For the last 6 years I have been working for Loud-n-clear Ltd, with whom I merged CFMX Hosting back in 2003. After 6 years of feeling like I was banging my head against a brick wall  I decided it was time split the companies up again so that I could actually work on growing and expanding CFMX Hosting, and get out of the rut I had found myself in. So In January I left Loud-n-clear, separating CFMX Hosting and taking it with me and launched a new company called "BlueThunder Internet". This will be the new name of CFMX Hosting, which I am re-branding to be more generic and less CF-centric which I feel will be a positive move in the in this current recession where I don't think one can afford to restrict oneself to such a small niche especially in such a competive market place as hosting. Plus there is the fact that there is no such thing as "CFMX" any longer since Adobe changed the name back to plain "ColdFusion", so I have been thinking of changing the name for a while.

While I am still a huge ColdFusion fan it is no longer the only cfkid on the block, so my new company will be specialising in "CFML" and supporting the likes of Railo and BlueDragon as well as ColdFusion and all the other usual technologies. I have become a big fan of Railo of late especially since it is far better suited to the shared hosting environment than ColdFusion with its per site admin interface which means less support tickets and more control for the customer, plus the security side of things is also significantly better.

If you haven't yet heard about railo or you have heard about it but don't know why you would want to use it, I strongly recommend heading over to CFMeetup and watching the recent recording of the Railo 3.1 Open Source Presentation, this should give you some idea of how cool Railo is and some of awesome and unique new features it provides, or perhaps like me it will even get you as excited as you used to be about ColdFusion :-)

With the emergence of open BlueDragon and railo now also being open source as well, I think this is going to give a much needed boost to CFML as a language and the community at large. Finally CFML is now on equal footings with the likes of PHP as it is now also free to download and use, but with the added advantage of being easier to learn and more powerful, oh and it works better on windows too ;-)

For those who may be wondering where the name "BlueThunder" came from, it was many many hours of trying to find a domain name that wasn't already taken and is easy to remember, which is very hard by the way. I had exhausted just about every name using the word "fusion" or "hosting" so I then randomly just decided to start thinking of names of old 8 bit computer games and old TV shows and then I remembered that old show about the helicopter called Blue Thunder, which as well as liking the name I thought was also a bit of a play on words in the same vein as ColdFusion, it has that same feeling of power, so having found a domain name that was free, I snapped it up. You may also notice the new logo might look slightly reminiscent of the original Allaire ColdFusion logo.