about

Closing Q1, Ubiquity has made a variety of improvements to our offerings, and begun turning focus towards improvements in our network infrastructure, rooted in Foundry Networks XMR 4000 and 8000 series routers for production carrier networks.

• Revised unmetered bandwidth deals and made our 12TB promotion permanent
• Re-released Ubiquity Overstock with an automated pricing system and smooth new interface
• Overstock systems are now placed in an RSS Feed for bargain hunters and resellers (subsribe!)
• Began offering nLayer and Abovenet bandwidth via our IP transit product
• Chicago network has gone 10gig!  We have begun turning up 10Gbps connectivity to each of our upstreams.

In keeping with our promise last month - we’re continuing to re-invent everything Ubiquity does with piles of new improvements.

• Launched an entire new ubiquityservers.com that’s far more informative and useful
• Opened Ubiquity’s nationwide IP Transit network for resale in all of our locations as a brand new service
• Began offering r1soft backup solution to dedicated, colo, and vps clients
• VPS provisioning automation system moved from alpha to beta - instant VPS provisioning ensues
• Implemented sFlow monitoring of Ubiquity’s network to make performance more clever
• Increased level 2 support coverage at our NOC with more staff
• Improved add-on pricing on all of our dedicated server options

Today marks the launch of Ubiquity’s 2009 re-creation, which will follow-up the panicked end of the year blog we posted in November 2008. With a new website now on ubiquityservers.com, a few pieces of our massive list of 2009 renovations are rapidly starting to show. What began as a very long list of new years resolutions… things we’ve been wanting to do around here for a long time… have quickly come to light, which we plan to roll out over the year to come, month by month. Here’s what our product development team has accomplished this month.

10 Service Improvements from January

• Achieve consistent initial support ticket responses beneath 10 minutes
• Give public real-time statistics of our support stats for total transparency (here)
• Relaxed cancellation policies to match our best competition (from 8 days to 72 hours)
• Increased facility stocking policies, and implemented a 1 hour h/w replacement SLA
• Increased headquarters and Seattle facilities coverage with several new staff members
• Increased the number of headquarters support staff using live support - chat now online truly 24/7, like our other channels of support
• Semi-automation of VPS provisioning, decreasing most VPS deployment times to under 4 hours
• Increased SNMP monitoring policies on all managed servers
• Raised the bar on network performance following our network upgrades, now supporting a 0% packet loss SLA on our internal network
• We are now offering r1soft CDP backups for free in our cPanel shared hosting

As 2009 progresses, we’ll be making monthly updates on new features and improvements, so check back often.

We’ve admittedly done a pretty poor job of updating this blog over the course of the past 12 months - however a lot really has been happening as anyone that’s been watching the rest of what we’ve been doing knows. With what the economy has been doing lately, I thought now was a great time to in the least boastful way possible show how this actually how we’ve endured pretty fantastically here.

• We’ve upgraded routers and distribution switching in all of our facilities to massive and redundant Foundry network cores.
• We’ve added XO Communications to our upstream in addition to Mzima Networks for additional routes
• We’ve turned up BGP on our new routers for seamless fail-over should one carrier have issues
• We have a shiny new Chicago data center that’s unbelievably nicer than the old one in every way
• Our network has grown to now exceed 1000 physical servers
• Our team has grown to now include approximately 30 full time staff for even stronger 24/7 support coverage
• We’ve expanded data center operations to include Atlanta, Georgia
• We’ve created public Wiki’s full of useful information for self-managed and managed hosting customers
• We’ve assembled a completely new hosting platform that’s even better than before at hosting Java and Ruby applications
• We’ve accomplished all of these thing without needing to raise costs or pass down rising energy costs - passing the economies of scale from our growth down to you

Another cool metric resulting from this - is to check the Ubiquity/Nobis ASN (AS15003) on major tools like CIDR Report, where our network rank is climbed drastically out of over 25,000 ASN networks to be occupy space in the top 2,500 following the addition of another /18 and the addition of XO and downstream peers.  As we move into 2009, we’ll try to do a better job keeping you updated on all of the exciting improvements going on behind the scenes.

As any long time visitor of our site knows, we’ve recently been unusually abuzz about our new Multi-Flex servers. If you’ve Googled Intel’s new Multi-Flex systems, you’ve surely gotten plenty of useless tech garble.

What this means for you is actually simple- a hosting platform virtually void of even the potential of any hardware-related downtime.Opting away from all of the overcomplicated “grid” platforms in the past, year that have been notorious for software explosions and at minimum, overcomplicated for the most simple of tasks.

By going redundant at the hardware level with the Intel Modular Multi-Flex server, we’re above to maximize uptime, and paired with the fantastic cluster scalability of InterWorx, we’ve prepared to host the most successful of websites.

Official Press Release: Ubiquity Adopts Intel’s Modular Multi-Flex Server Platform

The World Wide Web Consortium is a beast well too unknown to too many webmasters. Along with maintaining the standards of the web, the w3 lets you validate your web pages and style sheets to find out if the code you used is right.

Who Cares?

If your site works it works right? Unfortunately no. Some browsers overlook css and html problems, while others don’t - which means your awesome website might not look so awesome to some people if the code isn’t squeaky clean. To go even further, Google’s webmaster guidelines makes it pretty clear the things that they look at when deciding what sites are high quality for their search results.

But Don’t Worry

As big a deal as valid code is - you’re not the only one that’s slacking. Most websites on the Internet aren’t valid, and even being mostly valid will put your site above most. Writing HTML is easy - writing a totally valid website is pretty hard (hey - not even Google lives up to their own standards). I did it for us - but I’m not going to lie - that’s a week of my life I want back. So anyway, the next time your website looks awesome in FireFox and your visitors using Internet Explorer v. 0.1.2 beta start complaining - it’s time to validate.

Advancements

A lot of cool stuff happens behind the scenes at Ubiquity which no one ever gets the chance to see. Historically, that’s included UbiquityNOC, our renowned in-house software that’s long boasted many, many more features than most providers in the industry, and has helped us keep up on growing fleet of servers increasingly well. At the start of the year, saw the release of a completely revitalized, UbiquityNOC 2.0.

This month, we’ve finally admitted defeat, bringing Ubersmith Datacenter Edition’s powerful list of data center management features to our arsenal. Don’t worry- our programmers aren’t going anywhere, and custom server toys will still be showing their faces in the form of special Ubersmtih modules. The new client-side Ubersmtih DE interface can be expected by our dedicated server and colocation customers with the next few months the coming months, in the meantime, rest easy knowing that we’ve redoubled our attention and monitoring capabilities on the uptime of each of our customer’s servers.

Awards

Ubiquity has been awarded the overall best of service award from Web Hosting Search, which we’re proud to sport here. We’re very happy that Ubiquity’s triumphant plunge into a revitalized hosting platform this past June has been well-received, by web hosting search and so many others. And it hasn’t helped our egos one bit. In an industry amassed with desperate business models spewing absurdly oversold servers and absent customer service by the cut-throat economics of having 100’s of thousands of web hosting competitors, these awards and a stream of happy customers growing with each day, really provides us that reassuring reminder that in the end it’s just about treating customers the way they deserve to be treated.

Fish

People tend to remember things in 3’s, so we may be reaching now. For lack of a more awful pun- fishing. As anyone in any line of tech support knows- it can be pretty stressful. Keeping a low stress office means keeping friendly customer service people. This is why anyone that visits our corporate offices in Bloomington will now find our new office pets; our new salt-water fish tank display!! Excited? We are too.

Ubiquity is looking to hire four new full-time staff members to work out of our main office in Bloomington, Illinois- fitting various roles. If you enjoy figuring out computer problems, Chuck Norris jokes, and helping people remember their passwords, you might have what it takes: send an email to sales [at] ubiquityhosting (dot) com with your resume!

Now that everyone on the planet has written a blog about the iPhone - we decided - why not us?

It’s small, black, and shiny. It’s a phone, and it plays music. And it looks really, really cool with our website on it.

It goes without saying that we’re a company full of technology dorks, but, no one at Ubiquity actually owns an iPhone (at least, none that I’m aware at the time of writing this). Clint came really close to winning one from a long string of embarrassing acts at this year’s HostingCon, but just couldn’t take the CDGCommerce competition.

But back to the iPhone. Everyone thinks it’s going to dominate the market, and, well right now our staff are keeping their Treo’s. Apple’s done very well to marginalize Microsoft as simply a business-focused company in the desktop world lately, and the iPhone seems to be different.

Even though we’re split between Palm and Microsoft phones over here, some toys you just can’t do without. Like beaming spreadsheet files from one phone to another - or secretly changing the channel on a TV at the local pub. The iPhone is no doubt cool, but if they’re ever going to make sense for the business sector, they’ll have a lot of catching up to do in getting usable software on this thing.

So some of you might have noticed a few changes in your control panel. Interworx 3.0 has landed!!! (Thanks guys!!! but you told us last year at HostingCon it would be out a few weeks after we left Las Vegas)

If you can believe it or not, all computer guys aren’t dorks:

I am walking into a real Club with real people:

Here is Interworx guys with the Ubiquity crew (other than Socheat who wouldn’t come out and be “social”) EDIT: I guess Socheat was getting drinks for Chris and Paul. . . maybe he was there

Alright last old HostingCon pictures, then I will get back to rambling, here is Corey and the “paid to hang out with dorks chick”:

At that party the Interworx guys said it would be another month or so and we would get our beloved 3.0, well almost a year later we get it. Let me be the first to say it was well worth the wait. Here is the list of the updates:

New Features & Improvements

We have updated all of our systems and can honestly say we haven’t had ANY issues! In the days when Ubiquity ran that one panel (Plesk) we held our breath during updates. Really I did, it was the scariest thing on earth, knowing that updates have broken everything in the past and then having to wait 24 hours plus to hear back from a “Plesk engineer” tell you reboot your machine. With that being said, the only reason with Nobis Tech hasn’t written a panel is because Interworx did it for us

Also with the updates to ScriptWorx (InterWorx version of installatron or fantastico de luxe) it enables live updates to the packages that get deployed. Here is a current list of all the new packages and updated ones: link

I could go on and on about how cool it is, but really you should just signup and see for yourself.

later,

clint