Wow! A lot of things were checked off the to-do list today. First of all, Valorie called and asked me out to lunch. She is really pregnant and she is due in the next 24 hours! I am so excited for her and Doug. They are having a boy and they’ve decided to name him Cameron. I will post pictures as soon as I have them!

After lunch, I went to look at some office space with Brandon!! If you know me in person, you know that I’ll drag you around to every open house on the block just to look at places. I find real estate fascinating. One of my favorite things is stepping into an empty room and picturing all my stuff in it. (Hey, some people test-drive cars; I enjoy test-driving houses, and the more expensive, the better!)

We checked out two offices. The first one was 1200 square feet (we plan to sublet half of whatever we end up renting in order to subsidize our rent until we’re big enough to occupy all the square footage) and is on the second floor (elevator-accessible). It had one built-out office and the rest of the plan was open space, which the landlord said we could build to suit. The current company (a web design company) has gone out of business and has apparently abandoned the space, so I asked the landlord to tell them we’d just write them one big check for everything they wanted to get rid of. That means we may be able to write a single check for desks, phones, conference tables, chairs, computers, etc. That would certainly save me a lot of cash and a lot of headaches as well.

The second one was 1400 (or so) square feet, next door to the first one, and on the second floor of that building. Neither Brandon or I was as impressed by it, mainly because it was divided really strangely and felt like a maze to get through. They were also asking $1.60/sq.ft. as opposed to $1.26 for the first place. It was a no-brainer to pick the first one.

I came back home from looking at office space and rushed to get the business line paperwork faxed to Wells Fargo. I’ve been approved, but had to sign my life away. (hehe) I also faxed in an application to become a wholesale customer of MA Labs so I can buy PC parts at insanely low prices. We’ll see how that goes tomorrow.

After that, it was off to IBI (I actually grabbed dinner on the way and ate it at IBI since I knew I would be there late.) When I walked in, I was greeted by “ERICA!!” and lots of hugs. It is so cool to be in a place where everyone knows and loves you! Don was there; Don runs a wi-fi startup company and I love him to death. I showed him my new Treo 650, since he is also a Treo person, and it turns out he has one too! We both jumped up and down and said “YAY!” at each other over our new cell phones. LOL! (Treo addicts unite!)

I ended up staying from 7:15 all the way until 10:30. Kevin and I got some good business talks in, since we’re now partners in a new business (more info coming soon on that.) I got to meet the author of a book I’ve been reading (he’s a friend of another 1004 graduate.) Kevin spoke in front of the crowd and we had a blast picking at him from the peanut gallery. Since almost everyone there was a grad, it was like a bunch of old friends getting back together, and it was honestly one of the best local IBI meetings I have been to.

I am now looking forward to…bed. Ah, I might actually get 8 hours of sleep in tonight. Now that would be a miracle!

Well, I woke up today to great news. (Actually, no, the phone call that woke me up was a dedicated server customer who was having DNS issues.) But right after that, I got a call from Wells Fargo. I’d previously applied for a line of credit for Simpli, and I had been anxiously awaiting for a call back. I got that call today, and great news! Simpli has been preliminarily (say that 5 times fast) apppproooooooooooooooved! for a $45,000 line of credit.

I have many things planned with the line of credit, but first and foremost it means I get to pull all the business debt out of my personal credit cards. Secondly, it means getting an office sometime in early 2005 (Brandon will benefit most from that; I’m used to working from home by now) and it also means signing that big contract with AboveNet for our bandwidth upgrade.

I should probably mention at this point that I fully expect Simpli to be in the red for 1-2 months while we get our new services cranked out. This line of credit was the break I’ve been looking for for a long time. Now I can finally roll new services out without having to worry about bleeding cash for a couple months. The revenue stream this opens up for us is definitely worth it.

We’re also signing a contract for true 24×7 support with response times defined by an SLA (most likely 1 hour no matter what time you submit the ticket), so that’s good news for all of our customers. This will also include 24×7 phone support, although we will continue to discourage calling on the phone (it’s just not an organized or efficient way to do support.)

More than double our 2004 revenue in 2005? That’s where I’m setting my goals, and this loan will make it possible. Bring it on!

Brandon finally got me the bandwidth graphs for one customer I knew was pushing more than their contract stated they could. They were paying $379/mo. for 8U and 800GB (which is about 3Mbit.)

Brandon sent me their graphs today. They are pushing 22Mbit. At our current prices with AboveNet, we’re losing almost $1000/month on this one customer alone.

Shit.

I quoted them $1589/mo. for the bandwidth they are pushing now, which is a far cry from what they were paying before. They’re going to be pretty pissed when they read that email. I just hope we don’t lose them as a customer. sigh.

Well, I typed the word “reboot” into a server today, not expecting that I was going to cause myself and my team a combined total of 27 hours of work (between 4 people.)

Here’s what happened. We had about 40 websites, including simpli.biz, hosted on a RaQ 550 server that I’ve been wanting to get rid of for a long time now. Mooneer and I had been slowly moving the sites off of the RaQ 550 for the past week, planning to do a full-scale migration starting today and going through the end of next week. As of today, there were 26 websites still hosted there.

Well, the darn SMTP server kept crashing, and every day I was going without email and having to log in and restart the stupid SMTP server (and then get caught up with the email I had missed as it flowed in for the next hour.) Finally, today around 1PM, it crashed again and I decided I’d had enough. I rebooted the server through SSH.

It didn’t come back up.

I knew I was in trouble about an hour later. I’d rebooted it through SSH to begin with. After 15 minutes, I ran a hard reboot. About 20 minutes after that, I put in a ticket with AboveNet and had them unplug it and replug it. At 1:45PM, I headed to the datacenter to confirm that the server was, in fact, going through fsck. I figured I’d let it fsck while I ate lunch, and came back to find that it had stopped fsck’ing and was just sitting there like a total lump.

I rebooted. Nothing.

At that point (around 3PM), Mooneer came online for his shift and I realized we were going to have to take drastic action. I told him to grab our backup (made 14 hours previous, so it was pretty fresh) and we’d get to work restoring 26 websites. I then called Brandon and had him come into the datacenter to work the hardware end while I went home and helped Mooneer restore websites and email to meowcat (our new sexy dual Xeon server.) simpli.biz was moved to my ULTRA-POWERFUL AWESOME Celeron 800 server 😀 that I picked up for next to nothing (which also hosts this website and our helpdesk and ticket system.)

Well, the day wound down with Mooneer and I still restoring websites and email around 9PM PST (8 hours after this whole thing had started.) Just after 9, we finally got my email restored. I’d helped restore a couple websites, including simpli.biz and onthehouse.com (our two most hairy ones), and was working with customers to get them control panel access.

Why did it take almost 9 hours to restore 26 websites, you ask? Well, unfortunately, there is no easy way to convert sites from a RaQ 550 to a DirectAdmin-based server. We created all of the sites manually and slowly put back the public_html folders and the email inboxes for every person on the server, which turned out to be quite time-consuming. The lack of a migration utility meant we also had to change everyone’s passwords, so if you’re reading this and thinking “I haven’t been able to log into my email all day!” (George, that means you!), that’s why. (Email support@simpli.biz from an alternate email account, or call us, and we’ll get you your new password.)

So that’s how I spent Black Friday. And here I was really looking forward to getting cozy with Photoshop CS, DWMX2004, and a copy of Designing with Web Standards. Ah, well. There is no rest for the wicked [servers].

Nothing like negotiating with your transit rep on AIM, of all things. We just halved our bandwidth price! (Well, not quite halved. A 43% reduction.) DW, you better be kissing my feet for this one. I just signed my life away for you and your crazy-ass referrals. 😉