ANNOUNCEMENT

This announcement will be being sent out to all customers within the next 3-4 days.

ANNOUNCING:

NEW FASTER SERVERS
IMPROVED TECHNOLOGY
MORE FEATURES
IMPROVED HOSTING SERVICE

Over the last three months we have been looking for ways to improve our service to you. Though all of our servers maintain an average of over 99.7% uptime, we have not been satisfied with the length of time we have had to wait for the data center to do a "hard" reboot to the servers at times when that was necessary. We have also recently experienced a problem with users who either have not kept up to date with security releases for the software they are running, or who have installed applications that slowed the performance of our servers.

The hard question was what we could do about this. It is a common problem with any hosting service, and as we have grown, so have these issues. Our goal has always been to provide the highest quality hosting available while still maintaining our reasonable rates. We have finally come up with a solution and that solution will be implemented in stages beginning next week.

First, we are staying with our data center. Our servers are housed at The Planet, one of the two top Internet data centers in the United States. We now have 19 individual GB connections to the Internet backbone spread across 7 different providers.

We have decided to upgrade and consolidate our servers. Currently all of our public servers are dual xeon processors with 1 MB of RAM and standard ATA hard drives. Our new servers will be quad xeon processors with 2 MB of RAM and significantly faster SCSI hard drives. While places like IPowerWeb & Hostgator regularly host over 1,500 domains on these identical servers, we are committed to NEVER placng more than 800-900 domains on each server. And we will maintain our commitment to never oversell a server!

In addition our new servers will have Dell Remote Access Cards, (DRACs), installed in them. What this means is we no longer have to wait for a data center technician to reboot our servers! In the event a server freezes, within 10 seconds the DRAC card sends out SMS messages to at least two technicians on duty, in addition to notifying the staff at the data center. Even with the server completely down, we can log directly in to the DRAC card and do a hard reboot of the system. What sometimes took as long as an hour for us to have a data center technician reboot our server now can be done in as little as 10 minutes! The DRAC will also monitor our server and CPU temperatures as well as sudden surges in CPU usage and notify us when any of these reach a critical state. This will enable us to react before a server fails. Less than 1 in 1,000 web hosts has this capability!

We have also elected to purchase a higher level of reporting capabilities that will allow us to quickly and easily identify any domain that is drawing an excessive amount of CPU resources and causing the server to slow down. Prior to this we had to spend considerable amounts of time identifying which account was causing slow downs before we could act, which resulted in longer periods where a server was being slowed for everyone based on the actions of one or two domains.

We are also implementing some very stringent security procedures that will allow us to offer some customers SSH access to their accounts. Prior to this we could not risk that type of access for any account.

Right now we are analyzing accounts to be moved from the Omega 1, Omega 3 and Alpha 3 servers. Instead of moving accounts 'en masse', which sometimes results in issues, we will be moving and testing EACH account individually. Our procedures will cause you no more than 15-30 minutes of down time, (no downtime at all for static HTML sites), and we are attempting to schedule the moves based on EACH domain's individual "slow usage" periods. Outside security consultants are currently hardening and testing the new server, and once that is done, our staff will be testing all features to ensure everything is working correctly when you are moved over.

Within the next 7-14 days you will receive an email from me personally telling you when we plan on moving your site and letting you know what, if any, actions will be required on your part. We appreciate your understanding and patience with this change and hope you understand that it is being undertaken to provide YOU with the most secure and highest quality hosting service available.

Should you have any questions, please go to http://www.alphaone-tech.com/smf/index.php and post them in the New Servers message area.

Peace

Toby Wolf
Founder
AlphaOne Technology
Webs 4 Christ