Today is the American national holiday of Thanksgiving. We gather from all over the country and sometimes the world for the purpose of sitting down around the same table and sharing a meal with our closest family members. The news reported that 37 million people are traveling the highways on this day to be with their families. That is more than 10% of the country’s population on the roads at the same time trying to join their relatives for dinner. Dwell on the enormity of that for a moment.

In the hustle of life its easy to forget that this is really what is most important, family. We work to live not the other way around.

From our table to yours, we wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving!

On this date, eight years ago, our world changed.  Never forget.

A few minutes ago Comcast went down.  Boy, did we start receiving calls from worried clients who thought we were at fault!  Everything looks good on our side folks!  Nothing we can do to help until Comcast gets their network back up.

You really don’t appreciate a good ISP until you realize how rarely they have issues.

Shared hosting is now on sale!  New clients or existing clients who register for a new account, can now receive our lowest price ever, $3.95 per month.  This price will go back up to our normal $6.55 on May 15th.

Technological advancements are not without caveats.  For instance, our VOIP provider is having issues and as a result our primary telephone line is not working for some callers.  Luck would have it that all of our other (secondary) lines are working without any issues, while the only one that truly matters is down.

For the next several days call this secondary number: 847-368-9490

We have used this particular telephone company for the past 2 years without any major issues and this is the first time we have seen how they respond to a real customer service trouble ticket.

Working with their first and second level support really makes me appreciate our own support team.  Our people know what they are doing and they don’t have idiotic scripts to read while you are aggravated on the other end of the phone call.  We don’t waste your time with endless “for this department press this, for that department press that”.  We don’t have you wait on hold endlessly while reading basic notes.  We don’t transfer you to five departments before reaching the correct person.  Bad customer service is infuriating.

If we don’t have a resolution tomorrow, we will move off to another carrier, telephone support is too important for our customers.

You don’t appreciate good service until you need it.

After blowing through deadline after deadline, our new bandwidth carrier delivered our newest ultra fast backbone connection.  What they lack in intra-department coordination they more than make up for with the quality of their bandwidth.  The new connection has great ping times from around the world.

• Chicago:   12 ms
• Stanford University: 32 ms
• Czech Republic: 141 ms
• Italy: 141 ms
• Sweeden:  128 ms

Our customers should see a decent response time improvement as well as raw download speed improvement.

Happy browsing everyone!

After a conversation with a concerned customer we need to clear up the network graph situation.  The graph located here, is showing uneven traffic with gaps and dips and seems to drop down to near “0″.

We are absolutely NOT experiencing an outage or interruption.  We are just pushing so much traffic that we are hitting a limitation of our monitoring software.  When it reaches a peak our software becomes confused and  “wraps” around to start at zero.  The graphing software assumes that nobody could possibly push this much traffic, so it thinks the data is invalid.

We are looking for other graphing software options right now and should have a fix shortly.

Whatever you celebrate, we can all join together and wish each other a happy holiday season.  With such awful weather (in Chicago), it’s the perfect time to gather indoors and spend time with the family.

Due to holidays our team is operating on a skeleton crew for the next few days but we are still here for you if you have any questions, concerns, or just want to say “hello!”

Have a happy and safe holiday season and we’re looking forward to working with you in 2009!

Maintenance took longer than originally anticipated, but the extended time was used for wire routing and other such non-disruptive tasks.  Total customer outages were between 12 minutes and 57 minutes, depending on server.

All considered it was a great success!

This weekend, Saturday 11/22/2008, we have a scheduled outage.  Some customers are going to receive the following text.  Just to make sure that everyone has a chance to know what is happening, here is an update.

If you don’t hear from us in the next 24 hours, then your account is not effected.

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Dear eBoundHost Customer,

This upcoming Saturday night, November 22nd, 2008, the server which hosts your account is scheduled for maintenance.  The service window is between 9pm (21:00) and 3am (03:00) with an actual expected outage of 30-60 minutes.  This impacts, shared hosting, vps and dedicated hosting customers.  All times are in the Central Time Zone, GMT -6.

Over the past few weeks some servers have been upgraded in anticipation of this event.  We appreciate your patience through this final scheduled outage.  After this maintenance window, we do not foresee any more wide ranging outages, only the occasional kernel upgrade which requires a quick reboot.

Due to phenomenal growth in the past two quarters, we are upgrading hosting facilities.  This will allow us to provide faster throughput, lower network latency and ability to scale with demand.  Additionally, our equipment is being consolidated into a formation that will make it more resilient to power failure and less susceptible to overheating.  In a nutshell, things are getting even better.

As always, it is recommend that you keep a full backup of your entire account, including website, email and database.  We provide excellent tools for backing up your account, check your control panel.  Data loss is not anticipated but you can never have too many backups!