Tomorrow evening many of our lives get back to “normal” here in the States, at least… Major League Baseball finally gets it’s regular season underway, in the midwestern Mecca of the sport that’s known simply as: St. Louis.

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In December we started a project asking a few of our customer if they would be interested in doing a video testimonial. It was met with great success! If you would have asked me to predict the outcome, I would have told you that maybe 2-3 videos would be online in a couple of weeks. What actually took place was an overwhelming response from 8 very different organizations and a lot of really good web development to make this project a reality.

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Over the last 60 days, I have been involved in a project to audit the current backups of our clients. Having said that, I would like to discuss with you the process that is currently taking place and provide some tips and suggestions that will help you save money and avoid unexpected overage charges on your account.

The Managed Backup Service from FastServers.Net is available to help you protect your data. The nice thing about this service is the “pay-as-you-go” billing that allows you to scale up without having to reconfigure your solution. By design this allows the continued flow of backups to take place without service interruptions.

How Backups Are Billed

No matter which plan you are using, be it 7-Day, 14-Day, or 28-Day, billing works the same. You are charged for the amount of data that is being protected on your server. If you have a directory on your server that you are backing up, and it is 4GB in size, all you need to do is subscribe to the 5GB plan. Then select the retention (7, 14, 28 days) and pay a monthly fee based on the amount of data “protecting” you need.

Many other providers do it the exact opposite, where you purchase plans based on the amount of storage you need on their NAS/SAN device. While the cost might appear to be a lot lower, the cost is actually much higher. Going back to the example of 4GB of protected data, and the pricing is set at $1.00 per GB of storage, the mathematics for those values looks similar to the data in the following charts:

Retention    Total Data    Total NAS Space    Monthly
7-DAYS    4GB    28GB    $28.00
14-DAYS    4GB    56GB    $56.00
28-DAYS    4GB    112GB    $112.00

Retention    Total Data    Total Backup Space    Monthly
7-DAYS    4GB    N/A    $22.50
14-DAYS    4GB    N/A    $25.00
28-DAYS    4GB    N/A    $27.50

Backup Overages

With this system, we have encountered a tremendous amount of backup overages. A backup overage occurs when you subscribe to a specific plan, and the amount of data that is being protected, is exceeded. Using the example above, if you subscribed to the 5GB, 7-Day retention plan, and your data directory ended up with 6GB, you would have an overage of 1GB. This can occur if you are not aware of the exact data that is being backed up. It can also occur if you are not requesting an audit from time to time by our support staff.

We Can Help

Backup overages are friendly in nature – we want to make sure this service meets and exceeds your expectations. When an overage does occur, you will be contacted directly and you will be given an opportunity to purchase an upgrade or reduce your data. Our technical support team will work hand-in-hand to provide you with the technical details you need in order to make the right decision.

Tips And Suggestions

•    Communicate with the FastServers.Net team. We send backup overage notifications to all customers via email. If you do not provide a response to the notification email, your account will automatically be upgraded to the next backup service level to cover your space usage.

•    Open a ticket and ask questions about your backups. Our technical support team can provide you with the exact details you need on your backups. We are here to help you and we can provide knowledgeable input on how to setup your backups, files, and directories in order to get the most out of your system.

•    Review your data directories to make sure you see what is expected. A good example of this is if you zip or tar.gz your files, then upload them to a directory. If your files get added to the directory and not overwritten, an overage will occur.

•    Call a Sales Engineer and talk it out. Our Sales Engineers are available to make your experience at FastServers.Net enjoyable. They can assist you in providing more details about your backup service – whenever you need them.

•    If you DO NOT have backups taking place, DO NOT wait until it is too late!   Customers who have experienced this in the past will tell you that backups were “just a good idea.” But that was before they lost all their data. Now, these same customers will tell you that backups are a “necessity.” By being proactive, you will save yourself from a lot of grief. So protect your data. And should data loss occur, you will have the ability to restore your data!

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Originally written by Dave Young (www.youngcopy.com)

I have been tasked to write the company’s employee profiles. All 36 of them. As the FastServers.Net Professional Writer and Marketing/Public Relations Specialist, I think it is an exciting opportunity to be able to interview and write a customized profile for each employee. This is just one of the many incredible projects I get to work on at FastServers.Net. And it’s one where I really get to pull out all the creative processes and take our web site content to the next level.

A unique aspect of this particular project is that each profile is written to fill a complete web page, typically consisting of around ten paragraphs or more, depending on how much feedback I receive during the interview process. In each profile, I am giving you a lot of details on each employee that I think you will find interesting. A full web page for each employee says a lot about our company and what we are willing to do to communicate with you. It’s kind of like a “get to know us” project.

Posting employee profiles on our web site gives you an opportunity to learn about all the unique characteristics of the wonderful and talented employees we have on staff. You will find common traits among some of them, especially in specific groups such as the Server Support Engineers or the Sales Engineers. There are even commonalities among the members of the Management Team. But instead of me writing them in this newsletter, I encourage you to visit the profiles section of the FastServers.Net web site and see if you can identify the common characteristics. You will be surprised at some of the things our CEO told me during our interview. It’s quite engaging.

Also, I am periodically posting an entry in the “Fun Topics” category of the FastServers.Net BLOG on some of the interesting things I have learned about our employees. Take a few minutes to visit http://www.fastservers.net/blog/ and read my BLOG posts.

Think about this for a second – what other hosting company gives you a full web page on each of their employees. We think it provides a personal connection between our customers and our employees. Our employee profiles are written so you feel as if you are engaged in a conversation with each team member. We want you to get to know our team, what we think, and how we feel about our jobs, the company, our hobbies, and most importantly, you. What’s more, I am positive you will find that some of our employees have similar interests as you.

As you are reading these profiles, please let me know if you need more information about any of the employees I have posted so far.

Morning routines, most people have them, some more consistent than others. One thing that’s very consistent about my morning routine is first forcing my overweight Lab off the covers so I can escape the bed. Then I proceed to the computer. I quickly glance at e-mails, and pending verification that nothing blew up over night, I visit the online sports sections of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. (For those of you reading from the twin cities, The Dean and Shooter columns, specifically).

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