IMPORTANT SERVICE AVAILABILITY ANNOUNCEMENT

We're excited to announce that we have outgrown our current data center space and will be moving into twice the physical cage and rack space at the end of next week.

We are moving from our current northern San Jose location to the downtown San Jose data center owned and operated by our current provider - AboveNet/MFN.  Same virtually 100% uptime AboveNet network, same world-class Tier 1 data center facilities, same high-speed OC-192 national/international fiber optic network, and (most importantly) all the same TCP/IP addresses.

We have planned the move for Saturday, September 18, 2004 starting at 5:00PM PDT.  This time and date was chosen to minimize the impact on both our US and International customers. All servers and services currently located in San Jose including E-Mail, Web Hosting, and Co-location will be down for 4 to 6 hours while we transport everything to the new building and power-up in the larger space.

We anticipate that our downtime will probably be less but want to be conservative with our estimate.  Please note that only our San Jose data center equipment is moving.  Our redundant DNS and application servers located in our East Coast / New York data center and our Asian Support Center are not affected by this move and will continue to operate 24 x 7 as usual.

We apologize for this disruption and wish to remind our new clients that this is the first major scheduled (or unscheduled) downtime lasting over 1 hour in our entire 6 year history and are working hard to make the move as smooth as possible.

If you have any special needs or concerns, please contact us for more information and assistance.

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It's finally here!  Microsoft has released Windows XP Service Pack 2 - the most extensive update to Windows in many years.  XP Service Pack 2 is focused entirely on enhancing the security of desktop computers with new firewall features, code fixes, and security enhancements.

XP Service Pack 2 is free of charge - you can get it directly from Microsoft via Windows Update or by going to Microsoft's website and visiting the "download" area.

With such a dramatic upgrade, there has been a lot of publicity about whether you should or should not install XP SP2.  After carefully reading all the published reports in magazines and trade journals, following the online discussions in bulletin boards and forums, and consulting the information we are privy to directly from Microsoft as System Builders and Web Hosting Partners, we decided to to try it on a few of our office systems.

So far, so good.  Installation has been smooth and all the applications we use continue to run without any problems after installing SP2.  We're still learning the details of some of the new features, but the Internet Explorer pop-up blocker, the enhanced firewall, and the new Security Center have all been a pleasure to use.

Your experience may be different depending upon your hardware and applications (YMMV), but our advice is to go ahead and install it - but carefully.  Make sure you install it first on non-essential PC's and test it out before starting to upgrade every system you use.

To be more specific, don't upgrade the only PC you own and don't upgrade the PC you use to access your E-mail, run your accounting software, or any other business-critical function unless you have more than one computer.

As always, it is best to perform a complete system backup before attempting to upgrade so in the event of a major problem you can completely restore your system and lose nothing except your time.

(Note that Windows XP SP2 is for desktop systems, not servers - it has no impact on the operation of our web servers, E-Mail servers, database servers, etc.)

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The number one question we receive from new clients is "How do I get listed high up on the search engines"?  The question is always the same, but the answer keeps changing.

In the early days of the Internet the answer was simple: "Go to Yahoo and submit your site by clicking on the "Add URL" link on their homepage".  A year two later the answer became "Go to the top 10 search engines, such as Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, etc. and submit your site for inclusion". Don't we all long for those simpler times?

During the Dot Com explosion, getting to the top of search engines could mean the difference between making or losing money and everyone knew it.  Search engines starting taking money by charging for submission ("paid review", "paid inclusion", "express submission", etc.) and a whole new field of "Search Engine Optimization" experts - both people and software programs were developed to aid in the process of scoring higher.

Along the way, "meta tags" (the words present on every webpage but hidden from normal view) were considered the holy grail and creating, tweaking, scoring, and adjusting your meta tags was a specialized skill all to itself.

In a strange reversal of fortune, over the past few years most search engines have phased-out or greatly reduced their reliance on meta tags for determining the value of your website and the score or position you deserve for search results.

You may hear from your friendly neighborhood search engine guru (often a self-appointed expert) that meta tags are irrelevant and you do not need to even bother with them, so like most regular folks, you're probably totally confused at this point.

Based on our experience we'd like to offer our humble advice: Meta tags never hurt and sometimes help so don't omit them.  The "title" and "description" tags may no longer be used to determine your placement or score, but most search engines will still use them to create the abstract or summary description of your site that will be displayed when you are listed.

Meta tags should be concise, well-crafted, and specific to your business, product, or service.  Developing the exact text for your meta tags is a worthwhile experience.  Done properly, the same descriptions and phrases will be incorporated into all your sales and marketing activities - brochures, product briefs, customer presentations, sales info, etc. and therefore the effort is well spent.

Although the big search engines don't use keyword tags (they have been abused too much and have questionable value), some of the specialized and smaller engines still use them.  So spend a few minutes including keyword tags, but don't go crazy trying to jam hundreds of words and phrases into the tags - it won't help your score and it might hurt it.

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