So it turns out that we are sponsoring SkyCon this year. It’s looking fair promising and because a lot of people I know of from IRC, forums and just general Internet banter I took a closer look at it and decided that I’d do a talk for them. The least I could do, what with us getting all the PR on the run up to it and we’ll have a stand for the 3 days of the conference.

My talk is going to be based on some of the improvements that the OSS community has enabled us to do without spending wads and wads of cash on commercial products and also allowed us to cater for our needs more easily as we can modify/beat the program, programs into shape. I’m pretty excited and nervous about the whole thing as a) I’ve not done a lot of public speaking b) I’m a geek and not very much into humans, more so machines and c) I don’t want some demented kernel hacker asking me questions I can’t fricken answer

So are you going to SkyCon? If not, why the hell not? You do _realise_ that all the cool kids will be there?

Yep, a year has gone by. AS39122 was approved by ripe on 16th of the December 2005. On the same day our /20 was approved and the works were put into motion to seperate ourselves from our competitors and to reduce the overall running costs of the network while still being able to offer better service to our customers and allowing us to broaden our product range.

So in late Jan 06 we got all the equipment we needed to build our own network. We initially did a lot of testing with no customers on net. We then added a few customers to see how all the effort, time and planning would pay off. We’d only one provider for the first month, we were waiting for 8 weeks for Colt, who in the end couldn’t deliver within the rather generous timeframe we gave them of 8 weeks. We Joined INEX mid feb and we started peering with the various ISPs there. That was fun. I got to learn BGP the hardway, throw yourself in the deepend. I was always interested in the ins and outs of routing etc. It was a great fun learning all about bgp, as numbers, as macros, route maps, ibgp, ebgp, LIRs, PA and PI address space, ripe policies etc etc, I could go on for hours – needless to say we were set and ready to take on the market. At that stage we were about 10th in Ireland for hosting.

Groovy I say. We’re now number 2 in Ireland (or will be shortly, depending on what stats you read) and that only took us a year to achieve. We’ve over taken all our competitors, grown our colo and dedicated customer base to 300+ and we’ve got big plans for 2007.

I wanted to mention something about the upgrade we’re doing next week. it’s a very simple upgrade but the benifits are 10 fold. We’re removing some old switches from the network that are probably on their last legs and are causing a bottle neck in our network currently. All we have to do is repatch around 100 servers that were on the old infrastructure, this includes some of our shared servers which we plan to move later in the year to their own home alltogether. After the upgrade next Thursday evening we’ll have a fully meshed network, this means that we’ll have one of the most resiliant networks in Ireland today!

Anyway to close, as the title asks “What is next?” – well thats top secret right now , but if you would like virtual private servers, virtual dedicated servers or just a box to play with or test IPv6 as a college experiment or project then watch this space. As part of our expanding and improving product base we’ve got some very interesting new products with improved new features.

Oh and one final note. We’re the only Irish hosting company with native IPv6 support from customer, through our core and to the internet. We’ve substantial IPv6 transit and peering arrangements with several large ISPs; we are ready for the next generation of hosting services.