Fri Nov 16 12:14:24 PST 2001 — Newbolt maintenance. At Noon we booted Newbolt in single-user mode to move some filesystems around. Maintenance went smoothly, and Newbolt is back online. -Scott

Fri Nov 16 11:20:35 PST 2001 — Newbolt maintenance. At Noon (that is, in about 40 minutes), Newbolt will be shut down for some quick maintenance of its filesystems. Downtime will be about 15 minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience. -Scott

Fri Nov 16 20:07:37 PST 2001 — Night Operations: We need to reboot one of our core switches due to the fact that one of it’s internal processes has gone offline. The process doesn’t affect normal operations, only our ability to manage the switch. We are going to reboot it shortly after Midnight, tonight, total downtime shouldn’t exceed more than 5 minutes. We are also going to take the opportunity to restore its secondary management module. -Kelsey and Matt

Fri Nov 16 15:02:42 PST 2001 — We’ve got two webcams in our datacenter that you can now view. An Axis Neteye camera is pointed at a section of the colocation space, and a ComCam streaming camera is pointed toward the Cobalt colocations and the entry area.

The ComCam requires download and installation of viewing software, which supports viewing of up to six cameras in various locations at a time. It’s worth installing, there are test cameras in Hong Kong, Tokyo and other locations that you can take a look at in addition to our own.

www.sonic.net/datacentercam/

There are some limits on the number of simultaneous viewers of each of these cameras, so please do not leave your unattended system viewing the refreshing images. Thanks!

-Steve and Dane

Wed Nov 14 11:56:18 PST 2001 — New httpd executable online. After extensive testing on Thunder port 81, We have upgraded our web servers to support php4. Please let use know if anyone has trouble with web pages. Thanks. -Scott

Wed Nov 14 15:07:41 PST 2001 — Even newer httpd executable online for testing. We have some concerns about the new web server executable, so we are testing an even newer executable on thunder:81. We’d appreciate it if folks could test their web sites — especially those using php — and let us know how it goes in the sonic.net newsgroup ( news://news.sonic.net/sonic.net ). Thanks. -Scott

Tue Nov 13 08:34:55 PST 2001 — Sonic’s domain registration and transfer tools will be down for scheduled maintenance as follows:

Maintenance Window: Saturday November 17, 2001: 5:00pm – 9:00pm PST

This maintenance window has been set by the gTLD registry operator, and will affect all ICANN accredited registrars equally. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

-Chuckc

Mon Nov 12 16:45:50 PST 2001 — Due to the rainy weather and the fact that it is a holiday (Happy Veterans day!) we experienced a more then average load on our dialup pools, this caused some areas to return busy signals. We are aware of this and have already taken measures to add capacity. – Steve

Thu Nov 8 11:17:40 PST 2001 — We goofed up on the rollout of our new bandwidth monitoring and billing tools. I am sorry about the confusion and conflicting messages about this.

As we published here in September, we have made changes to both our bandwidth and disk quotas, and those changes were to be implemented in October. The disk quota change is simple – we went from 50 megs per service up to 80, and set pricing at $10 per month for each additional 80 megs. “Per service” means for each basic account or multihomed web hosting, so if for example you have an account with a multihome, you now have 160 megs of storage space.

The changes to the bandwidth quota are a bit more complex. In summary, we reduced both the size of the quota and the cost for going over it. In the past, the quota was 200 megs per day, and usage over the quota was $5 per 100 megs, or $50 per gigabyte. Under the new quota, you get 1000 megs (one gigabyte) per month, and the charge for going over the quota is $15 per gigabyte.

This reduction in the fee for overage brings us to a much more fair cost for sites that exceed the quota. In the past, it was far cheaper just to buy another account and split your website up than it was to simply manage it under one account. This never made a whole lot of sense, and caused extra work for for customers seeking to avoid the fees. Sites which did go over the daily quota could quickly accrue charges which were very, very high, and which were not a good reflection of the costs to Sonic.net.

In other words, $50 per gigabyte is too much to charge, the $15 price is a better reflection of our costs. Additionally, providing 200 megs per day to a site that used 150-200 per day both left the customer awful close to treading over that line and having a large charge added to their account, and left Sonic.net moving almost six gigabytes of bandwidth, which had a lot of costs for us.

Now, to the warning system. The intent is that if your site is projected to exceed the quota, you would receive a warning about potential costs. So, assuming that there are 30 days in an month for this example, if during the analysis on the third night of the month, you’d used more than 10% of the total quota, you’d get a warning telling you that we project that you may exceed the quota. This would provide ample time to make changes to the site to reduce it’s size, or find a way to produce some revenue to pay for the bandwidth.

The problem was that the warnings didn’t get sent on a consistent basis last month. Of the 90 or so customers who are over quota, only about ten of them got anything from us warning them about the usage.

Obviously, it’s simply not fair to make changes to the quota pricing and billing methods, then to charge a customer without giving them some warning prior to their incurring the charges. This was not our intention, and I’m very sorry that we posted these charges!

Bandwidth charges for customers who were not warned last month will be removed from their accounts today, and we’ll assure that warnings are sent out properly this month. Sorry about the confusion, and the contradicting messages here in the MOTD regarding this.

On an ongoing basis, we’d like to encourage customers to publish busy websites which do use bandwidth, but we need to work out ways to keep the usage at levels where the costs involved match up with revenue to cover the costs. Discussion is ongoing in news://news.sonic.net/sonic.general currently on this topic.

-Dane, Scott and Kelsey

Wed Nov 7 12:07:53 PST 2001 — .BIZ is live!! OpenSRS has completed their initial testing. They report a stable network and have opened for .biz-ness.

Customer interested in obtaining a .biz domain name can use the Sonic domain tool to process the registration and add domain services.

The domain tool is located at: sonic.sonic.net/members/domain_tool/

-Chuckc