Here's a copy of a client email sent this evening:
Greetings from Charlottezweb! I hope this email finds you well.
I wanted to update everyone on a few quick items.
First off, the new server has performed incredibly since bringing it online around two months ago. I haven't received any reported service outtages of any kind from the monitoring services I use and the server loads continue to be excellent. I hope it's been "serving" you well!
Prior to the move to the new server, I mentioned "Rsync" as a backup setup that I was attempting to configure for data integrity. At that time, the older server was running into problems that were prohibiting us from getting rsync to connect and run properly. This has now been resolved without the slightest issue on the new server. It's working better, in fact, than I first anticipated.
As a little background info, Rsync (http://rsync.samba.org) is a technology that allows us to backup a whole server across the Internet to an entirely separate computer in mere minutes based upon updating only the files that have been changed since the last backup. This way, we can almost keep a "mirror" of our server in another datacenter should something catastrophic happen to ours.
With this in place, Charlottezweb is now currently covering all clients, at no additional charge, with complete nightly backups of all your data from our master server in Texas to another server in Georgia. These backups run in addition to backups that run within the current server from one harddrive to another. With this in place, we have basically as much insurance for disaster recovery that a company could provide.
I plan to market this in the near future due to the fact that this technology is relatively new and the large majority of hosts out there do not offer included backups, with even less offerring full offsite backups.
Please remember that hosting clients should always maintain the latest backups of their data with any host, though we'll be happy to assist with recovery if the situation arises.
A few other quick notes:
I plan on offering some "holiday" specials in the next few months. Can anyone think of a better gift than hosting? I surely can't! Why not offer the gift of hosting to someone you think would be interested in learning about or starting a site? More details will follow on this.
As a final note, some of you may have heard of all of the hype surrounding Gmail accounts (www.gmail.com (http://www.gmail.com)). This is a new email service (similar to hotmail, or yahoo mail) provided by Google that is free and offers 1000mb of storage vs. the 5mb that most free services used to provide. Currently this service is available by invitation only from current users. If anyone would like a free account let me know. At this time, I have 12 extra invitations to give out on a first-come, first-served basis.
Thank you for your continued business! As always, I welcome any feedback or suggestions on ways to better your hosting experience.
Regards,
Jason
Update to our Rsync setup/policy:
http://www.charlottezweb.com/forums/index.php?topic=254.0
Thanks!
-Jason