We are very proud to announce the launch of the European division of Own Web Now Corp. After years of global success with ExchangeDefender and a large growth in our other lines of business in UK, Ireland, Germany, Greece, France, Italy and Spain the demand for an European line of business, and a native European network, made the following moves possible.

Effective July 1st, Own Web Now Corp is proud to start offering all our hosting services in Europe, starting with the following:

Exchange 2007 with 10 Gb Mailboxes by default, OwnWebNow Offsite Backups, SharePoint 3.0, Virtual hosting services for Web (Linux or Windows), SQL, FTP and email.

All services will be priced at identical levels to their United States counterparts but due to the further commoditization of server infrastructure solutions we are able to offer more storage better performance with services spread across the continent: United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Germany.

To comply with the new EU privacy laws, and avoid United States Patriot Act concerns, the European infrastructure is managed and located completely within the EU geographic limits.

With this move we are also establishing funding for IT community support in Europe. Stay tuned for details, further global expansion, new product announcements, centralized management and branding announcements and more over the next few days.

Please remember that our monthly conference call, one of many this year, is taking place tonight, Wednesday, January 16th at 4 PM EST (22:00 GMT, 2 PM PST, Jan 17 9:00 AM EDT/Sydney). We have found from previous conference calls that this time slot is the most attended compromise of time zones across our global client base and we will make every effort to record the conference call and post it for your listening pleasure if you are unable to attend.

The purpose of the call is to take feature requests for the upcoming Own Web Now Service Manager extension of Own Web Now Portal (Shockey Monkey) to streamline ordering, provisioning and initial support of our growing product lines. We will quickly discuss the features that we have already put into the product and would like to see what else might be helpful in the software to reduce the cost and time required to purchase and provision Own Web Now Products.

The conference call number is in the monthly Own Web Now News newsletter sent on January 5th. If you are unable to attend but still have a question or comment that you would like us to discuss, please email confcall@ownwebnow.com and we will consider adding it to the presentation. If you do not have the newsletter handy, you can get the dialin phone number from our support portal (on the front page announcements)

Note: This conference call is meant specifically for the discussion of the service manager feature set, we will not be able to answer questions or offer guidance regarding the schedules or features of our other products.

Over the weekend we completed our communications overhaul with an upgrade to the core of our network based around Exchange 2007 and Asterisk VoIP. We have upgraded our infrastructure to Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1, Asterisk (Trixbox) to the latest stable edition and we have also added the following components: Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft Responsepoint and Microsoft Livemeeting. We are also still in process of finalizing the SIP/IAX2 connectivity as we have brought another provider into the mix.

The above upgrade to our major communication systems was in order to help us connect better with you. These solutions will allow us to provide more personal and direct support, become more responsive and efficient. I hope you can be patient with us over the next day or two while the new phone numbers are programmed in and we get all our voicemails and voice prompts together.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

When stuff breaks (or when we intend to break stuff) you’ll hear about it first at our new NOC site:

http://www.ownwebnow.com/noc/

There are feeds, categories, upcoming graphs and charts and all sorts of helpful stuff that will help you work with us and stay on the same page. We had to publish this site ahead of schedule so there are many features that we will be introducing over the coming months but for the time being, OWN NOC is the best place to find out what’s going on. 

For the past eight months we have been testing our new support portal at https://support.ownwebnow.com and have had a lot of success in making sure support issues do not “fall off the table” as they tend to via email. Going forward, this will be the only way we will provide support, purchasing, cancellations and other account management.

Any mail sent to our previous support aliases will yield this automatic response:

*************************************
This is an automated message
*************************************

The address you sent an email to is not a monitored email address, your reply was destroyed.

Own Web Now Corp only provides support via our support portal at:
https://support.ownwebnow.com

If you have a support request or would like to update a support request please login to our support portal and create/update the support request directly. Doing so allows us to provide you with an SLA, guaranteed support request tracking, escalation and more.

Sincerely,
Own Web Now Corp Support Team
https://support.ownwebnow.com

Check out our blog:
http://www.ownwebnow.com/blog

There are several reasons we chose to eliminate the email support completely:

• We have no tracking of when/if a support request was emailed
• If the message is delayed because the support request was required to address a mail server issue we would get it far too late
• Clients would forget to provide updates
• Clients would keep the message thread going for support requests that were solved and were looking to address other issues
• E-mail is an insecure way of conducting e-commerce
• “Did you get my email?” <that they probably never sent>

There are far more reasons to drop email support but at the end of the day we needed a structured and fixed process of requesting support. At the moment there is only one way to get support, https://support.ownwebnow.com and we stand behind it with our SLA.

Thank you for doing business with us and I hope this change makes your support experience more enjoyable.

4:35 AM EST Update – Network shutdown proceeded as planned. The network recovery process is beginning. Please stand by as all the services are restored. Please be aware that we will not be able to work any Urgent or High priority cases while the maintenance cycle is active. We will resume regular SLA at noon EST. Please keep an eye on the blog as we update it throughout the morning.

10:51 AM EST Update - Powergrid maintenance complete, network maintenance complete, cage “shuffles” complete. Moving on to application layer testing.

1:21 AM EST, The day after update – All services, networks, systems and operations back to normal. We will provide additional details later, we’re also lobbying for a day off

As we prepare for the massive upgrades coming this weekend we are obviously testing systems and making intermediate changes to the network. As a result, over the next 48 hours you are likely to see some latency in DNS query results which virtually impact all other services such as backups, ExchangeDefender, virtual servers and everything else thats being brought online.

While you are unlikely to notice any of these changes directly, if you do see slight performance issues they are probably related to the maintenance work being done on our end.

We are extending the maintenance cycle window for July 21, 2007. Our regular maintenance cycle is from 3AM to 7AM EST but due to the number of systems going online this week we are going to have to extend that window until noon EST. We will follow up with full details of the work being done but suffice to say it is significant.

If you are not familiar with our maintenance cycle activities do not worry, they are routine and they happen every week. Generally they are things you would expect – reboots to add more memory, storage, reboot for software patch installation, etc. At times there are other items such as electrical or network maintenance.

This particular weekend involves nearly all of the above plus a significant upgrade to our core infrastructure of ExchangeDefender, offsite backups and virtual servers. We’re bringing online 3 new data centers to top it off so we wanted to give ourselves more time to get everything done right.

We have scheduled an emergency maintenance interval on our Offsite Backup System network for Wednesday, June 6th, 2007. We are adding new hardware, upgrading some of the software and replication systems, adding more equipment to the mix and extending the reporting functionality to offer more reporting and branding functionality to you and your clients.

The backup network will be unreachable to the public between 10 PM EST – 11 PM EST.

Furthermore, we will be moving certain users to a more scalable network storage system. Because this change affects a very small group of users and involves a more extended downtime, you will be notified directly with some contingency planning and preparation as we intend to make the move in off-peak hours during the weekend when backup activity and change management is low. While you will have the ability to retrieve data during this interval, you will not be able to store more data to it.

Thank you for your patience. Backups and proper disaster recovery planning are very important to us and we realize that the offsite component is the most important one, after all, it is the one you use for compliance and in case everything else disappears, so we’re doing all we can to make sure that data is there when you need it.

Vlad Mazek, CEO of Own Web Now Corp, is presenting to two small business user groups tonight on a variety of technology and business subjects Own Web Now Corp is involved in. If you’d like to attend the access is free, details below:

Tonight’s presentation is free, live over the web and starts at 7:30 PM EST. It ends at approximately midnight EST. Here is the preliminary schedule.

7:30 – 8:30 EST: Exchange 2007 Overview (Level 100)

8:30 – 9:00 EST: ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey (Level 0)

9:30 – Midnight: Virtualized Services (Level 200), Shockey Monkey, ExchangeDefender, and other tools we make (and why) that IT solution providers are using to make more money. These will be product demo’s, not sales pitches.

Is there anything else you’d like to hear? Since we’re pretty much inviting SBSers worldwide, is there something you’d like to see? See you tonight, livemeeting info below:

Meeting URL: Livemeeting Address

Meeting ID: D7QS3H

Meeting Key: bn6′%~P