The puppy is now in safe hands, and will be evaluated by our vet. There is a small potential that is has Femoral head ostectomy (FHO) and will need surgery.

More updates soon, in the mean time follow us on twitter;
@klenert
@reneeclemetns

and donate to Curly Tail Pug Resume to help all of our dog find a great home.

ShareThis

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, from the early days of outbrain we chose not to base our system serving on a cloud solution and establish our own serving farm. I guess it is not because we did not know that cloud exist or was afraid to try cloud. I think it was because we were somehow funded and as graduates of big internet companies we thought that if we want this company be as big we have to start our infrastructure the way the big ones start – with our Owned and Operated data center.

Datacenter That doesn’t mean you own the facility but when you start it you buy your own hardware and host it with some Colocation facility vendor. There are lots of such vendors with different sizes and locations. Most of them gives very much the standard service of power, network, security, power redundancy,etc… but I want to talk here about 2 aspects that are most important and makes our Colocation supplier exceptional – Serviceability and Professionalism.

It’s been almost 2 years now that we are working with Atlantic Metro Communications (AMC) as our Colocation vendor. We have been hosted somewhere else before and forced to move in a short notice. We have also tried Amazon AWS for short period and got disappointed but now after long enough with AMC and handling almost 20X growth in our traffic I can recommend these guys to you all.

The reasons is the 2 factors that made them so exceptional and a good fit for company like outbrain:

* Best customer service – Like outbrain, for the AMC staff, customer satisfaction is a core value. Like an integral part in the DNA. Yes, they do have a proper ticketing system and a proper NOC like any other vendor, but you can also submit a ticket or send a mail and get an immediate reply, in the middle of the night from Steve Klenert, their CEO, taking care of the problem or answering one of your questions. You can see that with all AMC staff which is always eager to help and share from their experience and knowledge, even when the case is not in their direct responsibility. For a CTO of a company located across the ocean from his Datacenter, this is super helpful.

* Being professional- knowledge in the technology zone is always something you can argue about. I believe no one is perfect and knows it all. However, there is something that makes a professional staff… mania for solving problems. When it comes to handling internet WAN and LAN networks, it is such a huge domain that nearly every problem is different from the other. Experts with good understanding in this domain and enthusiasm for solving each problem will eventually nail it and solve it. That’s one of the things I see in AMC staff, these are guys I can count on for solving problems and will not give me answers like “That’s vendor X problem, nothing we can do about it”.

outbrain is growing fast and so does our infrastructure I’m pretty sure AMC will keep being on our help in the foreseeable future.

One word for you, when you want to choose a colocation vendor, contact @klenert and see what he has to offer, you’ll not regret it.

www.klenert.net
www.outbrain.com
www.atlanticmetro.net

To download the outbrain rating widget for our blog go here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/outbrain/

ShareThis

We arrived at Mashable’s New Year NYC Networking Event at 212 Restaurant and Bar last night around 7:30, prepared to spread the good news of our first product launch, Kindling. Much to our surprise, there was a pretty significant line already forming. We thought, ok – cool, we’ll just wait in line with everybody else and chit chat to pass the time. Who says you can’t wait and network at the same time? Someone started passing out cookies (always a plus). At this point it’s about 10 degrees on 65th Street. After a few minutes, word gets out that the restaurant is full to capacity and no one is allowed to enter until more people leave. Needless to say, this was not good news.

This is when things started to get interesting. We were already with a great group of people that we wanted to hang out with and get to know better, we just needed warmth, space and alcohol. There was clearly only one option in this scenario: host an alternative party.

Jen, our in-house, one-woman, PR-machine took this task very seriously and paired up with someone else (Frederick) who was standing in line. They immediately started scouting the area for bars. The area seemed to lack a nightlife… all they could find was a hair salon called “Blow” (and even if it was a bar, probably wasn’t the kind of place we were looking for, as comically noted by Frederick). Meanwhile, Rich was searching the Internet on his iPhone and had a short list of possibilities, one of which was the Carriage House, a semi-short walk away. We knew this was our place. Jen and Chris rounded up the troops and started corralling everyone downtown. Once the word got out, the masses took followed us towards our new prospect of a bar. It was hard to tell at the time, but there appeared to be a steady stream of people up and down the sidewalk. We were almost to the bar when we were split up by a miscalculated green light. This is where we really bonded; it was cold, the walk was longer than we thought, and the Carriage House wasn’t exactly where the Internet promised it would be. Doubt was starting to set in and we feared losing some of the group, but Jen quelled the dissension and we forged on.

When we finally arrived at the Carriage House, it was like walking into heaven. Aside from finding warmth, it was the perfect place. There was empty space in the back of an otherwise busy bar and it just seemed to be waiting for us to arrive. We coordinated with the hostess and told her to direct anyone looking for the Mashable event towards the back. When we saw the long line of people streaming in, it finally hit us. We were hosting a party!

There were so many amazing people there. Between Twitter and word of mouth, the word had spread and Mashable’s own Adam Hirsch even joined us for awhile. What was particularly surprising was the sheer diversity of reasons that people came to last night’s event. Some were affected by the recession, some were scouting new talent, some were pandering their recent inventions to the Tech World Elite. There were writers and accountants and programmers and bloggers and radio DJs and VCs. Jeremy showed photos of his 10-month old daughter. Lucius demonstrated a recent iPhone app he’d written. Lauren crossed out the info on her old business cards and scribbled her new info on the backs. Our own Josh challenged people to games of darts and snapped some pictures on the side. In short, it was exactly the way you want a networking to be: connective.

The night was great for a variety of reasons, but mainly because of the people. We could have thrown in the towel and headed home, but we soldiered on, made friends and new connections. But we couldn’t have done it without the goodwill of the others; we were excited to have spontaneously gathered a group of new friends.

To put a perfect end to a perfect story, the Carriage House sent us flowers this morning…seriously, they did. Big thanks to the Carriage House who was not expecting us, but took great care of us. We had a fantastic time!

ShareThis

The North American Internet exchange point (IXP) business – public peering – is largely dominated by Equinix, with some localized competition from Switch and Data (Palo Alto, New York), Telx (Atlanta, Phoenix), CRG West (various) and Terremark (Miami). In most cases, the winning strategy is to be where Equinix isn’t – Silicon Valley is an exception because PAIX was there first. It’s not that there isn’t enough interconnection business for two locations – it’s that in the US, most traffic is privately interconnected, leaving a relatively modest amount for public IXP interconnection. That traffic and money is best concentrated, rather than distributed.

That thought comes to mind in light of some interesting news regarding the ChiX IXP located at 350 Cermak (suite 240) in Chicago. Sharp-eyed readers will recognize that building as the site of Equinix’s CH1 and CH2 facilities, on floors 5 and 6. Telx also has a meet me room in the facility. The news is that Tiscali is offering remote peering service – essentially VPN transport services – to allow folks in other facilities to access the ChiX switch.

To read the full story, login to your http://www.t1r.com/ account .

ShareThis

We had a great time.

See you at the next event.

ShareThis