centers due to the extremely low incidence of natural disasters like tornadoes, flooding and earthquakes. This new location gives our customers another secure option for primary or disaster recovery environments,” said Jason Rieger, CTO of FireHost. “The main benefits of this addition are that FireHost is widening its data center footprint and giving our customers more freedom and options.”

“We host thousands of WordPress sites with FireHost. The fact that we can make strategic decisions about where our servers reside, including disaster recovery, brings peace of mind,” said Joshua Strebel, co-founder of Page.ly, a Phoenix-based business. “From the beginning, FireHost has focused on securing our client data. Offering a new data center in this location is another example of the steps the company has taken to maintain that commitment. I love now having my data in my own backyard.”

FireHost’s mission is to provide the most secure, scalable cloud hosting possible. The company offers its customers more control within their secure environment than any other cloud host, from scaling, to storage. FireHost is the first public cloud host to offer three tiers of secure storage: SATA, SAS and now SSD. Additionally, FireHost offers three scaling options to manage costs and server resources: auto-scale, manual and scheduled scaling. All of these options can be controlled by the customers themselves within the MyFireHost customer portal.

About FireHost
FireHost is a secure cloud hosting company focused on protecting sensitive data and company’s brand reputation with an architecture built for security, scalability and performance. Customers with specific compliance or performance needs subscribe to FireHost’s PCI, HIPAA or high traffic solutions, including some of the largest companies in the world, as well as many fast growing eCommerce, SaaS and healthcare IT providers. FireHost provides services from Dallas, Phoenix, London and Amsterdam.

LaunchDFW has long enjoyed strong support from the actual entrepreneurs in the community and we really appreciate it. Here is what we wanted to build for YOU.

Homepage featuring at-a-glance stats

Community Calendar that automatically imports from other sources

Community News as always!

Community member profiles

Want to work at a startup? We can help!

The question at this point is… do YOU, the DFW Startup Community, really want this? Does LaunchDFW bring you value? Would you miss it if it were gone?

If you keep up with the local Startup news here in DFW, you maybe saw this headline last week:

Company Factory Disbands, BootstrapDallas.com Takes Its Place

Say what? Didn’t the Dallas Morning News just publish a story about the formation of Company Factory? Yes they did in fact, roughly a month earlier.

Confused by the quick turn of events, we reached out to the Company Factory founders to find out what was going on. The story is quite…. interesting. First a couple quick facts as launchDFW has been able to establish them…

• Company Factory IS NOT disbanded, nor has BootStrapDallas.com “taken its place” as the DMN article by Sheryl Jean states.
• Neal Rapoport bought out Chris Walter’s stake in Company Factory and is continuing to operate the company with a slightly different focus

What we’re really wondering is why the Dallas Morning News thinks that two guys forming a company is such interesting news, that they have to write about it again when it doesn’t work out a month later and the two guys go their separate ways. This happens every day. Why not write about Zynga buying New Toy or one of the many startup events happening in the metroplex?

At any rate, we thought we should jump in and shed a little light on the situation, since it seems the DMN was reporting some false information. To be clear, we got our info direct from Rapoport. Walters didn’t respond to our questions before we published, though his re-tweets of the DMN article suggest he fully supports the information that Jean published.

To summarize, Company Factory is still in business and run by Rapoport. Bootstrap Dallas is Walters’ new thing… and the two are very, very separate.

PS – If anyone at the Dallas Morning News reads this, we have a bunch of leads on interesting stories about the DFW tech scene that we would love to see you cover. Please do ping us if you need some ideas

TechStars has joined with the White House’s Startup America initiative to launch TechStars Network, a formal alliance of independently owned and operated start-up accelerator programs. Dallas’ TechWildcatters will lead DFW’s efforts toward the national goal of enabling 5,000 business leaders and investors help startups create 25,000 new jobs by 2015.

“At Tech Wildcatters, we believe collaboration across boundaries builds stronger communities. The TechStars Network will be the catalyst for a nationwide startup ecosystem, something our country desperately needs. With TechStars Network’s rich set of strategic resources, we will build stronger companies faster that are better able to compete globally,” said Gabriella Draney, co-founder of Tech Wildcatters.

You can learn more about the initiative via the press release, or head over to TechWildcatters or StartupAmericaPartnership.org to get involved today.

The “build your own kingdom” game We Rule, developed by local app company Newtoy and published by ngmoco, is up for a number of awards at the Game Developers Choice Online Awards.

The game, which has been downloaded over 2.5 million times and has hundreds of thousands of daily active users, has been nominated in the following categories:

• The Best Online Game Design
• The Best Audio for an Online Game
• The Best New Online Game

You can also make your voice heard by voting in the Audience Choice category here.

I am a really big fan of This Week in Startups, a program created an hosted by the ever controversial Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com and best known for selling Weblogs Inc to AOL. The show is entertaining and a great source of information and inspiration for entrepreneurs.

So it’s pretty cool, in my book, that a local startup finally got some airtime on the show. Chris Sundberg recently had a great post covering the launch of Swingly last week that you can check out here.

Below is the episode with Andy on This Week in Startups.

Blinksale, the online invoicing service run by Richardson-based Double Wide Labs, publicly launched their much awaited redesign today.

Doublewide Labs purchased Blinksale in May of last year from Firewheel Design, the company that eventually became Alamofire and now Gowalla, and the service has remained largely stagnant until today.

The companies blog post also reveals that they are close to releasing one of the most requested new features from over the years, estimates. The new paint along with the upcoming new features is a great signal to the Blinksale community and their loyal customers.

Check out all the details of the redesign over at the Blinksale blog.

The Startup Happy Hour has been one of the best regular startup events in Dallas for the past two years. Thousands of new connections have been made, companies have been formed as a result and it has really fostered the community growth we’ve seen.

Changes are coming to the event that is going to take it to the next level.

NEW VENUE: The High Tech Bar has been a good home for the event, but the parking situation really annoying. The new location will be at Architel’s new facility in the North Tower of Campbell Centre (the gold building on the corner of I75 and Northwest Highway where JR Ewing used to work).

NEW DATE: The first Monday made a lot of sense when we first began (the first happy hour just happened to be on a Monday), but we eventually remembered that it fell on the same night as Monday Night Football (this is Texas BTW). The new date will be the fifth Wednesday of the month. The inaugural event will be held October 27th, 2010 (subsequent events on Nov 24, Dec 22, Jan 26, Feb 23).

EXCITING NEW FORMAT: Cocktails and more cocktails seemed like a great idea two years ago – easy to organize and easy to host – but we can do better. Starting in October we will begin the event at 5PM with cocktails and light hors d’oeuvres, then at 6PM we will have a speaker/program for 30-45 minutes and then have more cocktails and networking until around 8PM. Each quarter we hope to attract a ’significant’ speaker, but don’t worry each month we will have really interesting speakers.

Now for the most important part. The new online home for Startup Happy Hour is at Meetup.com – http://www.meetup.com/Dallas-Startup-Happy-Hour/

It is extremely important that you join the group and RSVP to the events you will be coming to as this shows our potential speakers they are going to have an audience. We’re already talking to some amazing people about speaking at the event so please take a minute to join the group and RSVP!

Welcome to Startup Happy Hour 2.0!

The new Dallas seed fund and incubator Tech Wildcatters just announced that they will be hosting a happy hour with Brad Feld, managing partner of Foundry Group and co-founder of TechStars.

From the Tech Wildcatters blog:

Brad Feld, managing partner of Foundry Group and co-founder of TechStars will be in town next Friday and wants to hang out with some local entrepreneurs and share with them how Boulder built their startup community. He is having one of his (in?)famous Beers with Brad happy hours and we are looking forward to introducing him to the community here.

Little known fact is that he actually grew up in Dallas. Richardson actually.

Date:  Friday, May 28th

Time:  6-8pm

Where: Lotus, 2900 McKinney Ave

We’re looking for a sponsor, so if you are interested let me know.  If we don’t get one, it will be a cash bar.  I look forward to seeing a lot of great Dallas entrepreneurs get together and talk about how to make this community kick ass!

DALLAS, May 17 /PRNewswire/ — Traxo (www.traxo.com), the home base for travel, adds another tool to simplify travel: Traxo Loyalty Tracker keeps track of airline, hotel, and car reward balances, synching all loyalty program miles and points on one centralized dashboard. It is the first to display all miles and points balances alongside the traveler’s entire trip itinerary on one consolidated travel home base. A traveler’s miles and points from all their accounts get automatically loaded onto Traxo so users see balances, program status levels, recent transactions and the date when miles and points are about to expire. Last year over 150,000 travelers had approximately 1.5 billion frequent flyer miles expire due to inactivity (equivalent to over 55,000 cross-country trips), according to InsideFlyer Magazine.  Traxo’s Loyalty Tracker helps prevent travelers from losing miles by always displaying up-to-date loyalty account information and proactively notifying members before miles expire. It works seamlessly with the existing Traxo travel dashboard and is free for Traxo members.

The introduction of Traxo Loyalty Tracker also comes with a “Win Trips for Lost Miles” sweepstakes, where Traxo will award a total of ten $500 gift cards over the course of ten weeks. Users can choose between American Airlines or Travelocity Hotel gift cards. Enter by signing up for the free Traxo Loyalty Tracker service (at http://www.traxo.com/web/sweepstakes), and receive an additional entry for each new or existing Traxo member who becomes your Traxo buddy. Once every two weeks for ten weeks beginning June 2, 2010, Traxo will award a randomly selected winner a $500 travel gift card, with one grand prize winner being chosen to receive five travel gift cards on August 10, 2010.

“We’re thrilled to add this free Loyalty Tracker functionality to Traxo — it’s a highly requested feature that will help our users track all of their loyalty miles and points on one page, provide them with key information as they book their next trip and help them save money by enabling them to see and use their balances before they expire,” said Andres Fabris, co-founder and CEO of Traxo.

“The three most powerful words for travelers today are: simplify, simplify, simplify.  Intelligent travel simplicity is exactly what Traxo delivers,” said Randy Petersen, founder of InsideFlyer Magazine and FlyerTalk.com. “The use of the Traxo Loyalty Tracker will help prevent frequent flyer miles from expiring,” Petersen continued.

Traxo creates one itinerary for the traveler, automatically gathering information from all the user’s travel accounts online without the need to forward confirmation emails. Itineraries are also updated automatically when changes are made and Traxo’s award-winning Facebook integration enables easier sharing of travel plans with friends outside of the Traxo site. Featuring content and recommendations from Uptake, Traxo also aids in the trip planning, making the overall travel experience more enjoyable and streamlined.

About Traxo

Traxo serves as a travel home base, offering travelers a single location for managing travel. Trips are seamlessly brought into a user’s Traxo account, wherever they are booked, adding efficiency that frees the traveler from the hassles of merging all the details.  Traxo users can choose to connect to their contacts on Facebook via Traxo’s Facebook application. Conceived by Andres Fabris, Andy Chen and Richard Pendergast, Traxo’s executive team is comprised of individuals with extensive travel industry experience from companies like Sabre and Travelocity. For more information, please visit www.traxo.com.