Experience
As the Internet is such a new phenomenon to most users, its hard to find a company with much experience and longevity in this business. Since 1990, our employees have been using the Internet, developing applications, and following the development of the Internet into what it is today. Since our beginning in 1994, we have maintianed dedicated Internet connectivity and an established web presence to ensure reliable and fast communications with our clients.
Reliability
Building a high quality Internet service demands reliable equipment, service providers, and support. We have chosen hardware from leading vendors such as Compaq, Cisco, Nortel Networks, Lucent Technologies, American Power Conversion, Hayes, 3com, and others to power our network and provide 24x7 availability. We have also chosen high-quality services from our telephone providers and bandwidth providers in order to maintain reliable connectivity to the outside world. Our vendors also provide us with prompt technical support, and replacement products should an equipment failure occur. Our network is constantly monitored from multiple locations to ensure uptime and prompt problem isolation. Our network engineers are available around the clock to respond to outages reported by customers or our monitoring facilities.
Redundancy
Even the most reliable connections and equipment are not perfect. We strive to build redundancy in our network at all levels. Our local POP's are fed bandwidth from different facilities, and we have multiple incoming circuits that handle our incoming calls, so if one fails there is always another available to take calls. Our Domain Name Services (DNS) are spread among numerous diverse servers, making sure that your domain information is always available. Our POP's are also power protected against outages and brownouts. On our Nationwide network, many cities are services by multiple POP's, ensuring maximum availability.
Performance
We strive to make sure that our network provides the maximum performance possible. For our 56K incoming lines, we use state-of-the-art ISDN PRI facilities to carry these calls, rather than cheaper T1 circuits which suffer from some performance problems. As far as our backbone connectivity goes, our average round-trip ping times to MAE-EAST in DC are under 20ms, and connectivity to major backbones such as UUnet & MCI/Worldcom (Now C&W) are under 30ms, and our ping time to the west coast is under 100ms. These times are some of the lowest in the industry, and mean fast and consistent throughput of data for you. Our hardware and software is constantly updated and maintained to ensure that speed is maintained. In our primary datacenter, all servers and critical routers are interconnected by a switched 100 megabit Ethernet backbone, eliminating bottlenecks from our internal network and moving data between servers at the fastest speeds possible. We also emply web caching technology developed by Cisco Systems to accelerate web performance and reduce redundant traffic across our backbone.
Service
Perhaps the most important reason to choose us is the personal service that we provide to our customers. Our goal has always been to provide high levels of service and our customers appreciate that. Whether your service request comes via the Web, email, telephone, fax, or mail, we work quickly to respond in a personal, and professional manner. No robot answers here, your email will always be answered by a real person, and your calls will be answered or returned promptly by a support representative capable of solving your problem.
Price
Pricing is important to all customers, and we have worked hard to build a pricing structure that is fair and competetive. In some cases, we have the lowest price, but not always. We hope that when you look at our overall offering, that you will realize that Internet (and other services) are not always just about price, but value. We may not always be the cheapest, but we provide the best value for your money. Our services are not supported by advertising, so while there may be a cheaper or free provider offering similar services, you can rest assured that we will maintain a professional image, and you will not be forced to watch ads in your email or on your screen for the privelige of using our service. We also respect your privacy, while many ISP's are supplimenting their income by selling targeted advertising lists with information about their customers, you can be assuted that we will NEVER disclose any information about our customer base. Also, we have developed our pricing structures to be flat-rate. Many ISP's charge per minute for access, and many charge per megabyte or per hit for web hosting. We do neither. All of our services are flat-rate, meaning you choose the service that meets your needs, and your monthly bill will be the same regardless of usage. Some ask if we provide free trials or our service, and we don't do that either. We prefer to keep our facilities available to those who have already paid for them. We never thought it was fair for paying customers to get busy signals while people using the service for free were hogging the lines.
Don't just listen to us, see what others have to say about our service...