the finger-keyboard synapse

"OxONet" archive

Behold the power of Mother Nature! (12:07) - Some of you may have noticed that BitWise was down for a bit this morning. We have learned from our hosting facility that not only was there a widespread power outage early this morning, but that some of their network equipment was destroyed due to electrical damage. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this outage. We are sympathetic to our provider, and hope that you can also sympathisze with us and them for this unfortunate situation....

Potential service disruptions Sunday, March 19th (12:34) - We have been advised by our new ISP that there will be some network maintenance and expansion taking place Sunday afternoon. They will be installing new routing equipment that will provide faster access to our servers. As a result, BitWise and OxONet may experience short service disruptions anytime between 3 and 7 p.m. on Sunday, March 19th. While we realize that the timing is not ideal, this expansion confirms our decision to move the servers to be hosted with an... | 4 Comments

Planned downtime Friday, March 10th (11:59) - This announcement is a reminder that there is planned downtime Friday, March 10th while we migrate from our current servers to our new servers in a new data center. The full maintenance window is from 10 p.m. EST to 2 a.m. (Saturday morning), but we anticipate that we will be back online well before the end of this window. It is also possible that we may come up and go back down more than once during this window. If you... | 2 Comments

The new nova & galaxy (16:19) - I'm sure some of you have been wondering what the clues were a few weeks ago about "a new nova in the galaxy." Some of you have figured it out--my hats off to you. Perhaps if you knew that we have servers named nova and galaxy for OxONet, it would have made sense. As some of you also know, BitWise and OxONet are intertwined, including sharing servers. So, what exactly is going on, then? We have some brand new state-of-the-art...

Celebrating freedom by doing... taxes (19:13) - I understand it's only natural for people to ask, "How was your weekend" or "what did you do special over the 3-day weekend?" In my case, however, I wish I had something better to say about my 3-day weekend. The calmness of the long weekend gave me a great opportunity to do... taxes! No, not my personal taxes, corporate taxes. Curse my Accounting degree! (I was a double-major in college.) The next time I start a business, I'm going into... | 1 Comments

What's all this OxONet jazz anyway?--and some OxONet news (15:56) - As mentioned in my sidebar, one of my businesses is OxONet, a web hosting and design company now in its sixth year. I have been asked why I don't post much about it, and it's mostly because it's a pretty routine business by now; I doubt anyone wants to hear "I sent out OxONet invoices today" or "Some people from North Dakota opened an account today." Every once in a while, though, something exciting does happen, like today. A few...

The perils of new price packages (22:58) - Over the weekend was the big push for getting the new OxONet site finished and released. We succeeded at that, but more importantly, the new site contained some very improved packages, offering more for less (reflecting the changes in the market since our last pricing structure). This is all very well and good, except that we have to migrate every customer from an old plan to a new one. Which isn't really that big of a problem other than it...

DOS attacks, birthdays and desks (00:31) - As announced two weeks ago, BitWise 1.0.2 was scheduled for release on July 2nd (my birthday!). Some of you may have noticed that July 2nd has come and gone, and 1.0.2 isn't out. There's a very good reason. On Thursday, July 1st, through the night and into the morning we were experiencing some severe slowdowns and connection anomalies. Our upstream provider switched off the IP address to our main web server, which, of course, caused services to be inaccessible. The... | 2 Comments