Modwest Blog

A Holiday Message (and Gift!) from Modwest

Whichever holiday you celebrate, the team at Modwest would like to wish you a happy one! We look forward to serving you in the new year, and as a gesture of our appreciation, have decided to double our disk and bandwidth limits on our shared hosting Value plans and above. The new configurations will be applied immediately and automatically.

Also, some details about our phone support availability over the holidays:

• We'll be closed on December 25th and January 1st
• From December 24th to December 31st, phone support will be available M-F from 9-5PM (Mountain Time)

Naturally, operations staff will be tending to the servers as needed, and email support will be available throughout.

-JM

Relaxing on Monday

On Monday, September 3^rd (Labor Day in the US), we're sending the whole Modwest team home for a well-deserved day of relaxation. Regular phone support will resume at 9AM Eastern time on Tuesday. Our servers and switches, of course, will continue their diligent and dutiful labor, and rest assured the support & operations teams will still be available to assist with any urgent issues.  Thanks to the whole team; we'll be back in action on Tuesday.

Happy Sysadmin Day

July 27th, 2007 is System Administrator Appreciation Day.

For the last several years, our most important systems administration work has been performed by Mike, our Operations Manager, and Tom, our Systems Engineer. Tom and Mike are responsible for big-picture infrastructure planning, setting up new servers, workstations, and services, and being generally responsible for the continuous monitoring, maintenance, and improvement of our technical infrastructure. On top of that, these guys get paged at absolutely any time of the day or night, 365 days a year, about:

• hard drive failures
• spam outbreaks
• hacker attacks
• servers running out of disk space
• network cards going bad
• datacenter temperature alarms
• bandwidth provider interruptions
• software failures
• etc etc

Despite everything that can (and unavoidably does) go wrong, I'm proud of the highly reliable hosting we provide, which is largely due to the efforts of our system administration/Operations team.

-JM

 

Modwest is Hiring!

We've just updated our jobs page to better reflect a couple positions for which we'd like to hire this summer: a PHP/MySQL code ninja, and a rockstar sysadmin with deep and broad expertise in Linux, networks, hardware, and software. Both positions are full-time in Missoula, MT and include benefits. For full descriptions, our jobs page is the place to be.

-JM

Carbon Calculator

First, an introduction: I'm Jody Tate, the web production manager for Modwest. That's a long title that means, in short, that I'm generally your first point of contact at Modwest when you'd like us to build a website from scratch or if you just need a phone number updated on your current site.

I wanted to write today about the Carbon Calculator recently launched by one of our development clients, Friends of the Forest, a program of the National Forest Foundation, also one of our clients.

We developed the calculator for them over the last several months, but I hesitate to say we. I watched as Colin McCann and Dustin York, two of our developers who specialize in making PHP and MySQL sing in harmony, pulled off the programming. Cole Moeller, another member of our team, designed the calculator logo.

You can read a bit more about our development team and peek at some of our other projects on our design site. The Carbon Calculator is a great example of the sort of work we do in the web design and development department, but it's just one of a ton of projects we have in the works. I'll be posting more about those soon, so check back for updates.

-Jody

Modwest in Motion

We've recently had the honor of winning the Transportation Best Practices award presented by Missoula in Motion,  a program "designed to help local businesses, institutions and individuals address transportation issues within the Missoula community."

Part of the promotion of the program involves videos of the winners, and a local television crew shot and produced this two-minute piece, which features several of us talking about how we get to work in the morning. Speaking of that, Bike-Walk-Bus week is coming up...

Howdy! And Network maintenance tonight

An introduction first - I'm John Masterson, a Modwest co-founder and general overseer of Support and Operations around here.

As recently announced in OnSite and our Status Page, we'll be taking our network offline briefly this evening for a router upgrade. This affects "everything": shared accounts, managed servers, and our new VPS accounts. Maintenance begins at 11PM Eastern Time and will last from 15-30 minutes.

This is a vendor-recommended upgrade from Juniper and offers numerous fixes and features, including "80,000 microsecond packet buffers", "ultimate-hop popping", and other network sorcery that ensures continued secure, reliable communication between your visitors' browsers, and our servers.