May has been a busy month, very eventful and allot of very awesome things coming down the pipeline. Lets get right to them.
cPanel Beta
We have had a very successful beta launch of our new Control Panel design. It is awesome and we truly believe it is the best in the industry and cannot wait to get this out in the new few weeks. We are finishing up a few browser compatibility issues and then it is live!
Chief Uptime Officer
Due to our rapid pace growth in both customers and infrastructure, we have created a new position, which has just been filled. Our new Chief Uptime Officer is responsible for doing a complete intensive investigation into any downtime to any of our servers that last more than 5 minutes or any on-going issues, so we can get a final fix implemented, ultimately giving our customers the best possible uptime and hosting experience. We are rolling out a very expensive and extensive monitoring system that brings our monitoring from almost 30 checks up to about 100 checks per minuets. This gives our network operations team a better idea of what is going with each server at any given time of the day. We are very confident in what we are rolling out and will be proving this here shortly when this is implemented with a guaranteed SLA. We hope to have this completed and rolled out in early July.
Backup System 2.0
Lets face it, servers die, hard drives die, somethings are beyond our control, it happens when we have hundreds and servers and even thousands of hard drives running on our network like we do. We have been using a commercial backup software for the last few years that has been nothing but decent. It backed up well, but did not restore fast enough, or sometimes not at all, when we most needed it. We have since thrown that in the trash can and have completed a custom in-house backup system. We are very excited about this and actually had to to use the other day in real-life scenario, while we hated the fact we had to use it, we were excited it only took 2 hours to restore a entire server, that is unheard of in the shared & reseller hosting industry. We are aiming at a 2 hour max recovery on all systems.
Growth
Our growth has been crazy over the past year. We have added 30% more shared servers in the past month and are ordering even more at the moment to keep up with our growth and what I am going to discuss next. We are very excited about our growth and we thank our great technical support and customer service departments for serving our customers and ensuring our customers are completely satisfied.
June is Big
2 years ago, it was July, this year is is June. Be checking our website every day during the month of June, we have some things that are very excited that are coming soon. I cannot let the cat out of the bag yet, but it is huge and definitely ground shaking for the whole web hosting community. We are going to be putting our company in a new league of its own and feel the rest will be years behind what is coming here shortly. Keep checking back, daily, or sometimes a few times a day!
As always, if you ever have any questions/comments/concerns in general about Eleven2, please do not hesitate to contact me anytime, rodney@eleven2.com or call me at my extension: 1-866-ELEVEN2 x111
So I’m a big Firefox guy. I have been for a while now, so you can bet that I find it interesting to see a big majority of eleven2’s site traffic comes from folks with firefox, at about 57%. In comparison only 14% of our visits are from people using Safari and 19% using IE. I think the Safari data is more interesting when put in the context of the OS statistics. We have almost just as many OSX users on firefox as we do on Safari. I just thought I’d share. If you want to leave a comment on which browser you use and why, please go right ahead.
Congratulations to James Ramos on winning the contest. I’d like to thank everyone who submitted posts for their participation. Don’t forget to keep an eye out for potential future contests.
Take a minute to read our four finalist’s entries and then vote on your favorite. Votes will be tallied on May 5th
Once on St. Patrick’s Day, when I was younger, I filled my refrigerator with 17 individual glasses of water. I had heard on the radio the day before, if you put exactly 17 cups of water on the night before, all the cups will all magically turn green when you see them the next day. I woke up the next morning and darted to my fridge hoping the Irish Leprechauns had dutifully kept their part of the bargain. But when I busted the fridge wide open I had discovered that the cups were all mysteriously gone. There was no trace of them whatsoever. Distressed, I trudged back to my room worried that I had not done something right, such as putting too many glasses (even though I triple checked the night before) and that I made the Leprechauns angry, thus giving me bad luck for the rest of the year. Later that day, during dinner my dad asked me why there were so many cups in the fridge that morning. After explaining why and being laughed at, I soon learned that my dad had poured them all out, and put them all in the dishwasher to dry. And so, despite my chagrin, my hope for good luck was restored and I was able to sleep that night, confident that no banshee would terrorize the 9-year-old me and take my soul.
-James Ramos
These last weeks have been simply crazy, and that’s the only reason I write this now, and not a moth ago. Anyway, it’s always good to think about crazy things, because that’s how crazy jokes are born, and today the time has come for a little funny story about a madhouse, the loony guys there, and some apples…
The story goes like this: in a madhouse, the doctor in charge wasn’t really happy about his patients’ behavior, so he decided to study the effect of various fruits on his patients. Once he added apples to their meals, everything became nice and quiet. He was extremely happy, and already starting to check their files once again, thinking about the day when some of them should be sent home.
Unfortunately, crisis struck, and funding has been cut. Not the crisis we’re been going through lately, just some fictional crisis…you’re aware this is only a story, right? Good, let’s continue! So, no funding, less spending, and no more apples.
One evening, when visiting his patients, the doctor noticed there was no light, and the light bulbs were all gone! Just as a side note, he also tried some cromotherapy, and the patients had yellow light.
“What happened to the light bulbs?”
“We ate those yellow apples, they were awesome!”
This surely gave our poor doctor a sleepless night, but he ended up using some red light bulbs he tried during his cromotherapy period, since red light usually gives headaches, and maybe that way his patients would become peaceful and quiet, once again. Unfortunately, there are also red apples, so it’s obvious what happened.
After a few days spent thinking about what should be done, the doctor had a brilliant idea – this time, he used green light! We also need to mention that the loonies were extremely irritated by white light, so using regular light bulbs was not an option. These being said, green light bulbs have been installed, and days started going by without any incident.
One evening, the doctor visited one of the larger rooms in the madhouse, only to find all people inside staring at the light bulbs around them, so he asked:
“What are you doing?”
“These apples are green. We’re waiting for them to ripe, we can’t eat unripe apples!”
Wikipedia on Skittles
YouTube on Skittles
Some of the shortcomings that I mentioned above would include the following:
- Stepping over the branding of the sites they are using. Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia are all probably seeing a large increase in traffic to their Skittles branded pages yet are having their logo overtaken by the Skittles® navigation bar and logo which seems rude at best. Most people that would be using Skittles.com to reach these sites however will most likely know what sites they are being redirected to and therefore the logos are not necessary. Perhaps they are still gaining after all as Skittles® is branding them as experts in specifics stations, ie. Media, Definition, Friends, Chatter.
- Losing all navigation abilities once the visitor clicks on a page. This I think is a killer to the ingenuity of this interactive idea of Skittles®. If you click on any video on the Media section, any Twitter name in the Chatter section, or essentially any other link outside of the Skittles® navigation bar, you lose the navigation bar entirely along with any chance of visiting another Skittles® subsection. Now, technically speaking, other than including some form of frames on the pages (akin to the way you view Google images that you’ve searched for), I can’t think of a possible solution to this one. Of course, adding the nasty frames to the page as Google does would make for a much less sleek display however it would allow visitors to actually keep navigating around Skittles®’ new ‘website’ which would make for much better usability.
- Perhaps a little confusing to those not familar with the web. Now, with the crowd that would potentially be visiting the website for Skittles®, I don’t know that this would truly be an issue but it should be brought up. Sending users to a different site altogether without more than a paragraph of explanation seems a bit confusing and potentially untrustworthy. At one point in time, the navigation bar offers an explanation that to get rid of it, you simply need to type in the address of another website, so they are recognizing that they may have some visitors that might feel hijacked by this technique. In a world where claims of viruses still abound e-mail inboxes, wouldn’t it be better to have a link to an explanation of how/why they made the change and what it means for the visitor. The only explanation displayed to the visitor is a short paragraph at the beginning shown simultaneously as they are requesting birthdate verification in order to proceed. This may cause the statement to go unnoticed entirely.
But what are your thoughts? Did Skittles® hit a home-run, foul up a potential good idea or did they just plain strike out?
Ian Littman (http://yanntx.info, @iansltx)
There are rumblings of how Apple is going to create a netbook, after they’ve vituperatively (okay, not quite, but close) denied the very value of that product. In truth, they might well do something like that. After all, they’ve downed phones before, yet there’s this iPhone thing that’s been out for awhile. Heard of it?
Whatever they’ll be doing, it definitely won’t be what people are expecting. It’ll be powerful in some ways, downright weird in others (they left out that feature?) and overall strikingly beautiful…and aluminum. Maybe an aluminum analog to the Sony Vaio P, but with more aluminum, less ports and less buttons.
This is going from experience. Three examples: the MacBook Air, the iPod shuffle and the iPhone. I’ve owned a MacBook Air and own an iPhone, so I know what I’m talking about…
For the MacBook Air Apple took the “ultraportable” laptop field and squeezed. No, really; I don’t know of any 13.3” driveless notebooks prior to the MacBook Air. There are thinner computers, but by looking at the edges of the air you wouldn’t know it. They made the Air cheaper and more powerful than other ultraportables, using a low voltage CPU versus an ultra-low-voltage one. The result: a game-changing niche item, creating a market where there was none.
For the shuffle, it was introduced at a ridiculously high price, without a screen, into a coterie of much more functional flash-based players. Its claim to fame: it was small and it has double (or more) the capacity of everything else out there. For the iPhone, let’s just say capacitative (finger-based) input wasn’t mainstream on phones until Apple made it that way.
So, will Apple release a netbook, a Vaio P, or something else? Good question; I’ll bet Steve Jobs knows.
Well it is finally here after a few re-designs and alpha testing. Now we need you to help us with the beta testing! We want to ensure that we have the best control panel ever, and to do that we need the help of our awesome clients (thats you!) Click on the image bellow to see a full screen shot of our baby!
To become a beta tester is easy! You just have to send an email! Just send an email to jon@eleven2.com and include the following information:
- Subject line of email: [beta testing]
- First and Last name
- Primary domain listed on your e2 account
- email address listed on your e2 account
- And a 300 word essay on why you should be a beta tester
Ok totally kidding on the essay part! But we do need all of that other information! Only the first 50 people to email me will get a spot on our beta testing team, we do this so that we can work closely with our testers to ensure we fix anything that needs to be corrected or add features that we overlooked!
But don’t worry more beta tests are to come, our development team is not stopping with this! They are already working on yet another awesome project that is going to make hosting with e2 even better!
(I know you didn’t think it could get any better!)
Reminder: If you haven’t already, submit your blog post for a chance to win some money!
see this post for more details
UPDATE 4/21/09:
Our beta signups are now full! Keep an eye out for our final release.
Thanks!
Update: We are going to hold the contest open until April 21, so you still have some time to get your entries in!
Hey Everybody,
We really hope to keep this blog updated as frequently as possible, but we need your help too! Today we are launching a blog post contest for a $75 prize!
Here’s your mission:
- Submit a Blog post with 150-300 words about anything you want. It just has to be appropriate (think PG-13) and interesting to our readers. Blog about your favorite gadget or most helpful software tips. Blog about your favorite musician. Write a gag post, or a rant. Then take your post and submit it to me, brett@eleven2.com. If you want to, you can use a post you’ve already written, as long as you allow eleven2 rights to the material.
-I’ll be collecting submissions for a minimum of 2 weeks, but if i don’t get at least 6 submissions then I’m going to hold the contest open for an additional week, after that week ends, so will the window for submissions.
-After I have collected all of the submission we’ll review them for content and post our 4 favorite on the eleven2 blog.
-Blog readers will then pick their favorite post, and vote on it.
-The post with the most votes after 2 weeks will be the winner of a $75 gift cart to the physical or online store of their choice.
(Eleven2 Inc. reserves the right to change these contest rules at any time.)