Hey everyone, this is J Miller. In case you haven’t heard, for the past few weeks the buzz around here has been focused on the new Data Center. While the new place IS amazing, a lot of the buzz concerned how much work it took to get it ready, and believe me, everyone worked 110% to make it happen. Now its up, and since you can find lots of technical specs about the place in our press release and website, I thought I’d give you a more personal account from when I visited this place.

I took a tour of our new data center last Friday. It’s run by ServerCentral, and is located in a brand new computing facility built by DuPont Fabros Technology. From the moment I walked through the front door I was in “awe” mode. While I’m pretty sure my impressions, as sales guy, differ significantly from what say, Andy Pace, our VP of Operations would think, I thought the placed looked like DuPont built it to withstand the end of the world. Why so you might ask?
Well, ill start with power. They have 8 Rooms with 2 huge generators in each. The generators themselves look like a Corvette’s 8 cylinder engine, but 15 times larger! For day-to-day power, they also have 8 enormous transformers connected to the incoming power feeds.

Cooling? It’s all done through raised floors, as there is a 4-foot gap between where you and the servers stand, to the cement underneath you. The entire facility, as far as I could tell, was on a raised floor configuration. I was told, while on the tour, that if everything else around the facility was gone the place could survive for quite some time on its own, and without any outside resources. This includes scenarios where even a few of the generators blow up, or the cooling system breaks, or a few transformers blow up. But, even if all those things fail, they have an incredible 500,000-gallon chilled water tank that can dump water underneath the facility and keeping everything cool.

For security, they have bulletproof glass, and walls that are ridiculously strong all over the building.
If you have you ever seen a horror or thriller movie, you know the bad guy just keeps coming and coming back even after being hit over the head with frying pans. Or being shot at about a million times! That bad guy is like our new DC. It looks like it will simply keep going and going, even if the end of the world came to pass! This place rocks. ☺

Oh, and by the way, if you want to buy some dedicated servers in this facility, I’m your man! Shoot me an email or send me a tweet- Jmiller@singlehop.com ; @singlehopjeremy

After several months of planning, and a number of very late nights from the dedicated staff at SingleHop, we’re happy to announce the expansion of our footprint in the Chicagoland area! The initial phase of this expansion includes space for over 2,000 servers, which we plan to grow to 10,000 servers in the facility.

Highlights:

-Building environmentals provided by DuPont Fabros Technology (www.dft.com), with insuite services provided by ServerCentral.

-Onsite, 24×7 SingleHop NOC

-N+2 redundancy on critical systems, minimum N+1 on all systems

-HVAC, parallel electrical bus feeds

-Rotary UPS power systems each with 1300KW of critical output (n+2)

-16x 2,2500 KW capacity Diesel Generators (n+2)

-10,000 square feet of raised flooring

-Laser-based Very Early Smoke Detection (VESDA)

-500,000 gallon thermal storage (chilled water) for emergency cooling if needed.

-2 Utility Feeders

-8 Power Transformers

-100,000 Gallons of diesel

As part of our set-up, we have provisioned a diverse ring back to our downtown Chicago facility to be used for private network use, as well as 10-gigabyte circuits from nLayer. SingleHop clients located in our downtown facility will immediately be able to securely transfer data across the network, between the two facilities. The facilities are also located 30 miles apart, intended to suit clients disaster recovery needs.

As you can imagine, we’re excited to have opened this chapter in our company’s history. Over the past year we have grown exponentially, 673% growth in 2008, and 400% growth in Q1 09 over Q1 08. I largely attribute these kind of results to the high standards we set out to achieve. The selection of this facility is a continuation of those high-standards, featuring more redundancy than any of our competitors, as well as a 100% Power SLA that will be extended to clients in the coming weeks.

We are determined for our growth to always benefit our customers; as such, we are very excited to continue serving you through this new facility.  Thanks for your business!
Best,

Zak Boca

To read the Official Press Release: www.singlehop.com/about/press/
To view images of the datacenter: www.singlehop.com/datacenter/

I recently took the plunge and signed up for a Twitter account more out of curiosity then anything else. I had heard a lot about it and people I know had Twitter accounts, but I did not really see much of a use for it as a tool to use at work. So, at first it was just a way of letting people know what was going on here at SingleHop, but as I used it a bit more and discovered some of the clients developed using the Twitter API, it soon became another beast entirely.

As many Plesk users may know, there is a newly released upgrade for version 9.2.1.  At the time of writing, simply put, this update does not provide enough stability for production systems and as such, users are strongly encouraged to not upgrade to 9.2.1 until it has been tested longer.

The major problem(s) after upgrading mostly focus around the functionality of existing e-mail services.  Mail being an integral component to most client-owned servers, its unavailability and instability is unacceptable. One of the largest problems we have been noticing has to do with the “authpsa” process on Linux servers.  After upgrading to 9.2.1, the authentication daemon spawns thousands of authpsa processes resulting in a crippling server load which can only be remedied by disabling POP3 authentication, a move highly undesirable for many users.  At the time of writing, there is no hotfix for this bug and can only be corrected with a source code update from Parallels. We have been in close contact with Parallels support team, and they have informed us that they have yet to release a patch to fix this and other errors with the latest release.

Here at SingleHop, we like to try new things. One of our newest endeavors is personal web pages for each Account Executive. Now that Stephanie has joined me as my Account Manager, we are now officially Team Larkin. These pages are focused on letting our clients get to know us a bit better, and also to provide special offers that are available only through Team Larkin.

For example, one of the servers I am currently offering is a fully managed E8400 with 4GB of RAM, cPanel, and 10TB of bandwidth per month for $249. That is an amazing deal, and one you cannot get directly from the website or any of my fellow Account Executives. These offers will change periodically and will be geared towards certain niches such as webhosting, gameservers, application servers, etc. Keep an eye out for these via my WebHostingTalk.com posts as we all as Twitter(@SingleHopChris). We have experienced massive growth in the last year, but be assured that we still like to be on a first name basis with our clients. We are continually growing our relationship with current clients, and to get the ball rolling for new and potential clients, here are a couple of fun facts about Stephanie and me- My great grandfather invented the oscillating fan, Stephanie likes to travel and has been on a trip around the world.

As I am sure one can tell, we do like to have a good time here, but that does not mean that we are not very serious about our jobs. When one signs up with us, we aim to provide the best possible hosting experience. Combine our growth and resources, and we are in a unique position to be able to provide both a spectacular hosting environment (our second datacenter is coming online today) and great customer service. Keep an eye on the Team Larkin page for new special offers, and please let us know if you have any questions or comments, Stephanie and I are sincerely looking forward to assisting you.

Today, while looking at my TweetDeck, I saw a post that really caught my attention. It did so because it coincided so perfectly with SingleHop’s latest release- Paramount Atom Servers. In his tweet, @blackberrybr mentioned that:
“the only means to keep my blog in [hosting company name] was to rent a dedicated server. I aint server admin. I just want keep the things working”.
Basically he was stuck between the rock of his site needing more server capacity, and the hard place of not knowing or wanting to run a server himself, or pay through the nose for someone to do it. That is the exact predicament that our latest offering can get you out of. The Atom is the most economical, and eco-friendly sever that we offer. And starting today, you can get this server through our renowned PARAMOUNT series. This series is focused on providing customers with ultimate peace of mind. You simply provide us what you want to host, and our team of experts makes sure that your server works, and keeps working. We monitor it, we maintain it, we fix it if anything goes wrong, we provide the admin capacity that you may not want to, or know how to provide, at an incredible price- $149.95 per month.

Any server under the Paramount Series includes:

-Event Notification
We will monitor your server 24×7 and let you know if anything goes wrong.

-QuickReaction Monitoring
We’ll respond to any events instantly, often before you even notice that there is a problem.

-Kernel & OS Updates
We update your dedicated server’s OS and control panel 24×7 automatically.

-General Managed Services
One-on-one help 24×7 from our team of expert system administrators.

Here at SingleHop we really like Atoms. Take a stroll through one of our data centers, and you will undoubtedly see through the cabinet grids plenty of Atom stickers all around. You see, a few months back we pioneered the use of the Atom processor for server use. We saw the tremendous potential that this new technology offered. Only consuming 8 watts, while providing performance akin to some of the fastest Pentium 4’s around, we knew something good was in hand. We could offer customers great performance at a great price. We pay less in energy costs with the Atom, and in turn we pass on the savings to our customers. We win, you win, and our dear planet earth wins too. We were pretty excited when ComputerWorld Magazine featured us in an early February article, regarding our Industry leadership efforts to introduce and popularize the use of today’s convincingly most efficient and eco-friendly processor. For as long as they keep it posted, you can access the article by clicking here: Computerworld Atom Article.

The next time you find yourself in a tough spot like @blackberrybr, where you need dedicated server performance, don’t want to pay to much, and definitely don’t want to have to manage a server yourself- think of the Atom, think of the planet, think of SingleHop’s Paramount Atoms. Peace of mind at an incredible price.

What’s the Deal with Core Power vs Clock Speed?

So what is the deal with processor cores and clock speed?  As trivial as this may sound to the average techy, and latent life virgins, I have received this question many times during sales conversations with new prospecting clients.  Although it is generally a safe bet to go for the more robust solution with the higher specs in any situation, when it comes to processors, the larger the numerical digit measured in Hertz is not always the best in performance.  That’s right; the Ghz value you often see at the end of a processor label does not necessarily dictate it to be a faster processor if it only has a single core.

It is important to note that the Ghz in a processor is simply the frequency rate that a processor in a particular model family functions at when processing data.  While a higher clock speed might be ideal if you are operating a single core solution, it does not necessarily match a lower clock rate in a multi core server.  Here is why:
•    A P4 3.2Ghz processor (single CPU and single core) has a single wave rate of processing data at a frequency of 3.2Ghz.
•    When compared to P4 Dual Core 2.8Ghz model you will find that the clock speed might be less but the processing power of a dual core server will run much faster than the single core 3.2Ghz solution. 

This is because a multi-core solution has two independent cores to process information which gets relayed to a shared cache (an area that stores frequently accessed data for quick relay).  Thus allowing quicker processing time at a slower clock rate with better results in comparison to single core solutions.
So based on the above, a multi-core processor can process and transmit information at a faster and more efficient rate, while using a smaller frequency rate than that of a single core server.  One thing to mention and be aware of, is the specific applications or software you use on a multi-core processor.  Most modern software and applications are equipped to recognize and harness the power of a multi-core machine while older legacy apps cannot.

Multi-core processors are extremely useful when running a MS SQL database, and what makes this even better is that licensing fees for MS SQL are on a per CPU basis.  So, if you are looking to run a standard MS SQL 2005 Workgroup database, a single processor dual core machine will run more efficiently and productively than that of a single core solution with a higher clock speed.  This is because the multi-core processor will operate almost as if it was a dual cpu solution. You have the additional benefit of only having to pay for one CPU license that harnesses the power of the dual core technology.  This should not deter anyone from getting a multi-CPU processor if that is what you will require.  But it certainly is a shortcut if you are looking or debating between dual CPU processor with single core technology as oppose to a single CPU server with multi-core capabilities.  And that is sexxxy

Forever yours Migzzy,

Here at SingleHop, a lot of people know we do things differently but they probably don’t expect our company meetings to be different too! Last Thursday we held a company meeting after hours to discuss our recent growth and new data center while taking some much needed relaxation on our 3^rd floor deck. After a long discussion headed by President & CEO, Zac Boca, we decided it was time for a little bonding amongst coworkers – and what better way than Whirlyball!?! For those of you who have not had the great pleasure of playing such a fine sport, whirlyball is a mix of bumper cars, lacrosse and basketball. Mix in the sales team’s competitive drive with the tech’s bone crushing strength and you’ve got yourself a SingleHop primetime event!

Greetings to all SingleHop fans,
Effectively immediately bandwidth for all servers has changed from a split connection to complete bandwidth allocation for outbound traffic only.  That’s right, from here on all inbound traffic will not be counted towards your monthly bandwidth packages.  What this means to all of our clients and potential package buyers, is that you will now have more outbound bandwidth to utilize as you wish.  So now you can have as many clients as you wish, access your server’s sites without feeling any infringement on your inbound bandwidth.  It is still important to keep an eye on your outgoing traffic, but with the bandwidth allotments we provide and unmetered inbound traffic, I am sure this will not be an issue for many of you SingleHop clients out there.
So enjoy the new service upgrade and be on the lookout for announcements about our new Data Center, which is coming soon!!