It’s been a while since I wrote anything so I figured I would update everyone on what is going on at SingleHop now that the hosting off-season is almost over. In short, we are growing faster than anyone would have imagined and as a result are adding additional capacity. I said off-season kind of jokingly but its more or less true, more people use their computers in the winter and as a result the hosting business is busier. Thats what Zak says at least ;]

Capacity can mean a lot of things. What I mean though is that we are expanding our infrastructure to deal with the challenges, courtesy of you, our clients. Don’t get me wrong, I think we are all up for the challenge, otherwise we would get boring desk jobs at some monotone corporation.

Anyway, back to the expansion. We are in the process of building out a new data center. We have enough space and cooling for at least six times the amount of servers we have now, and thats not even the best part. The network is what I really wanted to emphasize. Backtracking a bit, one of the things SingleHop has to offer is the same blend of bandwidth offered to midPhase clients. From a client perspective this is great (if your unsure why its because midPhase trademarked “Unmetered Bandwidth”); from a provider perspective this far from optimal (just think about the ice cream man at an elementary school bus stop).

I am a huge fan of partitioning resources and that is exactly what we have done with the network. midPhase and SingleHop still share the same redundant (and fully meshed) core/border, meaning that both services can take advantage of the same upstream providers, but the distribution level has been partitioned off, meaning that midPhase’s distribution point is different than SingleHop’s distribution point. The distribution is handled by (brand new) high end load balanced Cisco Layer Three switches. The new hardware and topology allows us to effectively aggregate bandwidth at the core of our network but also makes expansion simple. We are currently using (theoretically) only 8 of 32Gbs(total), leaving us quite a bit of room to expand.

We are turning up new providers left and right (well just one so far but are in negotiations with two others currently, and are in the process of turning up at least two more GiG circuits), which adds to our total upstream capacity, while providing you optimal paths from your server to your clients, as well as to your server.

I did save the best for last. We are only a few days away from turning up our new core routers, which have quadruple the capacity of our current routers. We are not quite at the 10G level, but are getting there faster than expected.

SingleHop has really gone all out this time! Bravo!