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Upgrades, moves, and new services
By Dave-C - CEO | September 25, 2008
Please don’t think that because I haven’t written anything for a month that there hasn’t been anything worth writing about. Far from it! We’ve been a tad busy here at Netnibble and it’s been more important to get all the forward planning and work done (details below) than detail it here (until now). So, without further ado, let me give you a swift roundup of the latest goings on …
ASIA: It seems that the energy crisis has a world-wide effect. Of course no-one doubted that recent increases in oil, gas and electricity prices wouldn’t have a global impact, but it seems Asia (I guess because of the sheer population numbers all using oil, gas and electricity) has felt the effects first. So it was no big surprise to us that we received an email from one of our suppliers letting us know that they were bailing out of Asia and moving to the USA. We saw it coming. We re-negotiated our services out there and are currently planning and implementing the migrations of a number of customers’ servers and VPSs (and our own) from one data-center to another. So, from 1st October to around 14th October, we’re bracing ourselves for some overtime and a lot of “live migrations”. Kudos to our customers who have all embraced this necessary uprooting and relocation - You won’t be paying the resulting increased charges which result from this move, simply because I believe a deal is a deal regardless of whether you’re paying $2.95 or $295 for Asian services with us.
HONG KONG: Talk about a double wammy! A few months back we added some initial service in Hong Kong. Quite bluntly, the network stability we’ve experience there has been nothing short of atrocious. In fact, the word “stability” does not belong in the sentence I just typed. Service availability since the beginning of July has been 98.3296% - Not good, and not what we both guarantee and work to. So, at the end of this week, we’re uprooting our box there and moving it into another data-center. We’ve received a whole heap of promises about improved network availability, so we’re going to run with it and see how it pans out.
Enough of the doom and gloom - Since Netnibble’s inception we’ve always worked on the basis that cutting corners on the hardware and networks we deploy our services on was a bad idea. If we went that way, one day it would turn around and bite us in the bum(s). Almost 3 years later I (with some great personal pleasure) can report that this policy has worked well up to now and has led us to focus on using the services of two suppliers for our main USA hosting services. In the last 3 years we’ve shopped around, switched around, and generally caused ourselves more than a few migranes along the way as we strive to provide a quality service to our ever-growing customer base. Effective today our shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated server offerings are being realigned to be available from 3 primary USA data-centers in Los Angeles California, Clifton New Jersey and Herndon Virginia. Of course, anciliary services (support, mail, DNS fail-over, etc) will still run from other data-centers by necessity, but I’m now happy with our infrastructure and it will take a lot to drag me away from the set-up we now have. It works for us and it works for our clients, and that’s what counts.
NEW PRODUCTS: As Netnibble approaches its third real birthday in the hosting industry, the stability we’re now built upon means that we can begin to roll out new products, focusing for now on what our existing customers need, or might need in the near future. Our shared hosting customers know that we don’t over-sell our resources (rather unique in this industry!) and a number have asked how they can add extra resources to the hosting packages they already have. Well now they can - Our new EXTREME hosting package bridges the gap between shared hosting and dedicated servers, by offering a high-resource package on a shared server with a maximum of 12 customers per box. So, if you have a busy forum or on-line shop, we can now provide you with a souped-up hosting environment without the need for you to upgrade to a powerful VPS or dedicated server. Starting at just US$24.95 per month you’ll be hosted on a 12th-share of a server that has all the guts and power you need to serve your busy site, whilst allowing you to concentrate on running your business and not learning how to admin a VPS or server. Full details of this new package will be announced shortly.
Also coming up shortly are a new DNS clustering service (you might not host with us but you sure as heck need a better DNS service than the one provided by your current host!), and a rather unique style of dedicated server/VPS all rolled into one unit, where we mount a single VPS onto a server - we manage the box, you manage the sole VPS within it (you get a lot of help from us on that too), and available in the UK and USA.
Finally, I want to say a word of thanks to our customer base. It seems that we have one of the lowest churn rates (the number of people hopping from one host to another to find the best deals and service) in the industry. We are grateful to you for your loyalty! Just today I got a comment (compliment) from one of our customers describing us as a paragon within this industry (OK, I had to look that up on Wikipedia!). Your positive feedback (or otherwise) is always appreciated and acted upon where necessary. We’re now looking forward to “Year 4″ of Netnibble, and planning the roll-out of more products to suit the people who entrust their hosting to us. It’s going to be a good year!
Tagged as:announcements Asia better data center news service upgradesTopics: Infrastructure, Netnibble Tidbits, Service Announcements, Technical |
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