INTERDUBS status

No downtime in June.

We upgraded our e1.interdubs.com data center to 6th generation hardware on June 30th. The software stack took a couple of days to stabilize. This impacted

* PDF icon creation
* iPhone clip auto transcoding
* plain vanilla FTP accounts
* network performance

Affected clients will get credited accordingly

We officially launched ny.interdubs.com to serve customers on the east coast out of 111 8th Avenue. Our INTERDUBS data center documentation has more details about this.

Clients using Time Warner Cable in Los Angeles had network performance issues between June 21 until June 25th using our west coast data center. While we started to make this known to TWC on the 21st it did take them a while to identify the equipment that caused the performance problem. We were able to route affected customers around by means of an alternative upstream provider.

INTERDUBS does not use Amazon or any other 3rd party cloud services. The Amazon outages on June 29 – 30 took allot of web services offline.

We were not impacted. We still have to make our own downtime. Not looking forward to it, but at least we will be able to learn from it and will make things work better in the future. With a 3rd party service all one can do is to switch to a new vendor. A bit like getting a new spouse when things don’t work. We believe in a approach to better things by working on the issues.

Zero downtime in May.

4,427 files short of four million.

We brought alternative upstream providers online. While we were and are optimally connected it can be helpful to have alternative routes on an entirely different IP range available. Bandwidth is a good thing. One can never have enough of a good thing.

April: zero downtime. One almost might want to add ‘of course’. What looks easy to the outside is still allot of work behind the scenes. That zero downtime is not normal might be revealed by a quick look at a service in the same space (we don’t like the word ‘competition’): Their April was impacted by 7 outages totaling 40 Minutes of downtime. A couple seconds more and they would have lost their third nine of uptime.

Our New York data center is still being tested. We rather take our time than to rush it into production.

In April we pushed 77 updates to the system. A good average of two improvements per day.

Speaking of numbers: We are looking forward to cross the 4,000,000 file mark in May.

Things worked flawlessly in March.

Our New York data center got installed and is currently being tested.

A speed test is already available via

ny.interdubs.com/speedtest

If you like to you can compare this to our west coast hosting at

www.interdubs.com/speedtest

or our European servers at

e1.interdubs.com/speedtest

We have our servers in LA in One Wilshire. According to a google search result the
most connected data center building in the world. Not cheap, but it makes it easy
to have wonderful network performance and reliability.

Going to New York we decided to replicate this concept. In order to provide similar
stunning performance on the east coast as well we choose 111 8th Avenue as our
hosting location. A building worth 1,900,000,000 US$ when google picked it up in 2010.

There were no outages or service issues in February. Like in January, December, November etc etc.

Upgrades together with some optimizations were able to decrease the average page speed from 0.6 to 0.3 seconds. It also means that our system idle time is back to 95%. Yes we only use 1/20th of our resources. Even less on the bandwidth side. Having ample headroom allows us to see how high spikes in needs can go and plan accordingly. If a system becomes the bottleneck during high demand it is impossible to say how much would have been enough. Since we always strive to have enough of everything to meet our clients needs we know well just how much that is.

We have rewritten our Mac OS X droplet application from scratch and now allow the upload of entire folder structures.

We will soon be testing our New York data center. We are hopeful that we will see the same amazing performance that our customers close to our Wilshire One based center currently experience.

Things were running smoothly in January. No down-time or service outages.

We saw on 3 occasions some routing issues to isolated clients. Which made us prioritize some more network changes.
Luckily end clients were not impacted and our current network providers addressed those issues quickly.

Ramping up to the SuperBowl we saw some increased and lengthened work hours for many places. Glad that we could help, sorry that we could not make those long hour days go away. Maybe we should turn INTERDUBS into a 9-5 service. Then you can send your clients home at 4:50pm and go home yourself at 5:01pm.

We are looking forward to the remaining 11 months of 2012. The next bigger project will be the east coast expansion.

December finished quietly what turned out to be an amazing year for INTERDUBS. We had never thought that our concept to rely on word-off-mouth alone for growth would have worked so marvelously.

We would like to express our gratitude to all our clients for spreading the word in 2011.

With a constant increase of clients (and revenue) we were able to expand our system both in terms of features (we are running update #3148 today) as well as infra structure. This year we dove even deeper into the technology side of things: We are looking forward to put our peering agreements, data center additions and hardware upgrades to good use.

Oh – and our up time was 100%.

To put that into perspective: A competing service racked up 2 hours 15 minutes in 55 outages in December. Which results in an up time of 99.7%
But we never set out to have other services as our standard. We simply aim to achieve 100% availability. Each month.

Glad we managed to accomplish this in December. January started 14 hours ago and requires 30.5 more days of work and care.
We are looking forward to it.

Things were running smoothly in November.

We crossed the 3 million file mark. But that number change only got noticed by us human observers. The systems don’t care it seems. As they say: “Once a system scales it scales”.

Another month with 100% uptime and availability.
Which brings our overall and actual uptime since we launched in 2007 it to more than 99.997%

Things were running well in October. We doubled our data center footprint and installed new networking gear in anticipation for future growth.

We focused mostly on management of large data and archive sets and established a solid brackground rendering architecture that will be very handy in the future.

We also were able to lower the price for plain vanilla ftp to $1 per GB.

Our systems were running smoothly in September. System changes resulted in page load times that are almost twice as fast as before. We are still in the process of upgrading our infra structure in a reaction to the August 17th event. Parts of puzzle are in place. Others take longer to test than we had wished for.

September is also the month in that we became an Autonomous System. While this has no direct impact just yet, it is the foundation for very fine grained control over our network traffic in the future. And it makes us the proud actual owner of a healthy range of IPv4 addresses.

We saw a brief and partial network outage on 9/21 and had another issue in the morning of October 3rd. As a result we will try to expedite efforts to bring more of our network filtering under our control.