iWeb Communities: Blog

As announced earlier, the new iWeb blog also bring a brand-new tool for iWeb customers, the system status page.

As a picture is worth a thousand words, I invite you once again to come over and see the new visual tool.

You can see it as a dashboard to check the current system status of iWeb data centers, networks, and servers. Current incidents or updates about the system are shown first, while past incidents are shown below as a reference. We have also a new color code for the updates: green is for resolved incidents or informational messages, orange is for light service disruption or programmed maintenance, and red is for bigger issues.

When clicking on an incident, you will get a history of the incident, with each post reflecting an update.

What does it mean practically if you are a iWeb customer? First, it’s much easier for you to “read” the information and know if there’s a current problem or not, instead of having to search through past blog posts. Second, since an incident is now broken down into a series of posts, you can now just follow the RSS feed, instead of checking and clicking everytime on the post, as required previously. When an incident is resolved, a post will be pushed into this category.

We hope this will be an useful for all iWeb customers. Of course, this won’t solve everything; if you have an issue that is not show on this page, you are encouraged to open a ticket in the customer hub.

The iWeb blog was one of the first tools used by the company to communicate news and system updates to its customers, with the first ever post published in March 2003, more than 5 years ago.

Since then, iWeb has grown steadily, opening new data centers and offices, adding new services and products. The blog grew organically, following the company’s growth; but as time passed by, we saw the need for an improved tool for communication.

One of the problems you might have noticed is that it was very difficult to navigate inside the blog, or find old pieces of information. Simple things like trying to see the current status of the iWeb systems was also very difficult.

That’s how it was decided to build a brand-new iWeb blog.

If you read this by RSS, you might want to come over the website and see the visual and layout changes.

One of the first big difference is that we have now 3 different “channels”: iWeb, Web development and Web Hosting. iWeb will have all the news from the iWeb company, such as new products, new infrastructure or other official news. Web development is geared to iWeb customers who are building their website; we will share there regularly tips and news about designing, programming and marketing your website. Finally, Web hosting will have articles about the hosting industry, with articles about latest hosting conferences, new technologies, and also explaining why iWeb is choosing a technology for its infrastructure.

These 3 channels were implemented because we are aware that not all of you are interested in every topic that is published on this blog; you can for example choose to only subscribe just to one channel.

Because of the importance of status updates, these also have a brand-new section… that will be covered in a later post.

Another focus during the development of the new iWeb blog was feedback given by the iWeb community. This goes from current iWeb customers, visitors, future customers, outside partners or iWeb employees. To create a healthy community, with improved communication, we have implemented simple features like post rating, a better display for comments, a new blogroll etc.

But those are just simple tools, and our intention goes beyond that. To celebrate the launch of the new iWeb blog, we plan for instance to feature iWeb customers in this blog, telling YOUR experience with iWeb (like this). If you are interested, then please leave a comment, and we’ll contact you. For you, it’s an opportunity to showcase your current project & websites, and also tell your side of the story.

We are proud to announce a new 22M$ financing agreement with Goldman Sachs, a leading global investment banking. To learn more about the terms of this agreement, we invite you to read the
complete press release.

This agreement will cover iWeb’s financial requirements for the long term growth of the company’s data centers, as well as its dedicated server leasing and web hosting operations. “With this agreement, Goldman Sachs will provide financing to allow us to further our business objectives.” declared Eric Chouinard, iWeb Chief Executive Officer.

“A deal of this magnitude will allow us to continue investing in the infrastructures which are vital to maintaining our growth, which has been outstanding thus far.“ added Marc Guindon, Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer. Thank you to all of our customers, for being a part of what iWeb is today.

After its original launch in English and French in march, the new iweb.com is now available in Spanish! Olé!

Originally planned for summer 2008, the latin site is officially online since 8:00 PM Montreal time, and will offer all iWeb hosting services in Spanish at the following address: http://es.iweb.com. Though the entire site now available in three languages, you may notice that our team is still working on the ordering process (currently available in English and French), the backend and that our blog does not yet have a spanish version … we are working on it.

Over the past several months iWeb has multiplied the services offered to spanish speaking customers, including the addition of spanish speaking account managers, customer service agents and support technicians. We hope our efforts will facilitate the work of system administrators and web entrepreneurs everywhere in the world, who can now work with their web hosting provider in their mother tongue.

Gracias!

We are currently fixing the last issues on the new iweb.com web site. The development team has been working for more than 9 months on the project and has yet to go to sleep after yesterday night’s work to bring the site online. Discover the new design, the new iweb.com domain, new products and a lot more at the new iweb.com. Official press releases will be posted later today and tomorrow and there is still a lot to come in the next weeks.

An emergency reinstallation of the backup server Winter is scheduled today. The server should be functional by the end of the day and ready to make his backups in the course of the night.

Affected clients are those backuped on Winter.

We sincerely apologize for this unplanned maintenance. Thank you for your patience.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Update: Installation was longer then expected and will be completed tomorrow.

An important modification to the e-mail service on our shared mail environnement Jinn is planned tomorrow Wednesday July 25th. A new anti-SPAM appliance will be installed. For now on all incoming e-mails hosted on Jinn will have to pass through this new appliance. Clients who do not currently have anti-SPAM enabled on their account will notice an important drop on the amount of junk mail they receive.

This modification will cause no service interruption and concerns only clients hosted on the Jinn shared-hosting mail server.

Please do not hesitate to send us any comments or contact us if you notice any problems following this maintenance.

It is kind of unusual but our blog has been inactive for quite some days. It’s surely not because things are not moving at iWeb so I thought I should jump in and write about my thoughts this afternoon.

I just came back from a meeting at our new datacenter. I had not been there a lot in the last months, I need to give Eric (our CEO) and Cyrille (Network manager) most of the credit of building and getting this new facility operational. They worked very hard to have this new site ready in an impossible delay. One thing sure, the new facility is impressive.

I do not have any new pictures, but if you haven’t already looked at the iWeb-CL – Phase I almost completed blog post, have a look now.

We released the racks of the first colocation customers in the first week of June and started releasing new dedicated servers at the new site this week. Half of our sysadmin team moved at the new datacenter and everything is starting to be in place. Watch out for new promotions soon in order to launch this new DC !

I also wanted to take this opportunity to let you known that we are planning to add neutral colocation options to our colocation offers. We are talking with several important network carriers around the world in order to have them bring POPs to our new DC. It might be available quickly. It is easier to convince the providers to bring a POP (Point Of Presence) to our facility if they know there are demands for the service so if some of you have plans for neutral colocation and what to buy bandwidth directly from a carrier having a POP at iWeb, let us know !

That’s it for now. Do not hesitate to post your comments, I’ll be reading and answering most of them.

Martin Leclair
iWeb.Ca

Here it is …

For the last months, I have been personally telling a lot of customers that the new account management control panel would be online “soon”. After weeks of delays, our new Customer Hub is finally online and it looks great! I think a lot of customers will find, in the new Hub, functionalities they have been requesting and hoping to find at iWeb. We are still tweaking details, but you should be able to enjoy the Hub now!

(more…)

We are pleased to invite you to meet the members of our team at the IT Performance Expo (Stand 219). IT Performance Expo will take place on November 24-25, 2004 at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal. For the occasion, iWeb offers free passes (25$ value) for the event.

To get your free pass, please email us to verify the availability of tickets or stop at the office (3185 Hochelaga, Montréal) before the event.

Join us at the Expo TI !

Sylvain Leclair
iWeb.ca