We have decided to co-locate our servers at the Northeast Data Vault in Marlborough, MA.

The servers involved in the move include our mail servers, web servers, Java application servers, radius servers and remote access servers.

The Northeast Data Vault is New England's leading co-location center. Internet access to the data center is provided by AT&T, Conversent Communications, C2C Fiber, E-xpedient, NEESCom, RCN

Service provided by Northeast Data Vault is highly reliable, guaranteeing 99.99% uptime.

The Boston Marathon's web site has been hosted at this data center for the past four years. This year they served over 6 million page views over a 6-hour period.

We also plan on co-locating servers in Texas and California before the end of 2005.

Like every other ISP in the world, our mail servers continue to get pummeled by spam.

We now average over 6,000 spam messages every hour, 24 hours a day.

During the most recent spike, we processed over 15,000 spam messages in one hour.

The amount of legitimate mail we receive in an entire day is around 2,000

messages, or roughly 100 messages per hour.

That means we process 60 spam messages for every single legitimate email.

We are preparing a new mail server in preparation for the move to the Northeast Data Vault.

The new mail server will provide several improved

services to our current mail service, including both POP3 and IMAP service in clear text and secure modes.

We are also investigating several new WebMail and

Autoresponder interfaces. The new WebMail interface will allow you to keep an address book on the server and enable you to send attachments with your messages.

The new mail server is planned to replace our current mail servers sometime in January 2005.

It was a busy month at the help desk!

Most calls were for setup information and instructions on how to receive email.

If you ever need help, please select tech support (Option 2) if you call our main office. This

will enable you to get our dialup access numbers, email settings or our toll-free help desk number.

Please remember, our help desk team is available to you 24 hours a day and the direct, toll free number is
877-221-2116.

This was a relatively quiet month on the network.

Our upstream providers reported no outages and our servers had no downtime.

We are still working on migrating our web hosting customers' sites and email over to the H-Sphere web

hosting platform. This migration will continue to be the primary focus of our efforts over the next two months.

Don is busy building new servers for our H-Sphere cluster and planning for the servers destined for the data center.

Are you pleased with our service? Do you know someone who is unhappy with their current Internet or On-line service?

Why not do them and yourself a favor?

Just recommend our service. If they subscribe, we'll give you a free month of access!

They will appreciate your advice and you'll save a little money.

Again this month, several subscribers are getting their access in October for free - just by referring new subscribers.

Everybody wins!