In the next 5 minutes you could…

• Drink your 6th cup of coffee resulting in yet another round of acid indigestion.

• Get a head start on your rush hour commute, only to get behind a large truck with foul-smelling exhaust, inevitably turning left.

• Take a quick FastServers.Net phone survey and reduce next month’s bill by $20.

Do you have comments about your experience with our support department? How do you feel about FastServers.Net’s network stability? Is there any product you would like to see offered that we currently are not? Now is the time- and completing this survey is an excellent way- to make your opinions count.

FastServers.Net will be conducting a series of short surveys over the next month to gain feedback on your experiences with our company the best way we know how: by speaking directly to you. We promise this is absolutely NOT a barrage of annoying calls from 3rd party agencies; the surveys will be conducted in-house by one of FastServers.Net own customer support representatives. While taking the survey, please be as honest and complete with your answers as possible. Our management team is looking forward to reviewing your responses and making positive changes in light of them.

As always, if you ever have any suggestions or feedback for the FastServers.Net team, please email me directly at jara@fastervers.net. If you have just a minute to take out of your busy day, we would really appreciate hearing from you!

It has perhaps been far too long since my last assault on the newsletter. Hopefully the vast majority of our gleeful subscribers (yes!) have joined our official forums - http://forums.fastservers.net/ - and thus, have been aware of the multitude of developments in the realm of FastServers.Net over the past few months. That said, I realize that forum communities and the participation/vigilance required aren’t exactly everyone’s cup o’ tea. As we continue to enhance our Pentagon Extranet we will include additional pathways for critical forum dispatches to easily grab your attention without having to be subscribed to particular topics and/or maintaining a consistent residency at our forums site.

It’s certainly no secret that overall networking stability at our Iowa-based hosting facility left “a bit to be desired” from late summer into the start of the winter in ’05. Yes, that statement is already a sure-fire lock for understatement of the year. The degradation in service that many of you endured is not something we expect you to quickly sweep under the rug, regardless of the major enhancements that were successfully implemented in early February ’06. Our administrative team is thoroughly focused on the meticulous administration of our routing perimeter at the TEAMNET datacenter in Cedar Falls, as we certainly realize that the luxury of pointing to our upstream provider’s responsibility of capacity management and day-to-day quality of service is no longer an avenue open to us. This, of course, is exactly the result we intended: complete administration of connectivity from the hardware layer on up, including direct contact with our transport and bandwidth providers which include, but will certainly not be limited to, Hurricane Electric, WilTel/Level(3), and Internap. With these new alliances, alongside our ongoing quest to align additional, divergent-path gigE transport with our Iowa environment during quarter-2, ’06, we’re positioning ourselves for hefty growth at this facility while maintaining ample connectivity overhead to both protect our environment’s stability in the face of a crisis, and to assure that ample pipe exists for bandwidth growth as incoming customers continue to set up shop.

We wholeheartedly understand that only constant stability can trump past fluctuations and negative vibes as far as the perception of networking health is concerned. Discussions continue in respect to improving techniques to squash major network attacks & anomalies at both our HE.NET/Fremont hosting facility and with our new connectivity partners in Iowa. We’re investigating every possible route of enhancement we can to make sure that past instabilities remain an ever-distant afterthought! These upgrades to connectivity, when combined with ongoing advancements to the Pentagon Extranet as well as the growing ranks of the FS Technical Group, are positioning us for quite a progressive year.

Questions/comments/concerns?

I’m more than happy to be interrogated, travis@fastservers.net, as is our administrative group admin@fastservers.net. And/or you can find all of us on the forums as well on a semi-frequent basis.

Hopefully ’06 has started off well for you- we’ve certainly had a great year thus far.

Best wishes going forward,

New Employee Announcement

FastServers.Net has added two additional employees at the Midwest NOC and would like to welcome and introduce them to you.

Chase Ewing, Level 1 Server Support Engineer. Chase joined our team in February after finishing an internship with FastServers.Net. Chase will become part of the engineering team which handles your day-to-day support requests.

Wade Weisbrod, Server Hardware Technician. Wade also joined the NOC team in February and will be heavily involved in server deployments, upgrades, and server hardware analysis as well as ongoing maintenance.

DEFCON Management is an integral part of our day-to-day dealings with you. Your DEFCON level not only defines your overall range of server administration savvy but also defines the type of support that is provided with your server. Regardless of our continued growth, we have always attempted to go above and beyond the call of duty by providing an exceedingly high level of support to our customers.

During 2005, we achieved many benchmarks including the expansion of our highly developed team of engineers. One of the major factors for improvement was to assure that customers paying for managed services received fast resolution times on even the most complex of issues.

In a recent evaluation of our system in which we pool all client support requests into one ticket queue, a majority of time is being spent providing lengthy time-to-resolution responses to customers that are not paying for managed services.

March ‘06 will unveil a new approach to our support system that will enhance our DEFCON Management Services and allow us to provide a higher quality of support to clients that have contracted it. With this new update the following standards will be adhered to:

DEFCON 3, DEFCON 2, and DEFCON 1 server profiles will receive the urgency and direct attention- “Priority Support” - of our support staff with the goal of providing two hour or less time-to-resolution for issues covered within the boundaries and supported environments effectively handled by our DEFCON services.

DEFCON 4 clients will receive standard support with the goal of providing 24-hour or lessresponses to your basic, everyday questions.

Reboots and Emergency-caliber Hardware Issues will be classified as “Priority Support” for allDEFCON Levels.

If you currently are a DEFCON 4 client and rely on our staff to provide the overwhelming majority of everyday support, you are both encouraged and expected to upgrade to DEFCON 3 to maintain this level of service. DEFCON 4 & DEFCON 5 clients are classified as “Self-Managed” and are expected to provide an in-house system administrator that can handle the overall upkeep and day-to-day support of your server. DEFCON 4 & 5 support issues will be queued separately in our ticket system as non-priority while we focus on providing managed services to customers that have paid to expect it.

Proper alignment of our DEFCON Management Services allows our entire client base fair and equal access to our technical support engineers as the goal of this project is to insure that 100% of our client base is properly aligned with the administrative services they have contracted from FastServers. If you are a DEFCON 4 client that anticipates requiring constant access to 2-Hour “Priority” Responses, Complex/Advanced Support, or Enhanced Server Monitoring please get in contact with a Dedicated Server Sales Engineer today! We appreciate your cooperation throughout this vital transition period.