I am pleased to announce that Cogent has now finished their work.

Downtime spanned from 1:40:19AM - 4:39:48AM, Pacific Time, ending about three minutes ago from the time of this post.

Thank you for your patience. It looks like Cogent is finished with their two-step process now. Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this.

Valued Clients,

Our main internet service provider has notified us about planned maintenance they must perform on the connection they provide to us.

Dear Cogent Customer,

As a valued customer, Cogent is committed to keeping you informed about any changes in the status of your service with us. This email is to alert you regarding maintenance we will be performing on our network:

Start time: 3:00am central 11/12/08
End time: 4:00am central 11/12/08
Work order number: ******
Order ID(s) impacted: *-********
Expected Outage/Downtime: 4 hours

Cogent customers receiving service at ***** ******* Houston TX will be affected by this maintenance. Only the Cogent Order ID(s) listed above will be impacted. The purpose of this work is replace router and equipment at your site.

During this maintenance window, you will experience one or more brief interruptions in service while we complete the maintenance activities; the interruptions are expected to last less than 4 hours total. However, due to the complexity of the work, your downtime may be longer.

Our network operations engineers closely monitor the work and will do everything possible to minimize any inconvenience to you. If you have any problems with your connection after this time, or if you have any questions regarding the maintenance at any point, please call Customer Support.

We appreciate your patience during this work and welcome any feedback. Thank you for being a Cogent customer.

Sincerely,

Customer Support
Cogent Communications

In short, we will experience a short, planned outage, early morning, on November 12th, 2008.

Thank you!

Happy Saturday, everyone!

It’s been a while since I’ve made a blog entry, and that’s because we’ve been working our rear ends off over here lately!

One of our goals has been to make the website’s content more consistent, and to improve our sales conversion a bit.

We were able to accomplish two major steps this week - We’ve set up a “Toll Free Sales Line” and a Live Sales/Support Chat, which can both be found at the top of each page on our site, and on our contact page. We’re really excited to offer these new features and hope both current customers and prospects enjoy using them!

As a side note, we’ve also made some changes to our Helpdesk system to help improve response times on Support Requests - That’s a great thing.

As always, Thank You for hosting with us - I hope you enjoy our new changes!

It’s a simple story, with potential for tradgedy - I went out of town this week (to meet our credit card processing team face-to-face.) I was gone for a total of 5 days, 4 nights. On night 2, my personal laptop decided to die, claiming “a system file has been deleted or corrupted and windows cannot start.”

Thanks to the always-abundant help from the folks over at my local computer shop, we were able to get it back up-and-running today.

But the question everybody’s been asking is “DIDN’T YOU LOSE ALL YOUR DATA?!?!”

Again, paralleling the theme of simplicity, the short answer is “NO.”

Thanks to the technology from R1Soft (which we’ve been using since earlier this year,) like PhireFast’s servers, my personal laptop is also backed up to an offsite secure server every hour that it’s powered on.

The process was as simple as reinstalling windows (with full NTFS re-format) and having the backup system restore the files to the laptop.

Much success and a big thanks to R1Soft for developing great software!

I can take a mental trip down our network, picturing switches, network cables, racks, and our servers. Classical music seems to play in my head when I do that, illustrating the greatness of something when it’s working the way it should.

Let’s flash back to April 2003 for a minute. I had just started PhireFast and I didn’t know what I was doing or why the heck I chose the hosting industry as the one I wanted to be part of. All I know is there was no ‘we’ back then, it was just ‘I’, and I was hosting PhireFast and our three clients (which still host with us to-date) on a reseller package from a company that shall remain nameless in this posting. :-p

There were certain things about this provider that drove me crazy:
- The packages were very restrictive on resources
- It was expensive per gigabyte, which made the profit margin so narrow it was a joke
- Their servers would go down on a monthly basis
- Their support was slow
- Their staff spoke broken English which made it nearly impossible to troubleshoot situations

So, lesson learned. I decided when PhireFast hit some growth, we’d pull our business from this provider and become their newest competitor, and we would keep those key points (above) in mind while providing our hosting services to the world.

I had seen it done the wrong way, I developed my philosophy on how hosting should be done. From that, we developed the company around the following:
- We made sure our packages had extensive resources and were affordable, so our resellers could actually make profit
- We enlisted the data center with the best network and server hardware in the dedicated hosting industry and signed an equipment lease with them to ensure optimal uptime and quality of service to our clients
- We made sure to have Support Team Members working our HelpDESK around the clock, every day
- We made sure our Support Team Members were trained well and are fluent in English

As always, I hope by sharing my viewpoints in regards to quality has helped you understand why PhireFast does things the way we do - It all revolves around providing a superior service to you, the client.

Happy hosting.

Many web hosting companies host at The Planet, including PhireFast. Their network is world-famous and their hardware of high quality.

With the recent 100 hour outage at The Planet, the largest privately-held dedicated server provider, many shared website hosts (including PhireFast) were affected. Unfortunately for those other hosts, they didn’t properly communicate with their clients, and many of them don’t keep backup systems. As a result, PhireFast has seen many of our fellow hosting companies fall off the map in the last two weeks due to their clients leaving them.

The good news is that many of those fine people have made PhireFast their new home, and we’ve found surprising growth in the past two weeks.

With this new growth, PhireFast has noticed a surprising percentage of new clients are in need of E-Commerce services.

It didn’t take us long to establish the goal of creating some type of an all-in-one solution. We’ve built the new E-Commerce Pack just for you. It will take care of your E-Commerce needs from A-Z, with:

- Domain Name: .com, .net or .org - Your choice
- 30GB Disk Space: A massive amount of space to ensure there’s plenty of space when your store grows
- 300GB Bandwidth: Roughly 500,000 visitors (based on an average store) per month
- Unlimited Email Accounts: You@yourstore.com
- E-Commerce Software: We’ll install it for you! Choose from Cubecart, OS Commerce or ZenCart!
- Merchant Account: Process credit card payments automatically through your store with a merchant account through our friends over at ProcessingPoint, LLC.

Why did we choose CubeCart, OS Commerce and ZenCart?
Our team reviewed approximately 30 popular (self hosted) shopping cart software applications. From those seen, we liked CubeCart, OS Commerce and ZenCart the best (in that order.) Specifically, we wanted software that is Open Source (so we can give it to you for free,) Secure, Flexible and Feature Rich.

Why did we choose ProcessingPoint, LLC. as our Merchant Account Partner?
PhireFast has worked with ProcessoingPoint, LLC. for about one year now. We personally use them to collect monthly hosting fees from our clients and couldn’t be more satisfied with them. Their prices are outstanding for the support and service they offer. When they agreed to give discounted merchant accounts to buyers of our E-Commerce Pack, we were ecstatic!

Located in Carlsbad, California, ProcessingPoint, LLC. is local to us. PhireFast insists on our providers in the United States of America, and heck, they’re right here in our own state! (ProcessingPoint is a registered ISO/MSP of Merrick Bank and a registered ISO/MSP of Harris Bank.)

Readers, please enjoy the new E-Commerce Pack! As always, please feel free to post comments/question about my words. Thanks for reading!

Hi Everybody,

I’d like to be the first to welcome you to PhireFast’s new blog!

Why a Blog?
Why not! We thought a blog would be an effective, fresh way for our Team Members to communicate what’s on their minds… Not to mention weekly specials on Hosting Packages!

Who will post here?
PhireFast’s Team Members will be contributing content to the blog on a regular basis while you, as a clever PhireFast Hoster, contribute funny, clever and informative comments.

With that said, we have a lot of work to do here at PhireFast Today, so I better stop playing around and get back to work. You’ll hear from us soon.