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NewsLetter
SECTION I —Anniversary Specials for April and May SOVERNET CELEBRATES 5 YEARS! We are celebrating our Fifth Anniversary with an exciting assortment of Birthday Specials. Available throughout the months of April and May, these specials are our way of showing you our appreciation for your continued support and patronage. Dialup customers wishing to prepay their accounts during this period may take advantage of increased discounts. Accounts pre-paid twelve (12) months in advance will be discounted 20% off our standard rates (normally 10%). During this period, we are also offering a 30% discount on accounts pre-paid 24 months in advance! Folks with remaining time on previously pre-paid plans may take advantage of this by extending their current term to 12 or 24 months. These discounts can add up to more than 7 FREE months of access service! Please send email to specials@sover.net to find out more. We also have a variety of specials available to Full-time Dialup and Dedicated customers interested in signing 12 and 24 month contracts during April and May. Please contact our sales team for more service-specific information. Our Business SDSL pricing has been substantially lowered, and while this change goes beyond the "specials" period of April and May, we are offering setup and equipment deals during this time. Details on any of these specials are available by sending email to sales@sover.net, or by calling our toll free sales line at (877) 877-2120. Stop by either our Burlington or Bellows Falls offices during the next couple of months to join in the fun!
SECTION II —Our Website Has Been Updated! As you know by now, the year 2000 marks our Fifth Anniversary. It seems, therefore, an appropriate time to revamp the site—in celebration, and in appreciation for your continued support. We hope you'll find that the new page is not only more attractive, but easier to navigate as well. One important change to be aware of—The "Customer Web Interface" is now referred to as "Account Tools" which seems much less of a mouthful. The Account Tools can still be accessed from the front page of the site. For more information regarding changes to the site, be sure to visit our "Welcome" page at: http://www.sover.net/start Maintaining a site that is both informative and a useful tool to our customers is our ultimate goal and we expect to tweak the new site here and there on a continuing basis towards this end. Please be sure to share your feedback with us.
SECTION III —Acceptable Use Policy Now Online There has been a lot of media attention given to matters of Internet security and abusive usage of late. We have always taken a strong stand against the sending of unsolicited bulk email (spam) and other forms of Internet abuse. Our Acceptable Use Policy defines appropriate behaviors and details penalties for misuse of a SoVerNet account. This information is of great relevance to all SoVerNet customers so please be sure to read the Acceptable Use Policy at: http://www.sover.net/docs/acceptableuse.html Fighting Internet abuse is a community effort and SoVerNet is proud to be part of the solution.
SECTION IV —Reminders! Toll-free Technical Support & Account Management Tools Here at SoVerNet we're always hard at work looking for ways to offer greater convenience and flexibility in maintaining your account. Some recent enhancements bear reiteration. Our Technical Support Team can now be reached via a toll-free call. Use 8776SOVERN (877-676-8376) for direct, toll-free access to our Support Technicians 9am to 5pm Monday and Friday, 9am to 7pm Tuesday through Thursday and 9am to 1pm on Saturdays (or leave voice-mail anytime for a support call-back). Also, if you haven't done so already, be sure to check out our online Account Tools for an ever expanding array of management utilities: http://www.sover.net/tools Among the resources to be found in this secure area of our website are tools for sending and reading email online, changing your password, checking your disk usage on the mail, web and shell servers, implementing or removing email forwarding, requesting email only accounts and accessing the complete Numbers List. We will be adding several new tools and expanding the functionality of existing utilities over the coming months so keep your eyes peeled for exciting announcements. As always, your feedback is encouraged and helps us to plan future enhancements.
SECTION V —A Few Words On Maintenance A couple of years ago, SoVerNet made a commitment to our customers to keep you informed of any outages, whether unexpected or as a result of scheduled maintenance. While the overwhelming majority of maintenance results in minor outages affecting only a small handful of customers, the Announcements mailing list allows all customers to keep informed so that no one is caught off guard. We like to keep these announcements short and to the point so we thought we'd take this opportunity to explain in greater detail what the most common types of maintenance consist of and address a few maintenance related questions that we receive from time to time. WARNING -- This section will either be fascinating or make your eyes glaze over depending on your level of interest ;) This section is purely informational so don't hesitate to move on to the next section if you find it's not for you! The most common type of weekly maintenance relates to the application of patches and upgrades to our servers. All of our servers, such as the mail servers, the web servers, the authentication servers and name servers are UNIX-based. The reboots are under taken to apply patches and upgrades which BSDI releases on a regular basis. These patches and upgrades may address security concerns (keeping one step ahead of the hackers ;), address known bugs, or upgrade various utilities such as the email program Pine. By applying these patches and upgrades as they are released, we insure that our servers are always up to date which means they are secure and dependable. Generally speaking, these server reboots should not result in dropped connections. More typically, what one might find is that he or she might not be able to connect to the mail server for a period of about 4 minutes, for example. Because many of the servers provide redundancy with one another, care is taken to reboot them in a sensible fashion. For example, while the primary name server is being rebooted, customers should be able to obtain DNS resolution from the secondary name server. This does not hold true for all services, however. Your mailbox, for instance, lives on a specific server and is inaccessible during the reboot. Some maintenance will indeed result in dropped connections, though these events are less common and generally geographically isolated. POP (Point Of Presence) maintenance often involves the rebooting of chassis or resetting of modem cards in order to upgrade software (upgrades from the modem manufacturers usually address known bugs), fix hung modems, or expand capacity. Announcements for this sort of maintenance will generally specify which region(s) is likely to be affected by the event. Many customers have also inquired as to the reasons for our selection of a regular Thursday AM maintenance window. Obviously, having a regularly scheduled maintenance window allows us to plan maintenance in advance, reduce planned outages, and allow customers to work around any work that might affect them. Past experience has shown that a 6:00 - 8:00 AM maintenance window is preferable to an earlier window such as one starting at 2:00 AM. This may seem counter-intuitive but the later window has several advantages. For one, our engineers are at the start of their shifts so that they may address any potential problems that arise. While maintenance usually occurs without event, when problems do arise, they are more likely to be caught immediately as customers are starting their day and can report any problems that may not be obvious from our end. Furthermore, should the need arise, our engineers are able to get in touch with vender support technicians.
SECTION VI —Coming Attractions! Having reached the ripe old age of 5, we're not about to slow down! Here's a sneak peak at some of the exciting new services and enhancements we're working on for the coming months.
Keep your eyes peeled for announcements as these, and other services are rolled out in the coming months!
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