Sunday, September 30, 2012

EmailLargeFile customers get storage increase

June 2020 Update: this article is outdated as the Service has been completely redesigned in 2020.

EmailLargeFile.net is primarily a file transfer solution. We provide intelligent file delivery service and offer our customers ample storage for their files and data.

Why storage is important? Before a file can be submitted via Emaillargefile file transfer, it has to be uploaded and stored on our servers. We keep our customers' files until they delete them, unlike some of our competitors such as Mailbigfile which costs twice as much per month, but keeps files only for 28 days. Even so, many of our customers don't use much of the file storage space offered to them. For example, most of our professional accounts don't normally store 25 GB of files within their allocated space.

We carefully review the list of available options on a regular basis, but there are some of the upgrades that we are glad to offer to our clients right away. Today, we are increasing the available storage for all our new and existing Personal accounts from 5Gb to 7Gb. This should help our clients store and transfer more data, and will make us even more competitive on the market.

To review and compare the list of available options, see the subscription plans comparison chart here.



Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Alternative DNS hosting and Godaddy downtime

We, as many other businesses, are trying to keep our costs down to stay competitive on the market. We understand the importance of data storage reliability and data consistency. That's why we don't outsource server support, we maintain our datacenter and servers by our own staff and using our own resources.

Unfortunately, our attempt to cut costs on letting Godaddy take responsibility of our DNS (domain naming system) did not work as well.

As many of you probably read on CNN and other news web sites yesterday, Godaddy has been brought down by a massive denial of service attack. While we can certainly feel for Godaddy and their network engineers that had a hard day yesterday, we cannot afford being taken down during the busiest work hours.

We do consider our service unique and special. Understanding that we are not alone in the company of millions other web sites, does not make us feel comfortable at all. Our dedication goes to our customers at any cost, and we will not sit quietly waiting for another downfall of Godaddy or any other third party provider for that matter.

We are currently researching how Godaddy managed or rather didn't manage to hold the attack with their huge infrastructure and astronomical budgets. Of course it is almost impossible to tell exactly what happened, and it's pretty clear that Godaddy will never disclose any real details on that. Our preliminary conclusion is that they did not have enough redundancy at the network hardware level. Let their engineers do the work and rebuild what was not done properly in the first place.

Our next step is to research how we can prevent such a problem in the future. The answer seems to be simple. Stay independent, listen, learn, and be proactive. We are currently working on moving away the DNS and some of our domains to a different provider.


Update: Godaddy confirmed that there was no attack, there was an internal network problem. Most if not all owners of sites who were hosting with Godaddy at the time have received some compensation in the form of a month credit. Domain owners whose DNS was managed by Godaddy and which was broken for half a day did not receive anything.