Calling Your Senators about PIPA is Easier Than You Think
If you’re a subscriber to ServInt’s Twitter feed, you may have noticed we’ve tweeted nearly 30 separate “PIPA Facts” today. We did this because we wanted to empower all our online friends and colleagues with easy-to-remember information that would make phone calls to their senators as quick and painless as possible.
It’s easy to get scared off when people ask you to upgrade your protests against bad policy from the virtual to the real world. Tweeting and changing your Facebook status seems so much easier than actually picking up the phone and talking to somebody — somebody who you might feel understands the bill in question better than you do.
But that’s where you’re wrong. The fact is, your elected representatives almost always know a lot less than you do about what you do for a living — and they actually want you to help them understand how legislation will affect businesses in their state or district.
Calls to your elected representatives don’t have to take long. A few well-informed points, contained in a few simple sentences, are really what they’re seeking, and they’re what will make the difference. It’s easy.
So here’s what we need you to do — preferably tomorrow, but certainly no later than Monday, Jan. 23: Read more
ServInt, GoDaddy, SOPA and the Fight to Save the Internet
In the wake of a well-publicized boycott campaign against GoDaddy, hosting providers are racing to try to come up with their stances against SOPA. I am proud that we don’t need to do that. Our stance on SOPA, its sister bill PIPA, and the bill from whence they both came COICA, is well known. We have spent much of the last year not just railing against these bills but trying to do something about them.
The well-intentioned goal of SOPA is to go after piracy, which is noble and very important. But piracy is something that needs to be handled smartly, with a laser-focus. SOPA isn’t a laser, it’s a wrecking ball that if enacted is likely to destroy hard-working legitimate businesses more frequently than it does pirates. SOPA allows people merely accused of ‘contributing to infringement’ to have their business taken from them. Pirates will maintain back-up plans in case they get their resources pulled – it’s legitimate businesses that will suffer most. SOPA will be used for censorship and as an anti-competitive tool. It will stifle innovation, and is one of the most dangerous bills I have seen in my two decades in this industry. Read more
Our Largest Disk Space Upgrade Ever, Completed One Month Ahead Of Schedule!
Back in June, we announced that we would be increasing the disk space across our entire VPS line — and that this upgrade was going to be passed along to all our customers, both existing and new, at no additional cost. After weeks of hard work, I’m proud to announce that we have successfully completed the disk space upgrades — and prouder still that we did it more than a month ahead of schedule.
I should be clear — the fact that we performed the upgrade quickly doesn’t impress me so much. What impresses me is the fact that we performed this massive upgrade so quickly, without compromising our exacting standards for uptime, customer care and service reliability.
It wasn’t easy. Before our announcement we had done extensive testing. We had invested a small fortune in new equipment, and had devised the necessary workflow to get the job done right. But no matter how hard you plan you can’t help but worry when the hard work actually gets underway. Over the course of just 58 days, we managed to test each and every box to make sure it met ServInt’s standards and get everything into production without a hitch.
We implemented the change in two phases:
- All new clients were automatically turned up on new host machines (the giant servers we use to host our VPS and SuperVPS products) that were pre-outfitted with the upgraded disk space.
- All existing clients were then carefully migrated to host machines reconfigured with new resources by ServInt’s network engineers.
We made that decision because we wanted to get as many people more resources as quickly as possible, and we didn’t want to make everybody wait. Some of you may have seen your resources suddenly pop up overnight without ever having noticed the transition, and if you didn’t — well, that was the idea!
I’ve got pretty high standards for this company, and I don’t brag about our achievements too often — but in this case I really want to say that this was a fantastic example of intelligent engineering. Our team worked long hours, as long as it took, at all of our data centers to bring you these features in a way that minimized interruption to our clients’ online businesses, and I’m proud of them.
Now that everybody has their free upgrade, we hope you can put it to good use. Look for even more free updates in the future — and thanks again for your business!
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