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Monthly Archives: January 2007

Network Maintenance @ midnight

Last night, January 25th, 2007, there was a brief outage that effected our entire network at 2 am – 2:30 am.

Our network people had to take down both of the redundant gateway switches for maintenance (big iron 1 and big iron 2) resulting in all external traffic completely stopping. The switches were dropping packets and had to have some hardware replaced.
Some of our customers did not know what this was a scheduled outage and we were flooded with email as soon as the services were back up. So I want to take this time to point out the Network Status page which has a running schedule of all upcoming maintenance (network and server).

The vast majority of such repairs do not result in outages, since just one switch at a time is usually being worked on, but this was a very special event. They explained why both of the switches had to be worked on at the same time, but not being a network person, it was a bit over my head.

Affiliate commission goes through the roof

Happy to report that the eBoundHost affiliate system is picking up momentum nicely. We have been running for just over 160 days and the statistics speak for themselves. A lot of people are making quite a bit of money very quickly. The great thing is that there is almost no work involved, most of these people simply place links on their existing websites and the system takes care of the rest. Click here to view affiliate progress.

So what is the best way to make a great affiliate system even better? Raise the payout! How about $100 commission per customer? It seems outrageous to pay more in commission than the client brings in over a year but it is completely sustainable for the eBoundHost business model. We are here for the long haul.

To all of our affiliates: we are thrilled to work with you. Keep up the good work!

Shared hosting plans upgrade

Along with the very exciting news about the launch of the VPS product, something equally important received no attention. You may have noticed that the Home and Professional shared hosting packages were upgraded to:

HOME:
200 GB Storage
2,000 GB Transfer

PROFESSIONAL
300 GB Storage
3,000 GB Transfer

The prices did not change, the plans are $6.55 and $9.99, and of course all of our existing clients are automatically upgraded to the new feature set.

New VPS product launch

As we enter the second week of 2007, I am very happy to present a revolutionary new concept in hosting, Virtual Private Server (VPS) technology, also known as Virtual Dedicated Server. It allows for one server to have many virtual machines coexisting side by side. Each with their own set of software, root user, services, virtual memory and cpu process isolation. In plain terms, one physical server can host many independent servers.

Honestly it’s not such a new concept, IBM has used it in their mainframes since before history of time. But the technology was not available in any reasonable way to end users until very recently.

What it is good for:

1) Websites with sensitive data who cannot afford a security breach. Regular hosting accounts share space and daemons (server software: email, web, database, etc.) with each other. There is always a risk that one user’s poorly written script will open a back door to hackers to steal other users’ information. VPS technology eliminates this risk almost completely because only your own software runs on your VPS.

2) People who don’t want to share a server with too many users. Since VPS users have guaranteed storage space, there are significantly fewer users than on a shared system. For instance, while a shared system may run 500 websites, a VPS may only host 10-30 other users.

3) Users who need more resources than a shared hosting server can provide, but can’t justify a full dedicated server. CPU intensive websites are generally moved onto VPS to free up resources on our shared hosting servers. This is common practice for customers with very intensive websites such as forums and other database intensive applications. Since VPS can allocate CPU “time” it helps to guarantee that your website runs quickly.

4) People who can’t afford a dedicated server but REALLY REALLY want one.

5) Developers, great for testing applications. VPS allows you to isolate your software until you are absolutely certain it is ready for prime time.

6) Users that don’t want the hassle of dealing with operating system issues. Such as kernels, file systems, etc.

What it is NOT:

1) A VPS is NOT a dedicated server.
2) You cannot compile your own kernel.
3) Limited RAM. Although everyone has Guaranteed RAM, they may burst up to the full amount of ram on the server. But as more users are added, everyone scales down to whatever is available at the time.
4) You don’t have 100% of CPU time, same situation as #3.

We are very excited about this new VPS line and time will show that it is the next step in hosting technology.




Just a moment...
Just a moment...