SOPA / PIPA

Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA.

The Senate will begin voting on January 24th. Please let them know how you feel. Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

Ongoing network outage impacting a significant portion of the eBoundHost network has been traced to one of our main peering points. The peering provider has a “soft” failure and as such was not demoted from “preferred” status.

The link was not completely down since the outage was behind the next peering point and the router had to be failed over by a network technician rather than the router itself.

The regular secondary failover peer uses a diverse network which was apparently using the same provider as their primary and is now in process of switching them off. We estimate this outage to last another 10-15 minutes at the most.

This kind of network failure/recovery happens quite often, our systems are designed to automatically fail over. Such outage have impacted customers only 3 times in the last 10 years. We do not expect this to happen again any time soon but just in case, the primary network provider will be kept down until we can verify that everything works.

The last 6 months have brought a lot of behind the scenes changes to our team, office, data center, even a refresh of our office computers.

Most importantly we have added some fresh new faces to our customer support team.  Of course, the term “fresh” is relative, since our team members are industry veterans (if you can say that for a 10 year industry).  Those of you who have the pleasure to work with our support team will notice some new names on your support tickets, be sure to put them through their paces!  No need to go easy on them just because they are new.

Our data center has been expanded in order to accommodate projected growth.  This has involved new rackspace, more bandwidth and more electrical power.    Since even the smallest changes to the data center can lead to unexpected consequences, we try to plan ahead as far as reasonable and make incremental changes. The latest update should take us through the middle of 2011 without any more major upgrades.

And finally, we are in the midst of a office move.  We outgrew the previous office of 7 years and have moved up to a beautiful new office with large windows.  It may be strange to mention that this office has large windows, but you would be surprised at how many potential offices we turned down due to the lack of sunlight.  We might be computer people, but aesthetics and comfort of the office environment are paramount.  We spend more time working than any other activity, even sleeping takes less time during the week, so the office environment has to be comfortable.

That’s it for now, lots of other things going on that we can’t get into just yet, but a few major changes are in the pipeline.  Stay tuned!

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!

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

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.

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

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

Happy browsing everyone!

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.