Hey everyone, I’m Jeremy, the head of Team Miller
In my page you will see specials that I created with the client in mind. You see, I wanted to give server options for people who are just starting out, to people who have their foot in the door, and then the options to people who are already established.  But, if you have more detailed requirements, I’ll be more than glad to help.
I know that being able to upgrade your server efficiently is just as important as having a good performing server. So I have taken a small percentage off the price on some of our basic hardware. From hard drives, to ram, and RAID arrays and so forth, I’ve come up with all sorts of special pricing for you.  Its important to me that when you choose SingleHop.com  you do so without hesitation. Your experience with us should be something no other company can re-create. If you’re a current customer needing another server, check out the specials. If you’re a new client doing research on hosting companies, why not give us a try with one of these specials. We have a very low turnover rate with clients, and the reason for that is our genuine care for our clients needs. So without further a-ado, check out the specials!!!!   http://www.singlehop.com/jeremymiller

Hope to speak with you soon.
Jeremy Miller – SingleHop.com Account Executive
312-447-2580 Ext 103
jmiller@singlehop.com
Twitter – www.twitter.com/singlehopjeremy

I would like to start off by saying that I am not just an employee here at SingleHop.  I am also a client.

I have an e5200 server that I bought from SH a few months ago.  On this one, and other servers that I’ve owned, I had 10-megabit connections. Although I wanted more capacity, I could not find a company that offered the specs I wanted, including a 100mbit port, and a price I could afford. Eventually I went with SingleHop because their prices and specs fit best with what I was looking for. They too, though, didn’t offer 100-megabit uplinks. Until now! Starting today, every SingleHop customer has access to 100-megabit uplinks at no cost.

For comparison, most people at their house now have around 5 megabits down, if they have any type of high-speed internet. While this is a good enough speed for most people, it’s definitely not enough for me.  I stream music from my server and need a lot more capacity than that.  I also put a bunch of large images that are not modified from my camera.  They are pretty big and take a while to load even on my 8mbit down and 1 megabit up Speakeasy DSL line. I also use it to RDP into for my AIM and such.  I can even RDP (remote desktop protocol) in from my phone.  With the 100-megabit port I can do all that and more, with less latency, more speed, and even a line of defense against DDoS attacks.

I am happy to know that when I have a bunch of people viewing my pictures and listening to one of the mp3 streams that I am hosting, we all benefit from less lag.

Even as we celebrate 400% growth for Q1 of this year, our development schedule continues to buzz. Last week we released our blazingly fast, unmetered, and secure Private Network. It allows customers to have inter-server and non-public network connectivity at speeds of up to 1Gbps. So this week, it was just natural to compliment the Private Network by providing even more security through our new SSL-VPN.
Now you can have all the benefits of the private network, and stalwart security to go with it.

The idea behind SSL-VPN was to provide all the control and security that a customer could ever want by having their servers on the Private Network. It’s a super-secure back-end solution to control, backup, synchronize and manage your servers. Furthermore, the SSL-VPN offering allows for a split-tunnel, Layer 3 mechanism where simultaneous connections can occur, without sacrificing security. You can be browsing online, downloading music, and controlling your server in a secure and independent “tunnel” from all your other traffic.

Being a hosting company, we chose not to develop the security features ourselves, but instead partnered with Array Networks’ vast expertise in this area. Their SPX machine allows for tremendous scalability, hardware accelerated sessions, and even session monitoring so you know exactly who was in your server, when, what they did, and so forth- without any sacrifice in performance!

The SSL-VPN is available for free to all customers with a limit of one user per account; more user accounts are available for purchase. So feel free to try it out and enjoy the increased benefits of vital security, in an evermore-insecure world. Best of all, logging into a secure session is just as easy as checking your e-mail. Just because its ultra-secure does not mean that it needs to be hard to use.

Hello Everyone!  My name is Stephanie and I am an Account Manager at SingleHop, I work with Chris Larkin on his portfolio.
My background is in advertising, previously as an account executive for a newspaper, and an infomercial company; so web hosting is a pretty new frontier for me.
I have absolutely no work experience in web hosting or really IT for that matter, so poor Chris has to spend countless hours explaining the how’s and what’s of web hosting.  Thank goodness he is so patient!

So you are probably wondering, how did I go from advertising to web hosting?!?
Well, I met a very lucky man, now my significant other, who introduced me to the fascinating, ever changing world of IT.  I started right away studying IT in school and wanted to get into the job field as soon as possible while I studied.
At SingleHop, I was extremely fortunate to find one of the best work places someone could ask for.  Everyone here has been so helpful, easy-going and enjoyable to be around.  I can honestly say I haven’t had one bad day so far; sure, I have had moments of feeling stupid and overwhelmed but someone has always been there to help answer my questions.

Now that I have been here over a month, I have realized – I’m not the only one!  Many clients have a lot of questions and need help understanding too, this creates a perfect environment for me to learn and grow from their questions.  I definitely have the basics under my belt now, and feel I am really making some headway.  Of course there is so much more for me to learn especially, because the IT field is always changing.

So if you are a current or future client that is confused or frustrated, because you do not understand something, let me know and I will be able to help you out, trust me, I know what it feels like to be in your shoes a little over a month ago.

And, If you are experienced, then feel free to test my knowledge – within reason! – to see how far along I’ve come.

Hey everybody I’m the “newer” new guy over here at Singlehop. You can call me Will. For as long as I can remember I’ve loved working with and fixing computers and electronics. Even in high school, I found ways to get to a broken computer and fix it for anyone who needed it.
Nowdays, I guess you could call me a college guy. When I’m not pushing out servers at Singlehop, I’m a full time college student at Robert Morris College (soon to be University). I love my time over here with the SingleHop. There’s always something to do and I’m facing new challenges every day. A lot of things are new here for me, like how we rack (physically installing) the servers here. It may look simple, but there’s so much to pay attention to when planning out the layout.
When I’m not working at Singlehop or studying, I’m usually either playing my guitar, finding some type of way to stay in shape, or just hanging out with friends. I usually like to find a concert hosted by one of my favorite artist or see what’s going around in downtown Chicago for some fun.

Good Clean Fun.

Ok, so in my adventures on twitter (@SingleHopChris), I found @foiledcupcakes. She just started up a company that makes and delivers cupcakes in the Chicago area. Cupcakes? Naturally I was intrigued. We chatted a bit and I found out that she was planning a contest for Admin Day on April 22nd, not sysadmins day, but close enough…

Dear SingleHop Clients –

As you look more into SingleHop, you will find that we focus on being extremely transparent on all fronts. This means that during the bad times, downtime or any other form of service interruption, you can be sure that we’ll communicate as openly as possible and with as much detail as possible. It also means that when positive things happen, you probably won’t hear the end of it!

With that said, I am absolutely thrilled to announce our Q1 2009 results. During the first quarter of this year, we recorded growth of over 400% when compared against the same period in 2008. This equates to over 1,000 dedicated servers provisioned, and 500 of these servers were sold in 1 month!

What’s interesting is that during this period we didn’t increase our advertising spending, and our ARPU (average revenues per user) stayed consistent with past periods.

These are fantastic results which we attribute largely to increased accessibility for our clients, as well as increases across the board in the quality of service that we’re providing. Both factors increased our word of mouth referral business (thank you!), and our overall website conversion rate.

Here are some hard numbers to show you exactly what has improved.

• We have invested $250,000 in a massive network overhaul without adding any cost to clients.

• Server provisioning time was reduced from 57 minutes to 27 minutes, on average.

• Phone hold times were reduced from 2 minutes to 30 seconds, again on average.

• Technical support ticket response times also dropped from an average of 17 minutes to 9 minutes.

• Sales department hours have been expanded from M-F 9am-5PM CST to M-F 8am-10pm.

Beyond the numbers, which you’ll find are equally important at our company.

During this quarter, we have also launched a number of new features, including our Private Network, which enables remote, secure administration of servers, and our Server Bailout System, this last one enables remote troubleshooting and repair of servers in a powerful, multiplatform rescue environment. Both existing customers and new customers can take advantage of these powerful new features free of charge.

Additionally, we launched one of the most exciting extensions to our LEAP server control platform- LEAPMobile. This offering gives our customers remote control from the road, on an array of devices of our customers choosing. And, in recognition of Murphy’s Law, launched 100% free priority support for tickets submitted through LEAPmobile. Priority support guarantees an ultra-fast response time of less than 15 minutes.

The numbers and events highlighted above are especially impressive when put into the context of the prevailing economic environment. While other companies are cutting costs, at SingleHop we keep charging forward. Our employee growth is yet another sign of this relentless move ahead. In this same period, we have welcomed to the company several key individuals. We now count on a new CFO, a VP of Communications (Daniel Salcedo- Twitter), two more sales personnel and a new Senior Network Engineer. Also, we have added more systems developers to help with our ever-growing need for high-quality code. During this same time period, we have decreased hold times by adding several new employees to our NOC team.

Now that I have covered the last three months, let me give you some insight into what’s coming next. In Q2 2009 we’ll be opening a new Chicago data center location, as well as adding more ways for clients to maintain control over servers hosted with SingleHop. The launch of LEAPWebTop & LEAPMobile was a start, on our extended journey of empowering our clients and creating more, faster, and easier ways to control their servers. You can be sure that if you’re a SingleHop client, we’ll empower you with a great deal of tools- if we can automate it and extend it to you, we will! I personally welcome you to visit our offices, you will see all the people who make SingleHop a great company, and the metrics spread throughout our workplace, which challenge us to achieve more.

All in all, we have enjoyed a very strong quarter, both fiscally and otherwise. Here’s a big “hip-hip-hooray” for many more of the same, and we can’t thank you enough for being a client. Great work to all SingleHop employees!

The best,

Zak Boca

President & CEO
Follow me on Twitter- @zakboca

Greetings again:

In my blog post last Friday, I wrote about two new offerings that we released: Free Priority Support for LEAPmobile users, and our advanced cross-platform rescue environment, Server Bailout System. Today, I write excitedly late into the night to tell you about two more features that we’ve rolled out yesterday. I’ll save the best of the two for last.

The first ‘offering’ is more of a convenience feature. To give you the short version, we have launched localized toll-free phone numbers for customers and potential customers in six countries. Over time, we hope to add more countries. The goal is to be as accessible to our customers as possible. The six countries in our pilot localized toll-free project are: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Mexico and the United Kingdom. Now, customers in the aforementioned countries can skip the international dialing and call a local toll free number instead, making getting support easier and more accessible.

Our second offering is much more significant. Today, we proudly released our Private Network, which is a powerful secondary network which we have been building for the last several months. The private network, which will be detailed in a more technical blog post soon by Andy Pace, our VP of Operations, is simply put a second network entirely separate from our public-facing private network. It is a secure and segmented system which allows you to connect to your servers remotely without using public IP space. If you have multiple servers, it lets them talk to each other privately. Your backup transfer won’t use your public bandwidth limit. Under the secondary private network there are no bandwidth limits. It truly is an exciting product, and it’s free on all SingleHop servers (with the exception of some single-NIC machines, like the ATOM.) To enable the Private Network, simply log into LEAP, load up the My Servers application and select the server you would like to enable Private Networking for. Click on the Private Network button that shows up. It takes about 24 hours to get setup.

That’s all for today.

Best wishes,

Dan

“I’m here!!!!!!”.  That’s right, Migzzy has gone green and is coming at you froggy style with the team of SingleHop.

“So what exactly is a Migzzy?”, you may ask.  Well, to answer that question you will need to be able to sip cosmos, have a past\ slightly present shopping addiction, and love being a social butterfly in the world of dedicated hosting. I have impeccable bone structure, styled hair, care for customers, make water (Driving Miss Daisy Style), and sell servers for a living.  If you have not figured it out by now, I am the new Account Executive at SingleHop.

Coming from another provider in the industry, I am already pretty familiar as to what is expected of me in this job.  However, like most people, I was a bit nervous in anticipation of my official start date.  I’d like to share a bit of what has gone through my head, and, hopefully everyone reading this, by now, has already started a job at some point in their life. But, if you have not, some of the things you can look forward to when starting at a new company is anxiety. Not necessarily of the actual work, but more so of the following:

1) How many people am I going to meet whom I will have to pretend that I remember their names, until I actually remember them after a month?  2) How quick do they expect me to be up to speed to perform the equivalent of neurosurgery with my job?  3) What are the policies we have with dealing with our clients?  4) What are the policies of dating for that matter? (JK)

Truth be told, my first day of work here was phenomenal.  I pretty much went down my list of anxiety, and was able to realize that: a)  I already know the names of many of my coworkers (because they were friends in many of my past lives)  b) I have the skills to do the job they are asking (which is to sell ….servers) c) They have a very strong work ethic when taking care of clients (HURRAY!!!) d) And for dating? It seems everyone is taken..

I am very confident that my new job here is going to be very fulfilling and enjoyable one.  And I think, that the best advice I can leave you with is to become the super star of any new job you may take on; to look to the actual movie lines of Superstar for guidance:

-Grandmother (your new boss)
“When I say kick you kick. When I say tap you tap. And when I say ooga booga you ooga booga.”

-Mary (you)
“Wait what’s ooga booga?”

-Grandmother (your new boss)
“I don’t know but if I say it you better (bleeping) figure it out”

So here is to becoming the newest member of SingleHop, the Superstars of the web hosting industry.

PS: Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or future sales inquiries, I’d love to help you out.

Miguel Villegas
Account Executive
Singlehop INC.
621 W. Randolph 3rd Floor
Chicago, IL 60661
Phone: 1-866-817-2811 ext. 104
Local: 1-312-447-2580
AIM- MiguelSingleHop
Yahoo- MiguelSingleHop

Greetings and salutations everyone. I’m blogging today to announce two great new features SingleHop has released over this last week. We’ve brought you two new ways to get up when your server knocks you down:

Server Bailout System and Free Priority Response.

Murphy’s Law wisely states, “everything that can possibly go wrong, will go wrong.” This old adage holds very true in the world we inhabit, and more true in the world of web servers. Servers are viscerally complex and because of that, they break from time to time. But, fear not, we’re here to help you save the day.

First, lets talk about your server-side software. It’s kind-of an important part of your server, right? While we as system administrators and webmaster hate re-installs, and the headache that can come through them, sometimes, we’re left with no choice. Say you mistakenly delete some important system files, well, without physical access and a fair amount of technical knowledge it might be difficult to recover without performing an OS reload.

Drum roll please!

Introducing the SingleHop Server Bailout System, or SBS for short. SBS is a multi-platform rescue environment that is integrated into LEAP and enables quick and easy remote-access to your bricked server. It takes about 5 minutes to reboot into Bailout Mode and once inside you are given the tools to empower you to wrestle back control, quickly as possible.

-          Linux users gain access to a bash shell with a number of pre-installed utilities, access to their file system, chroot and more. Here, you can reinstate those all-important files you mistakenly rm -rf’d, or, simply get your data and copy it off-site before reloading the OS.

-          Windows users gain access to a remote-desktop like session with over 100 utilities pre-installed and available immediately. This includes registry repair tools, file system tools, data recovery programs, backup utilities and much, much more. Here, you can remove viruses, backup your data, or even defragment.

Both the Linux and Windows SBS environments function like a boot-n-recover CD, except they are accessible within minutes and at the click of a button in LEAP. Exiting your Server Bailout Mode is easy, too, simply click “End Recovery” in LEAP and the server will restart normally.

The second way that we are intent on helping you get up when your server goes down is Free priority response. Free for all LEAPmobile users when they submit their ticket through their mobile phone. Priority responses are guaranteed in 15 minutes (or less) from the time you submit your request. This is guaranteed 24×7.

Why did we implement this? Well, imagine the following scenario:

How many times have you been at dinner, on vacation, sleeping, having a drink or working out when a server that you are responsible for goes down, or breaks? You’re no where near a computer, and it, well, to be frank: it stinks… You have to drop everything, get to a computer and submit a ticket for help. Then, you have to wait for a response.

Never again, instead, just pull out your phone and send a ticket in through LEAPmobile. It works on Blackberry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Android phones, and more phone support is being added frequently. By doing so, you’re telling us that you need help now and we’ll jump on it. Server problems shouldn’t ruin dinner, they shouldn’t keep you awake all night, and they shouldn’t interfere with your vacation… at least not too much.

Please use and enjoy both of these new features and share your thoughts on them with us. Keep an eye out for new releases and products and have a great Easter!

Dan

P.S. Don’t forget to add us to your twitter! Here are the links:

http://www.twitter.com/danushman

http://www.twitter.com/singlehop

http://www.twitter.com/zakboca