Aside from being punished before ever proven guilty, this ignorance of technology is rife with unintended consequences. Since the passage of the DMCA in 1998, XMission has been forced to act as police, investigator, judge, and jury in copyright claims that are emailed to our abuse@xmission.com address. We have seen everything from recording company robots spewing notices based on textual matches to businesses trying to cause problems for their competition. Not to mention the number of lunatics that waste our time with their baseless accusations. The unintended consequences of the DMCA is that it had a direct effect on the cost of doing business that copyright claimers do not have to bear. If Sony was charged 10 cents for every email they sent us, they’d probably think twice before handing it the task off to a software robot.

PIPA/SOPA will do nothing to prevent copyright infringement on the Internet. Instead, they will fracture the legal use of the DNS system and drive criminals to more obscure methods that will be harder for investigators to track. This is the nature of censorship on the Internet. As John Parry Barlow said, “The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.”

The only way to control the Internet, as China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, and Iran have learned, is to shut it down altogether. Even when you do that, it would have to be shut down world-wide before you really stop information from moving. I hate to see the USA follow the leads of these despots, but XMission will continue to fight for a free and unfettered Internet as it always has. Over the past 18 years of business, XMission has fought a number of bad Internet bills in Utah and nationally. We have advocated for Internet privacy rights as “papers and effects” under the 4th Amendment and turned away all requests for information that did not fit jurisdiction or the definition of a proper warrant.

In spite of my own office-seeking, I have tried to keep XMission and my representation of XMission as apolitical as possible. Yet when it comes to the question of keeping the Internet unrestricted and unregulated, XMission’s voice has been clear. When the U.S.S.R. fell in 1991, I read first-hand accounts on Usenet as it happened. The Internet then was an embryonic force that has matured to bring down despots through communication. Governmental attempts to control the Internet are not new, and neither is my nor XMission’s commitment to fight them.

In recent years, XMission has greatly expanded our focus on business products, including colocation, advanced web hosting (with our Stackable cloud product), hosted email (with Zimbra), and business telephony. As those products matured, it was only a matter of time before we saw the need to perform this audit, especially as enterprise clients started to look more seriously at XMission as a vendor. While we are a privately held company, and therefore have no Sarbanes Oxley compliancy concerns ourselves, we recognized that compliance sensitive companies often require SSAE 16 certification, which include publicly-traded enterprises, financial firms, and healthcare organizations.

Ultimately, I think that all of the work we did in preparation for the audit brought about many positive changes. While we have done many things related to IT security for years not only due to our own commitment to best practices but also to maintain PCI compliancy, we took this opportunity to review and refine our policies and procedures. We performed a new risk assessment and found better ways to mitigate, if not outright prevent, a few more potential issues. We had some productive conversations and better organized our documentation. All in all, the process brought renewed rigor and focus to things that warrant close scrutiny on an annual basis.

In order to complete the audit, XMission management developed rigorous internal control objectives to support first-class data center, hosting and networking management services. You can think of internal controls as the processes by which an organization manages its people and systems. It is how a business conducts business, day to day. These controls should be closely aligned with an entity’s goals and objectives. When an outside auditor comes in, they first review the organization’s control objectives to determine if they appear to be reasonable and then secondly test their processes and see if the entity reliably meets those objectives. Professing best practices isn’t enough; the proof is in the pudding. And since we chose a type 2 audit, we were required to prove the operating effectiveness of our internal controls throughout the audit period. Abiding by new requirements under SSAE 16, the report also contains a written assertion from management regarding the systems and a services auditor’s opinion letter.

An SSAE 16 audit report provides a framework for a service organization to have an outside entity examine their internal controls, which can then be provided to its enterprise clients. Therefore, an SSAE 16 certification assures new and existing customers that XMission’s policies and procedures are sound and that their critical Internet services and data are secure. Colocation and Stackable customers can request a copy of our audit report, which should make it easier for them to pass their own SSAE 16 audit. If anything is missing which could help them with their own audit, or better set them at ease regarding the products they purchase from XMission, we gladly welcome such requests. We have already started to evaluate how we will expand the scope in next year’s audit.

Our audit was conducted by CPA firm A-lign, who specializes in these audits for IT firms. SSAE 16 replaces the previous industry standard, SAS 70 and brings the US closer to the international standard, ISAE 3402.

For more information, please visit xmission.com/SSAE16.

Grant Sperry

XMission VP of Operations

For more than eleven years, XMission has proudly sponsored the Utah Arts Festival. This year’s festival kicks off today at Library Square (June 23-26) with XMission once again presenting the popular Sponsor Patio.

Our advanced hosting division, Stackable, now hosts the Utah Arts Festival website (designed by our good friends over at Third Sun Productions). If you require festival information, ticket information, or want to make a donation, their beautiful site has everything you need.

For the first time, our 400 S. window display features Utah Arts Festival graphics as well as digital art by local artists. Stop by (or drive by) and check out our colorful windows on your way to and from the festival!

XMission also provides free wireless access to the Salt Lake Main Library and Library Plaza. If you need to get out of the heat to check your email or update Facebook, we now have a very robust connection for you to use.

Enjoy the 2011 Utah Arts Festival!

It’s science fair season in Utah schools and XMission is again sponsoring the Salt Lake Valley Science & Engineering Fair on March 22-25 at the University of Utah. Each year, the Fair features the best young Utah scientists in grades 5 to 12. Students present their experiments and compete for a chance to represent Utah at the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair.

Local companies, including XMission, support the Fair by volunteering, donating needed funds, providing door prizes, and offering scholarships and grants. Last year, five Grand Award-winning seniors received $80,000 scholarships from Westminster College. Each year, our own Pete Ashdown judges the Fair and awards students the XMission Technology Award (including a fancy Newton’s Cradle) for best use of technology and the Internet.

Students who want to take their discoveries online may be interested in the Google Global Science Fair. Google accepts entries from any full-time students, ages 13 to 18. Students can submit entries starting from now until April 4. Prizes include National Geographic Expeditions and Google scholarships.

Your kids’ scary experiments in the fridge could pay off big! Good luck to all of the young scientists out there.

In addition, I have stood against attempts to censor or restrict the Internet by state and federal governments by advocating for the protection of the open Internet. In spite of my recent candidacy as a Democrat running for U.S. Senate, I have found overwhelming non-partisan support for keeping the fingers of government out of controlling, censoring, or monitoring the Internet.

Protecting American constitutional rights is not the same as harboring illegal activity. XMission has repeatedly cooperated with law-enforcement provided we are served with a proper warrant, signed by a judge, that is specific in demand. I do not support wholesale spying on my network, nor will I ever. I would rather shut down XMission than allow the government to use it as a tool for violating privacy otherwise guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment.

While some ISPs cower at threats, XMission stands against them. While some seek to control or censor the Internet, we fight to protect its freedom. Through transparency, there is accountability, and the Internet remains a unique technology for revealing despotic and despicable acts. It should be protected. As one of the few, if not the the only remaining American ISP that believes this, I ask you to consider our services and support XMission. If you are already an XMission customer, thank you.

Big thanks to all of our artists who submitted work for XMission’s Digital Display Contest. We received so many creative and beautiful pieces and were thrilled to see them on our tubes at night.

After reviewing the popular votes, and making their own final decisions, our judges have concluded that the Digital Display Contest winner is:

“Summertime” by Bryce Buchanan

Congratulations Bryce!

XMission will continue to rotate all of the submissions on our display in the coming weeks and months. To see the animations at their LED finest, you will want to drive or walk by in the late evening.

If you have any other animations that you would like us to include in the rotation just for fun, please feel free to send those to marketing@xmission.com

Features include over-the-air synchronization of mail, address book, and calendar in the native BlackBerry UI
; the ability to search messages by content; management of calendar events, including meeting accept or decline; and attachment view.

While beta testing this product, XMission will give the first 50 Blackberry subscribers three months for FREE just by mentioning this post. Plus, no setup fee and no monthly fees means you keep $20 in your pocket per user.

If you already have XMission’s Standard or Base Email Hosting, we will upgrade you to Premium for one month, for free. This offer applies to any of our current customers. New customers get their first month of Premium Email Hosting for free as well.

BlackBerry integration requires “Enterprise Data” on the BlackBerry phone plan, and XMission’s Premium Email Hosting service (powered by Zimbra).

Please call (801-539-0852 / 877-964-7746) or email our sales team with any questions you may have about XMission Email Hosting or BlackBerry services.

Find useful tips, tricks, and how-to videos on XMission’s Zimbra Hosted Email support wiki.

The Pride festival is this weekend and those who count themselves among the gay, or the gay friendly are getting excited.  The tents and fencing around the City/County building festival grounds started going up a few days ago and friends are already making plans to celebrate.  Its been nothing but Pride weekend event advertising on Facebook for the last 2 weeks and the local a(A)lternative press have been running ads for all sorts of ancillary parties, club nights and events for a month.  And while there are many unofficial events, the festival proper has a deep schedule of things to see and do throughout the weekend.

I’ve heard from some people that the Salt Lake Pride is one of the biggest in the country.  Having never been to one outside of the state of Utah I wouldn’t know.  What I do know is that we have an amazing gay community in this city, and one that has been reflected here at XMission stretching back nearly to the dawn of the company in 1993.  I’d like to thank Pete Ashdown for cultivating such an accepting and diverse workplace at XMission (a ‘proud’ sponsor of Pride!), and I’d like to thank my gay coworkers and friends – Harley, Roger, Matt, Jeff, Chris and Mikey especially – for making Salt Lake City a much more vibrant place to work and live!

I have to admit, I wasn’t always a fan of soccer (football!).  Growing up I wasn’t the most in shape kid in the neighborhood so when my parents signed me up for a local city league it was like torture.  I dreaded practice and I hated games… all that running!  Later I played indoor soccer, but our teams weren’t ever very good (probably because I sucked) and so soccer never clicked with me.  Based on these early experiences I carried a passive indifference to the sport with me all the way through my twenties.

Years later while working here at XMission, I had seen several of my coworkers crowded around the big screen in the break room avidly watching various European matches of teams I’d never heard of and considered them with bewilderment.   I’m also pretty sure I openly mocked them for their dedication to the sport on a few occasions.  But then something happened.  I found out XMission was sponsoring the newly formed Real Salt Lake team.  Part of the package included tickets to every home game that were up for grabs for those employees who were interested.  As it turned out, the diehards here already had seasons which decreased the ratio of employees to tickets down to a manageable level.  Never one to turn down a free anything (I previously had spent several boring Sundays watching Buzz games while we were sponsoring that team.  Never underestimate the entertainment value of cheering on the first base coach when the action of Triple A baseball fails to impress!) I signed up for a couple of games.

Because I had no clue about the rules of the MLS, I brought along a friend who had played and enjoyed way more soccer than I had and was glad to come along and babysit me through my first live match.  I honestly didn’t think I was going to enjoy it, outside of the ‘hey its something to do on a Saturday afternoon’, but by the end of the first half I was hooked.  I started to see why this sport was so addictive.  I won’t bore you with the interim details but by the end of that season I was watching away games at bars, following other teams and I had even gone so far as to purchase the Sega game ‘Football Manager‘ so I could get my fix during the week between games.

Even though now I was enjoying soccer I still hadn’t gotten into the European leagues, and the concept of callups, national teams U-21 and U-17 was still a foreign (cough) concept to me.  Feeling the World Cup buzz though, I decided to sign up for FoxSoccer.tv to start to educate myself on the teams and players the US National team would be facing in South Africa this June.  One of the first matches I decided to watch was a Semi-Final (I think) UEFA Champions League game between Manchester United and Bayern München.  Manchester United dominated in the first half, scoring three times to Bayern München’s single goal.  After the half though Bayern was a team on a mission.  Tightly focused, they turned the momentum of the game around and kept Manchester on the defense for the rest of the game.  Although they were pressing the attack they only converted that momentum into a single goal and at the buzzer the score was Manchester United 3, Bayern München 2.

And this is where things got weird.  Manchester United walked off the field with their heads down, dejected, frustrated and upset, while Bayern München was dancing in the field and participating in group cheers with the small section of away fans that had taken up residence in the upper stadium.  Had I misjudged which team was which the entire match?  I felt a little embarrassed, even though nobody could even have been aware of my confusion.  Why was the winning team sad and the losing team obviously celebrating a grand victory?  I decided to check out the uniform patches and sure enough they matched up.  I was reading the score correctly.  Clearly more research was required.

I headed over to the ufea.com site and started poking around.  After a couple of minutes I found this page http://www.uefa.com/uefachampionsleague/matches/index.html which contained a sidebar explaining the rules of the tournament.  As it turns out, the matches were decided by most goals scored in a 2 game set.  Apparently Bayern had scored more goals in their previous meeting and had come out on top, even with the loss.  Suddenly I understood:  I was in unexplored territory, the rules of the MLS completely failing to prepare for the new world of international soccer (football!) that lay before me.

The final match in the UEFA Champions League tournament is this Saturday 5-19-2010 at 12:30 MST and you can bet I will be watching it live.  The soccer bug has bitten again.  The World Cup is coming up quick and I will be taking in as many games as I can.  You might even see me at a pub cheering for the US National team, or simply enjoying a high-caliber game of the worlds most popular sport.  I’ll be the guy in the jersey having a blast.

For the past two years, members of our research and development team (Jason Hansen, Mike Place, and Eric Waters) have spent their days and nights working on a new premium web hosting service for XMission. Because of their hard work and the direction of our fearless leader, Pete Ashdown, we are very proud to announce our new hosting division, Stackable.

Traditionally, web hosts offered inexpensive, yet static hosting packages. Eventually, more expensive options arose but left web developers with little control and increased complexity. Now, companies like Stackable strive to offer a more developer-centric service that integrates the development and testing processes into web hosting.

Stackable responds to a number of challenges faced by web developers. For example:

1. Development Challenge: Scalability
   Developers must either purchase excess resources (storage, memory, bandwidth, hardware) in order to anticipate growth, or find themselves having too few resources when they require them. Often, scaling during a sudden influx of traffic can mean hours or even days of downtime.
   
   Stackable’s response:
   
   Fully scalable – both horizontally and vertically.
   Developers can instantly increase or decrease the resources provisioned for their sites as demand increases or decreases. Stackable allows developers to scale horizontally as well as vertically. For example, increase your site’s capacity in moments by adding memory from the Stackable control panel. If a developer prefers horizontal scaling, they can purchase four 256MB containers instead of a single 1GB container, Stackable will charge them for the same amount. Stackable is one of only a handful of providers that charge the same price for horizontal and vertical scaling.

   Utility Billing – Billed by the day
   Stackable will bill developers only for the resources they consume. For example, they may begin by purchasing a single container (256MB, which includes 1TB bandwidth, and 50GB storage). If they require additional resources for three days out of the month, they can increase the size of their container just for those three days and then reduce it back for the remainder of the month. Stackable will only charge developers for the resources they use per day no matter how often they need to increase and decrease their consumption during a billing cycle.

2. Development Challenge: Testing
   Developers cannot always insure that code developed on their workstation will work when uploaded to the hosting provider because of different environmental variables, such as software versions. Setting up a useful testing environment can be difficult and time-consuming. Developers often have to show test versions of sites which may or may not work as well in a live environment or might be difficult to move over.
   Stackable’s response:
   Real-world Testing
   Stackable allows developers to test website functionality on the live server, but using a private URL. This gives web developers the chance to test and refine their website in an environment identical to that of the live web server. Testing on Stackable means that developers will not experience any surprises when they deploy their site, giving them more confidence and security.

   Easy client demos
   Developers can easily create multiple versions of a website on Stackable, and then, with a single click, deploy a chosen version into production. For example, a developer may have three versions of a website to show to a client. The developer can show the client all three versions on Stackable, using private URLs. The client could select the preferred version, and then the developer could effortlessly promote that version to the live, public site. Because the IP address of the tested site does not change, developers will not have to wait for DNS updates. This functionality also works well for businesses using A/B testing to see which version of a site resonates more with their audience.

3. Development Challenge: Load-Balancing
   Developers have to purchase expensive load-balancing hardware, and administrate it effectively; or developers opt to forego load balancing altogether which limits their sites’ redundancy.
   Stackable’s response:
   Unlimited load balancing
   Nobody does load-balancing quite like Stackable. Stackable does not charge anything extra to load-balance across two servers or even fifty servers. Developers do not need to worry about administration of hardware because Stackable engineers manage it for them. High availability has never been so affordable.
4. Development Challenge: API Limitations
   Developers often use control panels that either have a lot of non-essential features, or too few features. As a result, developers alter their workflow to accommodate the control panel.
   
   Stackable’s response:
   Custom API access
   Stackable gives developers full API access. For example, a developer could create a dashboard widget containing the control panel features essential to that developer. This widget could also log the developer into the Stackable control panel from the desktop. Developers can create what they need to work better because of Stackable’s flexibility.
5. Development Challenge: Reliability
   Developers have to sort through hosting companies claiming to have the solution and expertise they require, only to find that they fall short.
   Stackable’s response:
   Over 16 Successful Years in Web Hosting
   XMission has successfully provided traditional web hosting to a variety of industries for over a decade. We listened to web developers’ concerns about traditional web hosting and learned more about what they really needed. Our engineers have taken that feedback and built a hosting product that helps developers to work more efficiently and productively. Stackable has inherited very high standards for technical ability and expertise, client communication, and reliability. XMission has always received excellent reviews from customers, and Stackable will continue to live up to its heritage.

Stackable also responds to the following business challenges:

1. Business Challenge: IT Expense
   Businesses who prefer the security of colocation have to purchase expensive servers, power, and space to effectively host their site. They also require additional systems administrators to monitor and attend to their equipment.
   Stackable’s response:
   Benefits of cloud computing, managed hosting, and colocation
   Stackable provides the same benefits of security and allocated resources as colocation, minus the hardware and staffing expense. Our engineers manage everything on-site. Stackable comes pre-configured, so businesses will not have to wait for lengthy setups. Developers can begin uploading their sites in minutes.
2. Business Challenge: Site Vulnerability
   Businesses using shared hosting have their sites slowed down, or taken down altogether by another site. This happens because multiple sites share resources on a single server. If any one client uses the majority of those resources, other sites tend to suffer.
   Stackable’s response:
   Resource guarantees for every client
   Unlike shared hosting, Stackable dedicates hosting resources to each container. For example, if two businesses on Stackable have a moderate amount of site traffic and suddenly one of the businesses has a huge increase, the second business’s site will not suffer. Their container(s’) resources will continue to remain intact and readily available.

We have a lot of work ahead of us to launch Stackable nationally, and we hope that those of you who have stood by us for the past sixteen years can help us spread the word to web developers you may know. We can’t wait to see where this takes XMission, and hope that you share our excitement! Please stay tuned for updates and follow our progress day-to-day on Twitter at twitter.com/stackable or on Stackable’s blog at blog.stackable.com.