(Thank you Luis for teaching me better ways of doing this)

There are many different types of sushi, and many ways of making them all. This is just one way to make the most common (in America) type.

Last night SingleHop sponsored the Chicagoland Fast Pitch Competition, a local competition where entrepreneurs vied head to head for $5,000 and validation of their aspirations! We were on hand to lend our support and to watch the best and the brightest pitch their ideas for a panel of judges made up of professors, investors and and influential movers and shakers from some very big Chicagoland organizations. From a pool of 55 pitchers the field was narrowed to five finalists who would describe their business model in front of an audience of 200 and the winner decided by a vote from the very same audience.

We have two events we’re sponsoring coming up in the next week or so that everyone should know about!

First there’s the Chicagoland Fast Pitch Competition organized by EntrepreneurshipWeek USA! We’re sponsoring this competition to help support local entrepreneurs on their way to having their dreams realized. We’ll be giving away a free year of hosting to all pitchers and the winner of the competition, in addition to the $5000 will also get three free months of managed dedicated server hosting from SingleHop, almost a $900 value! It’s seeing Chicagoland’s tech community thrive that drives us to get involved in local events like Fast Pitch.

Network Neutrality, the concept that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally, is under attack in Congress. It has been for a while, largely due to lobbying efforts by large telecom and cable companies to allow them to prioritize, and shape traffic through their networks. Essentially, this means that (in theory) customers of AT&T’s cable internet service would load pages by a paying site, faster than a non-paying site. They would erect ‘toll booths’ on the Internet, charging web sites to load faster to their clients. The telecom companies argue that this is so they can offer TV service over their lines and compete with cable companies. However, the possibility for the companies to control who is successful and who is not to their clients is an unfortunate byproduct of this legislation.

cPanel is a very adaptive control panel as far as what platforms it will function on. However, like in most cases, it operates VERY well on one linux distribution, and not so well on others. I decided to do a bit of research as to why this is the case and found out that the most popular linux distribution to run cPanel on, is CentOS.CentOS comes packaged with ‘yum’, a mediocre package manager with a nice dependency handler, and is also considered an ‘RPM-based’ linux distribution, which attributes to it’s versatility.

SWsoft today announced the end of life for their Plesk lines with versions 7.0 or 7.1 and Plesk for FreeBSD 4.x, which they have set as May 1st, 2007. This will affect the Linux, Windows and FreeBSD installs.

What this means to our customers: If your dedicated server is running any of the versions mentioned above, SWsoft will no longer patch, troubleshoot or answer support questions covering these versions after the first of May. If a problem is encountered on your server and you are running a version of Plesk that is 7.1 or earlier, we will not be able to submit any complex support tickets to SWsoft support and an emergency Plesk upgrade will be required. Our suggestion in this situation is to be pro-active about your control panel software and make the change before it’s a requirement. Currently, we are installing Plesk 8.1 for both Windows and Linux.

Please contact the Sales Department at the email below if you have one of these versions installed, and we’ll schedule an upgrade for you.

Drew Hulburt
VP of Sales - SingleHop.Com
sales@singlehop.com

It is said that the transition to a “paperless world” is complete. That is, people are putting their files (their important documents) on electronic mediums more than ever before. What does this entail? Well, more productivity and efficiency, and also the chance for a hard disk failure to cause a massive amount of damage. The amount of important information now stored on hard drives now makes the backing up of data, which has always been important, an essential event where the customer will be faced with many choices. One such choice, facing SingleHop customers, will be discussed in this blog entry: the choice between using our backup service or doing remote backup with some other service.

First of all, this will be an attempt to convert anybody who doesn’t think backing up is terribly important (although I really doubt there are many of you . . . it just seems tragic, anyway). Before I came to SingleHop I did a lot of miscellaneous computer consulting, mainly for doctors. One day I got a call from a doctor requesting my services immediately, because all of his data was lost due to a hard disk failure. I examined the drive and made various attempts to make it bootable, but alas, no luck. I finally told the doctor that the only real choice would be to send the drive into a data recovery service. By the time the service had gone through the drive and recovered the data the bill had grown to $5,000. Needless to say, the doctor paid it (there was a lot of highly sensitive patient information on the drive), but it was a cost that could have been mitigated with proper backup protocols.

So that we’re all on the same page: backing up data is important. The question is whether to take backups using SingleHop’s backup offering or a remote backup solution with a third party. My approach will be to list some (this is by no means an exhaustive list) of the advantages of backing up using SingleHop’s backup services:

1. The backup servers are connected our existing (very fast) internal network infrastructure.

Backing up across the Internet can be a big hassle. Backing up on a fast internal network is not only quicker, but also more reliable. If you’re backing up on an internal network you can also backup more data more frequently.

2. Our administrators are already familiar with our backup servers and will be able to restore data from them faster than a remote solution.

Our administrators have to work with all sorts of hardware and software they’re not familiar with every day, but knowing the system certainly does make things easier on them. So having a unified backup system on our network means: if our administrators need to login to the backup servers to help you restore something, they can do that easily and quickly.

3. Our backup services are much more economical than, let’s say, buying a small dedicated server from another company as a backup.

This is a common solution: buy a seperate service from another company and use that as your backup service. This will be at least a few hundred dollars a month. Consider, for example, our 70gb/mo. backup service. This is only $70/mo. whereas a completely separate server used only for the purposes of backing up data could be a few hundred a month.

I’ve only considered a few points about SingleHop’s backup services here, but they illustrate some of the variables that need consideration in the world of data backup. Data backup in this age is essential, the question becomes where and how you should create those backups.

Ryan Hayes, Administrator.
SingleHop, Inc.

How many times have you talked to a doctor and not known what the hell he was talking about? What about a lawyer, maybe a car mechanic, or even a computer technician? Well what’s interesting is that these are MASSIVE industries, and it’s rare to see an organization that can present their services on a level that the customer can understand. Managed dedicated servers are no exception. Companies that require managed services don’t want to manage that side of the business- they want us to present a clear and concise solution for their business, and that’s what we went for.

When dreaming up ideas for SingleHop, we were in a fortunate position to test services to midPhases’ dedicated client base, which was pretty substantial. To get started, we set out following suit of some of our competitors, and provided an all-inclusive management service. Initially, I thought that this was the most logical step- one that took the confusion out, and kept things pretty simple for the customer. You come to us, and we’ll manage everything. The drawback with this solution was that in order to do this on a mass scale, we would have to keep our prices pretty high, and things have changed since the late 90’s. Not all companies today require complete management, so that was no good. We had to find a solution that was not only transparent, in that the customer knew exactly what they were purchasing (read: not confusing), but a solution that would allow customers to select management services that they actually needed, and weren’t simply required to purchase to be a customer with us.

Our next step was attempting to develop tiered support packages, which seems to be what most of our competitors are offering. Package A provides this, B gives this, and so on, but we still felt that this wasn’t transparent, or flexible enough, to offer.

After some thought, we opted to go with allowing customers to completely build their management packages which, surprisingly, is a new concept for this industry. We had a growing list of management services to provide, that were bundled from our first attempt at providing an all inclusive service, and we split them up allowing customers to purchase only what their business required. If you already have someone on staff that’s familiar with cPanel, or updating kernels, you don’t need to pay twice for it- have them do it, and pay for what you could actually use, like our backups or monitoring services… or not.

We launched SingleHop in early November of 2006, so we’re not even four months old yet, but we’ve been growing by leaps and bounds, and there’s no slowing down insight. Today, in fact, we’re very excited to see this recognized by HostingReview.com, who announced that they have ranked us as a Top 3 Fastest Growing Hosting Company in an industry with thousands, and thousands of providers. In addition to the hard work that our employees continually put in, I think we can attribute much of our success to taking much of the confusion out of managed hosting, and meeting today’s needs of customers.

Zak

Greetings and Salutations, Web Denizens!

It seems that the SingleHop name is really gaining steam in the national media! Due to the efforts of our expert press releases, advertising momentum, event sponsorship and grassroots word-of-mouth campaigns, we’ve started to get some valid placement in some of the normal modes of news relay. Not only are the tech-based media outlets picking up our press releases and blog entries, but high-profile periodicals and news radio in some of the country’s largest markets have started to give mention to our value-added services and products.

For example, an attorney based in Washington D.C. contacted us yesterday to mention that one of Zak’s quotes from one of our press releases had been mentioned on a prominent news show on public radio in that market, including the SingleHop name.

If you’re interested in reading the BusinessWeek article that makes mention of our continued efforts toward fighting unsolicited and virus-laden emails and alerting the public of the same, you can do so here:

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8N9247O0.htm

In addition to the above, John’s article that covered the CentOS vs. RHEL decision was picked up by multiple tech-based reviews and blogs across the web.

We’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to this on-going campaign to get the SingleHop name out to the general public in keeping this wave of high visibility going. 2007 has started in grand fashion and we hope to continue along this path. We wish you all a wonderful week and make sure to contact us for any further questions or discussions.

Drew Hulburt
VP of Sales - SingleHop.Com
drew@singlehop.com

I just wanted to make a quick post about the next Chicago Beta on February 28th of this month. Keith Schacht passed on this video from the previous beta- http://www.chicagobeta.com/2007/02/chicago_beta_4_.html

You can get more information, and RSVP at http://www.chicagobeta.com . We’ve played a role in each of the monthly events, and always enjoy the time catching up with local technology innovators. If you’re at all involved locally in web 2.0 projects, make sure you make it to Chicago Beta this time around!
Zak