As we discussed earlier, your bandwidth capacity is one of the most important factors affecting the performance of your site. Buying the right amount of bandwidth will help ensure that your site remains functional and profitable, and in our last post, we talked about how to calculate the right amount of bandwidth for your site. The key, you may recall, is to calculate your average site traffic and buy enough bandwidth to handle your average usage and also cover potential spikes in traffic.

Occasional spikes are one thing, but even if you’ve planned appropriately, you may eventually find that your traffic is exceeding your bandwidth capacity. When that happens (actually, before that happens), it’s time to look at your options for increasing your bandwidth. There are different ways to increase your bandwidth, and the one you choose will depend on your specific needs.

If your average site traffic has increased significantly and your monthly usage is approaching the monthly limit for your hosting account, you can purchase additional capacity. Your monthly usage is something you should always keep an eye on, especially if your hosting plan provides a relatively low amount of bandwidth. Some hosting providers might give you 100 GB or 1 TB of bandwidth per month, then charge you a $1 to $5 fee for each gigabyte you use in excess of that limit. At SingleHop, all our plans include at least 10 TB of monthly transfer, which tends to be enough even for sites with heavy traffic, but you can always add more.

If your site isn’t close to exceeding its monthly bandwidth limit, but you are experiencing performance problems due to large, short-term spikes in traffic, you can boost your site’s performance by using higher-capacity network cards and datacenter switches. This essentially gives you a wider pipe so that traffic continues to flow even at peak periods, without changing the monthly bandwidth limit for your account. SingleHop offers 10MB, 100MB, and 1000MB switches, which provide more than enough power for even our busiest customers. In fact all of our servers, save the Atom, are powered by 100MB uplinks standard. That’s right you get 100MB uplinks standard.

If you are a SingleHop customer, enjoy! If you are looking for world-class hosting with extreme amounts of bandwidth and capacity, look no further than SingleHop.

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Hello Cascade Beta Testers (and Cascade Fans), It’s been a long time since our last release and I wanted to give you some inside information into what we have been up to to rigorously test one of SingleHop’s most exciting technologies. We recently came to a crossroads and decided that we had to implement strategic optimizations into the backend code that manages Cascade, this task has now been completed. We’ve also overhauled some of the interface and have squashed some annoying bugs.

On the 21st we did a silent push of our latest changes and improvements and everything thus far has gone off without a hitch. We’re naming this release “Moon” as on the 21st of September 1966 the Soviet probe “Zond 5″ returned to earth completing the first ever unmanned round trip around the Moon.

So in detail this is what we did and how it improves the Cascade experience:

Interface Changes

-Rewrote animation system, users should now see more fluid slide animations when switching between servers and vm’s.
-Added a “please wait” overlay when certain calls are being made that block the interface to prevent user confusion.
-Added colored resource bars that reflect how much storage and memory are being used.
-Added note about not being able to decrease storage space when creating and editing vm’s
-Fixed a bug with the main content window being offset improperly when a dedicated server is pulled up.
-Fixed chart overflow bug.
-Reverted back to regular style tabs in vm interface.
-Changed how selected servers look in server list.
-Added a icon for the activity log and refresh button. Also added time to the timestamp.
-Added more verbose activity log messages and removed the dreaded defining on host node message.
-Fixed a bug that caused scroll bars to appear when maximizing and minimizing the Cascade window.

Backend Changes

-Completely optimized the backend code that managed the vm’s
-Added a locking mechanism that insures vm’s can only run on a single node
-Added a locking system that insures requests to the daemon will not conflict with one another and all queued tasks happen in the best order to minimize downtime.
-Improved resource management that makes sure that all resources released by a vm a reusable.
-Wrote a new api for communication between our backend management system and the vm daemon.

For those in our Beta program, enjoy the changes. For everyone else eagerly awaiting Cascade… its going to be worth the wait!

Luke Tworek,
Lead Systems Developer
SingleHop, Inc.

If you didn’t catch the drift we are talking about SingleHop’s API!

Starting today all SingleHop customers can request access to use our API to further customize and build powerful control into their hosting operations. Almost everything that our server management platform, LEAP, or reseller platform, Tandem, can do can now be further automated by our customers through the API.

Specifically some of the options now available include:

-Rebooting servers

-Submitting and replying to technical or account tickets

-Displaying detailed information on IP, bandwidth and server hardware.

-Paying invoices

Future features for SingleHop’s API includes control over our Cascade cloud hosting offering. Our API will not only allow you to create, resize, and control VM machines with ease, it will allow you to do this through whichever hosting configuration you may choose! We are extremely excited about what the next few months have in store and the API is one more step towards offering YOU, our customers, the best hosting experience and the most control.

To get your API key make sure to apply for it inside of LEAP.

For more information on the API go to: http://www.singlehop.com/control_section/control_API.php

To review our API wiki located here: http://apiwiki.singlehop.com/index.php

At SingleHop we are proud of the geographical diversity of our client-base. It means that our top-notch network engineering, customer service, and hardware is valuable, and highly coveted in countries all over the world. In fact, SingleHop can boasts of clients in over 100 countries!

Today we continue this focus on offering the best hosting experience possible by announcing our official entry into the Brazilian hosting market! SingleHop.com.br went live today and our full-featured Portuguese website will be online very soon also.

We chose to put a special focus on Brazil for a few reasons. First, we already have a significant number of excellent Brazilian and Portuguese clients, one of our most notable is webhost and SEO experts, Desklance.net. Second, the Brazilian population is adopting the web at an unprecedented speed and we want to be part of this exciting connection of people, information, and resources. Finally, we are doing this because we like to grow and try new experiences, after all, a little samba never hurt anyone!
This expansion means that Brazilian and Portuguese clients can look forward to:

- Account management in their native language
- Easier navigation on the site and control panels
- Regionally focused hardware and services
- Portuguese-language hosting support, Tandem & LEAP Panel support

If you want more information, checkout www.SingleHop.com.br and sign up to our RSVP list. We guarantee it will be worth it!

[Apparently Hostingthatsucks.com did not check their own advice, as their site is currently offline! Either way it was one of the most unique webhost review sites that we have ever come across.]

Today we found one of the most unique reviews on our company. If you are like many of us SingleHoppers, before you buy a new product (especially if it is expensive or you are going to be stuck with it for a bit) you search the web for negative and positive information. I know I did before switching from Blackberry to an Android phone, and being fully aware that the majority of individuals who are looking to purchase a dedicated server do the same, I tend to keep track of what the cyber-chatter about the hop looks like. We genuinely want to know when we are doing a good job, and even more, when we are not meeting our clients expectations.

The review that I found today was done by “Hostingthatsucks.com”, a really neat site that claims to aggregate positive and negative comments on the web regarding webhosts- it scores each company based on the ratio between positive and negative comments as well as some apparent investigative reporting. According to their keyword search algorithm SingleHop passed with flying colors. In fact, they state that “Single Hop actually replies to their emails, responds to queries, doesn’t rip you off, and provides quality hosting.” While this just scratches the surface of what we strive to achieve each and every day, we are glad that even when put to the ultimate web-chatter test, our brand, our product, and our hard-working people stand up to the challenge!

So next time you want seemingly honest and accurate reviews on a webhosting company, checkout www.hostingthatsucks.com they’ve got you covered.

The INC 500 list- that is the list of the 500 fastest growing companies in America, was officially released a few days ago and includedSingleHop as the #58th fastest growing firm in the nation with increased revenues between 2006 and 2009 of 3896%!

While we already mentioned the exciting news on our blog last week, our celebration has only begun. Being inducted into the hollowed halls of the Inc 500 is monumental on several fronts. First of all, it shows that we are following in the (good) steps of giants that came before us. Giants such as HP, Microsoft, Zappos, Amazon, Gateway, Oracle, and many other extremely distinguished IT and technology companies. Second, it demonstrates the incredible tenacity and hard work that everyone at SingleHop has put in to get to this place. Finally, it shows that even in the midst of difficult economic times growth can happen through ingenuity, hard work, and being located in a great place like Chicago.

So down to the numbers, SingleHop is:

#1 Fastest Growing Webhosting company.

#2 Fastest Growing Company in Chicago.

#3 Fastest Growing IT Company!

Go SingleHop!

If you would like to learn more- read up on our latest press release: Here