The maintenance window scheduled for earlier tonight was a great success!

Everything went as planned with no complications. We are proud to announce that we have also added more capacity in order to deliver more bandwidth to our customers in response to the recent popularity of SingleHop.

We have literally doubled the bandwidth throughput on the SingleHop network tonight! Enjoy

It’s been a few months since we’ve launched LEAP and the response has exceeded our original expectations one thousand million times over Clients have praised the automatic server provisioning and multi-server management features and we’ve heard the word “wow” a lot.

We decided that it would now be a good time to give free demo accounts out to anyone who wants to try LEAP out first hand.

That said, and without further delay, please feel free to get your own LEAP demo account for 72-hours by visiting this page:

www.singlehop.com/poindexters_lab/leap_landing.php

BTW, in an entirely unrelated note, our CEO, Zak Boca and I will be in London this week meeting with some clients. If you’re around the area drop us a note and say hi

Enjoy the demos,

Dan

We are performing an emergency maintenance window tonight to increase our bandwidth capacity to one of our primary upstream providers. Minor latency is expected, but not for more than 10 minutes.

Thank you for your patience as the SingleHop network grows!

Window start: 9:00PM CST

Window end: 10:00PM CST

**UPDATE** This maintenance window has been postponed until tomorrow night (September 25th, 2008) at the same time.

http://singlehop.com/

Some months ago our Co-Founder and Vice President, Dan Ushman, did an interview with TheWHIR TV about LEAP, our Server Manager Webtop. Below is the interview video…

Hello Everyone,
We’ve put together a cool LEAP introduction video… Pasted below. Let us know what you think!

[VIEW FULL POST TO SEE THE VIDEO - TURN YOUR SPEAKERS UP!]

We have electricians on-site diagnosing the problems we experienced yesterday, and as a result some servers may go offline for a brief period while they replace the presumed faulty equipment.

If you are experiencing any connectivity issues with your server, and are not subscribed to the Quick Reaction monitoring service, please submit a ticket and our datacenter technicians will restore your service immediately.

Thank you for your continued patience!

We just experienced an unexpected outage in around 9 of our cabinets. Our datacenter engineers have looked into the problem and have found the cause. 

Things should be back up shortly, and we will be releasing our RFO (Reason for Outage) later today. If you would like to receive a copy, please email dushman@singlehop.com.

**UPDATE: We have narrowed down the problem to one of the breaker panels and the facility eletricians are going to be combing over all other components to ensure that this does not happen again. If you have a SingleHop managed server and your service is still down, please submit a support ticket via LEAP and our datacenter technicians will quickly respond and get your service back online.

By our calculations, total downtime did not exceed 15 minutes

Tomorrow at 9AM CST/10 AM EST we will be making some enhancements and modifications to our billing server/software infrastructure.

LEAP and the ticket system will be unavailable for 20 to 40 minutes. Thank you for your patience as we stay up to date

Speed — Everyone wants it. Global distribution of static content — everyone needs it. Diverse paths of delivery — SingleHop has it!

After months of developing and studious planning, we have finally released our latest addition to the SingleHop services portfolio: IPCast — a Content Delivery Network!

Often referred to as a “CDN“, a Content Delivery Network is a way to globally distribute static content, and deliver this content faster and more efficiently to visitors based on where they are located in the world. We all know how the internet works, and according to Infoworld, 56% (I believe this number to be more, but I’m no analyst!) of the population use the internet on a regular basis. This obviously extends to other parts of the world. The problem that a lot of webmasters run into is sending data to the other side of a continent, which depending on where their server is located, can be incredibly slow, or sometimes non-existent. IPCast’s focus is to fix this by placing pictures, videos and other static content on servers across the world and basing it’s rapid delivery method on the IP’s geographical location. The SingleHop IPCast network exists of nearly a dozen North American points of presence (POPs), 7 European POPs and 6 or more in Asia.

Hypothetically speaking, if someone were wanting to run an Ad network or picture gallery and reach out to everyone in Tokyo, they could still house their server here in Chicago with SingleHop, and upload their images or ads to our CDN, which then is replicated out to each one of our POPs. When a visitor from Tokyo visit’s their site, they would initially contact the server in Chicago, but all ads and images on the site would be delivered from our Tokyo POP. We’re talking about at least a 200ms *INCREASE* in latency, therefore allowing that customer to not only view ads or content quicker, but keeping them happy as a visitor prolonging their visit.

Using IPCast couldn’t be easier and is done in three easy steps: Signup, upload your soon to be distributed files and change all links that linked to your old images to the new URL’s on your site. Oh yeah, and enjoying the lack of sleepness nights worrying about how far your providers network reaches

At SingleHop we have integrated all the tools needed to manage your IPCast account into our recently-released WebTop LEAP control panel. This tool includes all the processes to upload, modify, remove or delete your IPCast content without having to download or install any software onto your computer — not to mention being cost-effective at the rate of $0.20 per gigabyte of bandwidth used!

Combine our competitive pricing structure and revolutionary tools, and then wonder to yourself: “Why don’t I have an IPCast account yet?”

Google announced it’s anticipated browser, Google Chome, yesterday, and then quickly pulled it offline. Today they finally released it, and we were all anxious to try it out. Our developers of course, were anxious to see how it rendered LEAP. (screenshot attached below)

We were all very impressed with how fast Chrome rendered LEAP. Windows inside of LEAP can be manipulated quite a bit faster, and this appears to be exactly what Google was trying to accomplish (well, one of the items). The key takeaway from the launch is that Google has engineered Chrome for how people use the Web in 2008, which is to run applications like Google Docs, Gmail, and LEAP.

To accomplish this, Google built a new javascript engined dubbed V8 that is specifically designed for better performance of these applications, which is consistent with Googles take (and many others) on how software will be managed through browsers.

I’m personally impressed with Chrome. I’m an OSX guy, so I was a little discouraged to see that Google only released the Windows version, though there is plenty of reasoning behind that. Priorities..