Since we started in May 2004, we have been relying on our own smarts, and our teams at Rackspace, to manage our servers and infrastructure. In those nearly four years we have had two windows of unscheduled downtime — not perfect, but pretty good for a growing web service.

That said, we have some big goals to achieve over the next while, so we knew we needed to deepen our network and operations capabilities with someone in-house full-time. Enter Rich Lafferty, the man who had me at “hello”.

Had you at “hello”? That doesn’t sound quite right…

Hang in there, and allow me to elaborate. In the final quarter of last year we did a lot of interviews, and the more you do something, the better you get at it. We had been struggling to find a systems administrator; the best candidates tended to be stationed in other countries. Then Rich entered our little office. Just like the day we met Aaron, I just sort of knew Rich was our guy. I wasn’t even involved with the first interview, we just said a passing “hello” — and funny enough, that was pretty much all I needed. Don’t get me wrong, we did our due diligence and I was involved with later interviews; but right off the bat, I just knew he was a fit.

Rich started in early December, and his impact was felt immediately. I guess our needs are growing beyond the realm where a generalist is the best fit. Now we need people with deep domain expertise, and Rich has fundamentally changed our confidence levels in all things network related. Our dev team is able to run a heck of a lot faster with someone now dedicated to operations.

We’re delighted to have Rich here in Toronto with us, along with his wife Candice, who just arrived from Ottawa this weekend. Please join me in welcoming him to team FreshBooks!

We’re pleased to announce the U.S. leader in online payment processing, Authorize.Net, has selected FreshBooks to be included in their Merchant Toolbox, a set of twelve best-in-class tools recommended by Authorize.Net to help online merchants run their businesses more effectively.

With this announcement, Authorize.Net’s parent company, CyberSource, becomes the second major public company to partner with FreshBooks. The first was Amazon, who chose FreshBooks in August 2007 to be one of the first four services to integrate with their brand new Flexible Payments Service.

We’re very proud of this latest recognition from our friends at Authorize.Net! They’ve been an online payments industry leader for years, and we’re delighted to be given their seal of approval. It’s a very big deal to recommend products or services to a friend, colleague or customer — it means putting your own reputation on the line. The fact Authorize.Net is willing to recommend us to their over 200,000 merchants, and has even dedicated a page to us, really gives us that warm, fuzzy feeling inside.

Our close mutual relationship also benefits anyone wishing to use FreshBooks and Authorize.Net together. If you sign up for Authorize.Net through us, you’ll benefit from reduced signup and monthly fees, and a lower percentage fee on credit card transactions; and once you’re an Authorize.Net customer, you’re entitled to a discount on FreshBooks, too — $12 off your first month, to be exact! You’ll save money all around, and enjoy all the benefits of using both services together.

So be sure to check out our excellent discount on Authorize.Net, and get signed up with both services today!

FreshBooks is all about our users.

We communicate with them in several ways. E-mails, instant messages, IM, Twitter (new!), Facebook, newsletters and other assorted tried-and-true methods. Heck, we even post silly photos of ourselves on Flickr. However, our primary megaphone has always been our blog.

Knowing this, we’ve decided to re-tool the blog, creating a wider, more friendly, spacious feel. The body font has been enlarged to make it easier to skim articles, allow for easier reading, and make the blog more accessible for all. We’ve added connections to other blogs, and tried to clean up all the information so you can better traverse the newly updated “Fresh Thinking.”

We’re also making great efforts to post more frequently, so you’ll always know about important FreshBooks information, updates, travels, and general office tomfoolery. So please stay tuned in, and let us know what you think!

Toronto’s mesh conference is going into its third year, and today the dates were announced: May 20–22, 2008.

For those keeping track at home the event is now three days in length. The additional day should be of note to Fresh Thinking readers. In Mathew Ingram’s writeup, he described May 20 as meshU and said:

What we have in mind is a one-day event — which we’re tentatively calling meshU — that will be filled with small, focused workshops by those who have earned their stripes in the startup game; people who can talk knowledgeably about everything from interface design to using Amazon’s S3 distributed server network.

The team here at FreshBooks is going to be heavily involved in selecting and recruiting the content, and while I cannot comment on the specifics, I can tell you we’re aiming to make the speakers a great mix of imported rock stars and showcased local talent.

On a related note my good friend Stuart MacDonald finally pulled back the curtain on his latest startup — Tripharbour. Stuart is the founder of Expedia Canada, former CMO of Expedia.com and probably the business person I have learned the most from over the last 24 months. Trip Harbour is the place to go if you are looking to book a cruise and I’m betting this venture is going to be a great success and another win for Canada’s technology community.