Just a quick posting to tell you that we’ve replaced our “North America: North” server. It’s been giving us problems of late so we decided the best solution was to retire it. The new server is on the East Coast and we’re pretty happy about that — we now have servers on the West Coast, East Coast, and in the middle of North America.
It was a performance issue that finally caused us to make this decision. It had degrading to the point where the results from our VoIP testing was compromised. We found ourselves spending time diagnosing the issues and making little changes here and there to work around the problems. In the end, we’re happy to rid ourselves of that headache.
We have automatically updated all VoIP tests to use the East server if they were using the North server previously.
We’re now offering pricing discounts for customers who pre-pay for multiple months. We’ve been planing this for a while but it wasn’t until recently that we actually had the time to implement it.
Take a look at the discounts below. We wanted to get pretty aggressive with the discount on 1 year plans and I think we’ve succeeded.
- 3 months: 5% discount
- 6 months: 10% discount
- 12 months: 20% discount
The savings can be quite substantial. For example, if you are on the Bronze plan and you pre-pay for 1 year, your savings will be $60.00!
Let us know what you think. Will these discounts get you excited about pre-paying for 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year at a time?
The VoIP Spear API is ready at last. It’s pretty easy to use, though you can judge for yourself after reading the instructions. The API is RESTful meaning that it’s lightweight and easy to learn. I’d imagine it’s easier to learn a RESTful API rather than one based on SOAP or XML-RPC.
We have a few customers who have been asking for the API already, so it will be interesting to see what they can come up for VoIP Spear mashups and add-ons.
The VoIP Spear API is available to those customers who are signed up on the Bronze plan ($25 per month) or greater. Check our prices to see if you can use the API with your VoIP Spear account.
One last thing: feel free to suggest any changes or additions to the API. We’ve left some of VoIP Spear’s features out of the API because we thought they were unnecessary (in the API). If you think differently, let us know.
VoIP Spear has only been live for a few weeks, yet we’re seeing good numbers of users signing up for service. It’s nice to see the fruits of our labours.
One nice thing about going live is that we’re finally seeing how real people use VoIP Spear. A few problems have come to light, the most common of which is that our VoIP testing isn’t working for some users — the MOS for their endpoints is always 1.0 (the lowest possible score). We figured out pretty quickly that this is happening because their router or firewall is blocking ping/ICMP traffic, resulting in 100% packet loss. VoIP Spear servers use ping/ICMP for running the tests to all of the endpoints.
The solution to this problem is to ask the affected users to unblock ping/ICMP traffic. This certainly works, however we decided it was time to implement a support/help section in the web site. It took a few days to create this and enter the content, however we’re finished now and pleased with the results. We also think our users will appreciate having a resource to help solve their problems rather than having to email us.
Great news, everybody! VoIP Spear is finally live. The Internet’s finest VoIP QoS testing and tracking service is ready and raring to go.
We’ve worked hard to make VoIP Spear a compelling service right from the get go. Our Personal plan suits the needs of most casual users. It’s free to use and lets you monitor one endpoint. For small businesses or users who need a little bit more, we can offer our Basic ($5.00 per month) and Standard ($10.00 per month) plans, which let you monitor 3 and 7 endpoints respectively. Beyond that, we have our Bronze, Silver, and Gold plans which are perfect for carriers offering VoIP to their customers because these plans support many more endpoints. If you have more than 100 endpoints to track, please contact us and we’ll work with you to develop a pricing model that suits your needs.
March 7, 2009
Filed under: 
Tags: