Since my last several blog posts, there have been many changes that have taken effect at Host Excellence. We’re rapidly building our support team of “Personal Heroes”, we’re participating more in external social media so we can keep in touch with you, and we’re building an internal community of customers so you can put your collective voice together and be heard about the things that matter.

But what I’d like to talk to you about today makes all of that turn just a shade pale in comparison.

One of the top-secret projects we’re developing right now is one we call Imperia (seriously, this is ultra-sensitive, so I have to watch what I say about it). Essentially, it’s an entirely new way of running and managing your website. There’s a lot of technical aspects to it, but suffice it to say it will have beautiful effects on how successful your site will be and how much it will do for you.

The best part is: It will be available to you for FREE. I’ll go into more detail in a second but first… I need your help. And it’s urgent.

We have only 24 hours left.

Imperia’s technology is built on cutting-edge open source software from a wee little company called Red Hat (just joking, they’re actually huge). They hold an annual contest to determine the year’s best innovators, and guess what? Imperia, your soon-to-be new hosting platform, just won the Red Hat Award for Outstanding Open Source Architecture! We now also qualify for the overall Innovation of the Year Award.

This directly affects you.

Winning this award would be of tremendous benefit to you. Should Imperia win, Red Hat will invest significant resources into the project to make it even better. We’re competing with the likes of Geico, Verizon, Whole Foods, etc – giants compared to us. Luckily, the big award is open to public voting – that’s YOU – for the next 24 hours. I hope you’re with me on this.

If you are willing to give me your vote (it only takes 10 seconds of your time), please go here:
http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/269267/2c6a/

Vote for: “Ecommerce Inc. + Vizuri — Outstanding Open Source Architecture” at the top and the bottom and hit “Submit.” That’s it. (Ecommerce is our parent company name. That’s why it doesn’t show Host Excellence on the page).

Here’s a screenshot that shows you what to select and how to vote. (Of course I know you’d have figured that out yourself. But I wanted to show you that we’ve made every possible effort and even prepared a screenshot!)

I would REALLY appreciate your vote! This is about you, after all!

IMPORTANT: VOTING ENDS THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, SO PLEASE HURRY!

By the way, to read more about how Imperia works technically, take a look at this:
http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/awards/ecommerce_vizuri.html

What Imperia Means for YOU

Ok, now that I have your vote, let me show you exactly what Imperia will will do for you. If you didn’t vote yet, go do it right now!

Imperia will bring you:

• Profoundly stable websites. We are legitimately expecting the coveted 99.999% uptime goal.
• A really easy to use interface. I know what you’re thinking – ugg – but seriously this is going to break the mold, just wait. Build your websites faster, manage emails/FTP/databases more easily, the list goes on. We’ve been getting hundreds of comments from customers testing Imperia about the unmatched beauty and gymnastic flexibility of the interface, but we know that most important is providing you with a control panel that doesn’t tie your shoelaces together every time you turn around (talk about annoying). This really will save you tons of time. Here are a few screenshots:

• Environmentally friendly. This is TRULY exciting: the new system will reduce our data center electricity usage by over 70%. Yep, you read that exactly right. That’s something we can all get behind, right?
• A breathtakingly fast hardware infrastructure. We selected HP to provide the equipment at Imperia’s core, and these machines are SWEET. Featuring the latest blade server technology along with HP’s newest storage solutions – EVA 8400 disk arrays – Imperia runs on a highly dynamic computing grid consisting of thousands of energy-efficient Xeon cores, more than 3 terabytes of RAM and over 600 terabytes of high-speed fibre-channel disk storage. Comparing apples to apples, we’re seeing more than a 10x fold increase in performance and efficiency from the new hardware alone!

What this means for you?

Well, instead of being assigned to a single server and suffering the fate of that single machine (or group of machines), your website flows in a fluidic fashion across the grid, never being impacted directly by singular hardware or software glitches. This means no more localized disk failures, RAID rebuilds, slow server response, overload impacts, etc. In a nutshell, it makes your website’s life pretty much great. And as a consequence, hopefully yours too, if only in a small way!

You may be a technically interested like I am – so if you are curious to learn more about how Imperia works, read on.

Imperia Technical Background

Last year, it became clear that the H-sphere Control Panel software we use to provide web hosting services was way too outdated. We reviewed other control panels such as cPanel or Plesk – but those too suffer from inherent flaws that lead to downtime, and are sometimes difficult to use. I felt that to really improve, we were going to have to develop our own new system; from SCRATCH. Enter center stage, Imperia.

At its core, Imperia is a combination of state-of-the-art hardware, leading software solutions, innovative command and provisioning logic and an intuitive user interface. That’s a really fancy way to say that Imperia will bring many amazing features together to create the ideal hosting platform. I already elaborated a little bit on the hardware that we will use above.

To utilize this hardware to the fullest extent possible, Imperia was designed using the latest Enterprise-class software including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBOSS, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, Zimbra and Windows Server 2008. Together with Vizuri, a Red Hat-preferred award-winning development company in Washington D.C., and our own internal development guys, we are able to coordinate these applications to work in beautiful harmony. These software solutions are being tied together in a super-streamlined customization (dubbed Imperia Command) to make them all sing, and I do mean sing.

Imperia Command is a business-decision based intelligence system for running large super-computer grids and data centers. Some may call this a “cloud” architecture, but we don’t. Clouds mean rainy days. We prefer to think of this as “ionosphere” architecture, or something else much more cool than a rainy day.

Imperia Command actively senses thousands of metrics for all of the services and nodes operating within the grid and continuously applies the results against a set of rules for action. This built-in “intelligence” gives Imperia Command the ability to move services across servers as needed to eliminate downtime and DRAMATICALLY improve speed and performance.

And what’s even better is this is all going to happen soon.

In the coming weeks we will be in touch with you about Imperia’s development and the cool features it’s going to bring you. Beginning in late October, Imperia is scheduled to go into a limited beta-release, with full migration likely occurring by the end of the year. Our goal is to make the transition as seamless as possible, so all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the improved features and performance.

And hey, thanks again for being an Host Excellence Customer!

Until next time.

Fathi Said, CEO
Host Excellence

Psst…remember to vote! http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/269267/2c6a/

Just two years ago, the first was wishful thinking. Our servers indeed were slow (in all honesty, a few still are). Backups were made sporadically. Downtimes were frequent. Customer service, suffering from low server performance, ran at a very low morale. If you look around online, you will find many negative reviews about us spanning that two-year timeframe. Despite all this, many of you stayed on board and with us, supporting us through the tough times, allowing us to outgrow the growing pains.

To all of you, our wonderful customers, I want to say thank you. There are no words that could express my gratitude, but there are actions.

In three parts, I would like to introduce to you the sweeping changes we wish to make to improve our company for you. I would like to ensure that your continued journey with us will be worthwhile for you. The only way to ensure this can happen is with your help and feedback. So please, don’t be shy!

Before I get started, I’d like to briefly recap our major milestones of the last two years:

1. All service issues previously stated are now resolved.
2. We’ve successfully deployed IronPort anti-spam and anti-virus filtering to our entire customer base; a very expensive project, but well worth it. For you, this eliminated 99.9% of all spam and virus emails received to your domains and created a significant uptime improvement for your email service with us.
3. Database related servers (all types of SQL) have been dramatically accelerated through improved ‘abuse’ management and massive hardware upgrades. Compared to two years ago, today you will experience expedient and stable database connections.
4. Today, we operate our data center out of a self-financed and owned, state-of-the-art 20,000 sq. ft. facility in Columbus, OH connected with Tier 1 Premium Bandwidth only at 5gbit/s (from Sprint and Qwest). At some data centers, you will find ‘cheap bandwidth’ resulting in longer loading times when visitors come to your website. These delays are hardly noticeable when you test for them yourself, but as long as they exist, your sites will lose visitors. But not with Host Excellence. At this facility, we would not even allow a mediocre bandwidth provider’s fiber optics to pollute our crystal-clear path of light. This industry-grade true Tier 3/4 data space can house over 10,000 servers, all self-managed and employee-owned.

   In fact, I would love to give you a tour! If you happen to be visiting Columbus on business or you can spare a few hours on your trip, I’d love to show you around our data center. We’ve a few hundred customers in Columbus as well – you’re welcome any time. Give one of our representatives a call and we’ll meet soon!

So how will we make your hosting experience with us worthwhile?

This year alone, my company has committed to its single largest investment into customer service and the level of server performance you experience.

Old and New

Before the year’s end, we are planning to upgrade our entire web hosting infrastructure. This should put an end to virtually all service-related issues. I can’t promise 100% uptime, but it’s what we’re shooting for. In detail, we will…

1. Introduce Imperia, an ‘intelligent cloud’ hosting environment, for all of our customers. This effectively means that your websites, databases and email services will be hosted not on one server, but on hundreds or thousands, all at the same time. You could theoretically turn off half our data center, or take an axe to the server hosting your website – and it would be back online within seconds (in fact, it may not be down at all). Please don’t try any of the above by yourself.*
2. Develop and launch a website management control panel featuring a state-of-the-art user interface that we are developing in-house right now. It is designed to make your life easier.
3. Replace ALL existing hardware with brand new blade servers, centralized storage and a fiber-channel switching architecture. This is a multi-million dollar investment into our networking and server infrastructure that will make your sites load faster than any dedicated server ever could. If you were to rent an entire server and all it hosted was your website, it would load your site as slow as molasses compared to how fast your site will load on Imperia.

Our development team is starting a special Imperia VIP Membership that you can join if you are interested in providing feedback to help us test and optimize the new platform. As a VIP member, we’ll share top-secret development material with you, your suggestions will be considered first for upcoming releases and you’ll get early access to new releases (membership is, of course, free of cost.).

Stay tuned for Part 2 of 3, in which I will address a whole new approach to customer service.

Please don’t forget to let us know your opinion and feedback.

Thank you!

Fathi Said, CEO
Host Excellence Web Hosting

*Disclaimer: Don’t use axe to destroy computer of any kind.

I should probably start this post by introducing you to our VP of Systems Operations, Rick. This is a person who is not only passionate about his job, but also highly intelligent and creative.

OK, enough of the positive. He’s a little crazy. His insanity does happen to be almost wholly attached to the safety of the data center (he’s a really cool guy otherwise), but that insanity is there and it is something worth poking fun at.

Super, High-Tech Tea and Coffee Station

Danger: Tea and Coffee May Cost You More Here Than it Does at Starbucks

For example, when our team decided to create a coffee and tea station in the kitchen (it’s not even as elaborate as I just made it sound…see photo), Rick immediately felt the need to establish regulations. We are not allowed to leave the “station” until whatever process we initiated is complete, and then when it is complete, we must unplug every surrounding appliance. If we use the microwave, we must watch it like a hawk—watch it like that microwave could steal our livelihood at any moment. You know why? Because it can. At least, that’s what Rick thinks. Any of these appliances can start a fire, which could spread if our fire-suppression system doesn’t kick in, which could enable that fire to somehow reach the servers, which could melt our customer data, which could make our customers very angry with us, which would make us very angry with ourselves, which could sink our business.

All for a plate of bland, re-heated Chinese food.

If Rick is this way about appliances that lie hundreds of yards away from the actual servers, imagine how he careful he is about the servers themselves. Our data center is about as redundant as they come—millions of dollars went into making it this way.

Well, in the middle of the night on March the 30th, a power line went down in our corporate park. All buildings in the complex (from one end of Dividend Dr to the other) lost power. No problem, right? We have backup generators, backup batteries…we even have the energy Rick’s undying concern for the data center would provide if we could only find a way to harness it. Unfortunately, one branch of our backup setup failed (namely, a generator) and a good percentage of the machinery we need for operations was left powerless (namely, our network). Fortunately, our network was back up fairly rapidly (within minutes) and it didn’t take long for the servers to catch-up.

For those of you that experienced outages, however short, we are unbelievably sorry. We were able to quickly return to status quo, but many of our customers still experienced downtime and we know that this is unacceptable. We are really, really sorry.

The issue that we had with the power loss is being investigated with the utmost priority because we don’t want anything like this happening again… and neither does Rick. I came late onto the scene (at about 2 AM, when the power had been long-restored and the servers were coming back up from their temporary, power-starvation induced sleep), but I knew Rick and was still inside because his car was parked parallel to the building, nearly on the sidewalk entryway and I could still hear the echo of his tires screeching against pavement. When I got inside, the root of the problem had been taken care of, but we had another problem. Our main System Administrator/Network Engineer had clearly arrived straight out of bed, wearing MC Hammer pants… and he was doing so without shame.

While this event that took place never should have happened, we are going through great pains to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. We, again, are terribly sorry for any downtime that was caused by this downed line, though we were fortunate that it happened at such an odd hour of the night. If we find out that the line went down because it was hit and knocked over by a clumsy driver, we’ll make sure to find and then glare at them on behalf of all of us.

We’re sorry, we’re sorry, we’re sorry! (I can be redundant too!)

Thanks for reading!

Michelle Schroeder

P.S. If you want to look like one of our very own sysadmins, you can get your own set of updated, metallic MC Hammer pants for one payment of only $19.95 from this website. Oh wait, I’m sorry. I put the decimal where I thought it belonged, not where it actually was…these happen to be only slightly more at $1,995.00.

That site will even suggest what to pair with them, though I personally think that this other site does a better job in helping you achieve the whole “MC Hammer” package: http://www.ehow.com/how_2058695_dress-like-mc-hammer.html.