Lightbound will be having a customer appreciation event on June 17, 11:30 at our Lightbound data center on 731 West Henry Street.   Fonality, one of the leading SMB VoIP PBX Solutions provider will be at the event presenting.  Lightbound is one of the few VoIP Service Providers in the area that can directly supply SIP to Fonality's trixbox server.   We will also be providing tours of our data center at this event.   Lightbound's data center is a great solution for business continuity and server collocation that can be used with the Fonality solution.  

If you are in need of an Indiana VoIP provider Lightbound can deliver the voice services you need.   We are one of the few commercial grade VOIP Service Providers that delivers our services solely over dedicated private circuits.  This is a critical point in delivering business quality VoIP services. There are many VOIP service providers that will deliver their services over the open Internet at a very low cost.  The problem is that the service does not work reliably. Sometimes it will work great.  Other times its worse that a bad cell phone call.   Reliability of your VoIP phone solution can be enhanced in a few ways.  First you can host your VoIP PBX Solutions our data center for server collocation which is the location of our voice switch.  No need to work about problems with circuit connections to your office.   If your circuit does go down the calls can be rerouted by calling our NOC and giving alternate numbers to call.  Cost savings can result by purchasing only the exact number of lines needed.   Instead of having to purchase a PRI with 23 lines, your can purchase only 15 lines if that is what your business needs.    Look at Lightbound for VoIP PBX Solutions if your want to increase reliability and save costs for your company.

If you're business relies on having high availability Internet service make sure that your Internet DSL Internet or High Speed Internet in Indiana provider has upstream redundant connections.   Ask your Internet providers what business continuity and data disaster recovery plans they have to keep service running in event of upstream service interruption.  There are many Internet providers that only have a single upstream connection to the Internet.  There was a major outage in the area last week due to a fiber cut in a key communication line to an upstream Internet Provider in Chicago.  This left many customers without Internet Service.   Lightbound, which provides High Speed Internet in Indiana, has two 2.5 GB upstream connections, one to Herndon, Virginia and the other to Chicago.   Even though the Chicago connection was cut there still was a full 2.5 GB connection to Virginia that provided Lightbound customers uninterrupted Internet Access Indiana. This is very important if you are using managed servers hosting or server collocation in a facility that needs always available High Speed Internet in Indiana.                                                                                                                          

The most common question that are customers are asking about today is higher bandwidth and faster connectivity for Internet Service Indiana or for companies to connect to Server Collocation in the data center.   Many customers today have T1 circuits for Internet or Collocation and are pushing the circuits to the limits of their capacity.  The cost of Ethernet circuits for 6 and 10 MB, and even 100 MB has decreased drastically compared to costs in the past.  Customers are looking for the larger circuits as they are interested in moving their primary or backup servers to a high availability and highly secure data center that is staffed 24 x 7 x 365.   They are also looking at disaster recovery and performing off site data back service.  Customers are also moving to "cloud computing" applications such as Salesforce and need much larger bandwidth to handle the needs of increased Internet demand.  An increase to an Ethernet circuit (typically at least 6 MB or above) versus a T1 circuit (1.5 MB) can result in a four fold increase in bandwidth.   Customers can contract for Internet Service Indiana with a contracted Internet rate lower than the circuit bandwidth and get an advantage of bursting over the contracted rate on occasion without extra costs.  Bursting is charged using what's known as 95th percentile billing which allows the customer to burst over contracted rate for 36 hours per month without additional charges.   If you need High Speed Internet in Indiana contact us today to see how cost effective an Ethernet circuit can be to deliver your Internet or connect to our data center.

In today's tight economy many companies are looking for ways to cut or control operational expenses or increase productivity of employees.  One way to do this is through managed servers hosting with an Indiana server hosting company that has high speed Internet in Indiana. Many companies have IT personnel who would be better focused on improving business processes specific to the company.  If a company would move the application servers to a managed servers hosting company the day to day maintenance and updating of the underlying operation system would be taking care of.   When in house personnel do the updates and maintenance they are wasting time on work that could be done more efficiently by a company that specializes in support of servers.   The company IT employees are much more familiar with their internal business process and applications and would be better off spending their time in creating competitive business advantages by making improvements on those processing.   Another way to cut costs is when an IT employee leaves voluntarily consider hiring a company who provides managed servers hosting to provide the services that the previous employee took care of.   The cost for  paying for IT support services for Indiana Servers Hosting may be less expensive in the long run the hiring a direct employee. Data centers with Internet Service Indiana can provider managed servers hosting and help increase productivity of your IT employees.

For Data Recovery Indiana consider setting up a Managed Servers Hosting at Lightbound's data center.  Many Small Business Server Hosting customers who are looking for business continuity are now setting up their backup or even their primary servers at the data center.   Lightbound provides 24 x 7 x 365 managed support with a high availability data center with power, HVAC, and security round the clock. Customer's can consolidate their data and use our Off site Data Backup Service along with Server collocation to protect their servers.  If they have a VOIP PBX solution they can move all their voice services to the data center as we are one of the few SIP Indiana VOIP providers.   Additionally centralizing WAN communications at the data center can completely provide a robust solution to keep a business up an running through most any type of weather related incident.  Look to Lightbound data center for the optimum in business continuity.

Companies that are looking for ways to cut costs in this economy should look at consolidating voice and data WAN circuits in a data center.   The data center can now become the central hub for distributing services for Internet, Voice, and Data connectivity.  Many data centers have a large number of carriers to choose from.   Instead of using a single carrier the data center staff can help  find the best value and cost for services by using multiple carriers.   Instead of paying large fees to deliver the last mile of the circuit the customer essentially has the cost of cross connects at a fraction of the cost.   In addition to costs savings business continuity can greatly improve because a data center generally has better redundancy for power, cooling, and security.  Data disaster recovery can be enhanced by having servers at the data center that backups can be restored on or even mirrored production servers.   Data centers typically have staff available 24 x 7 x 365 that can take care of issues when normal operations support staff are not available.  In most cases problems are taken care of before a customer knows there is a problem!  Small businesses can get the same type of support as large enterprises by using managed server hosting along with WAN consolidation. With cost saving and improved reliability it make sense to consider this option. 

The recent winter weather resulted in thousands of people being without power and probably effected hundred of businesses.   As a result there was a great deal of lost revenue from closed businesses and lost productivity due to workers not being able to get to work.   In order to minimize the lost revenue and productivity a business should have a business continuity plan to address situations.  A few key strategies to keep the business running is to host critical IT and Voice systems at a data center with server collocation.  When power goes down at the main office the critical systems are up and running.  Remote workers can get  to  the systems with Indiana DSL Internet and a VPN connection.  VoIP PBX solutions housed at the data center could take incoming calls and route to cell or home phones of home workers.   If workers are in areas that don't have power or phone service at the very least messages are going to voice mail.   I was able to work from a home office yesterday and was fully productive as I could get phone calls from customer and access all business IT systems remote to conduct my daily business.   My productivity may have been down after 2 hours of snow shoveling, but I was at least able to do all the normal activities I do at the office.

If you are ever looking for an Indiana VoIP provider that provides a hosted VoIP PBX Solutions make sure that they address the issue of QOS (Quality of Service) over the WAN circuit that delivers Internet Service.  The Internet WAN circuit needs to be a dedicated circuit to the location of the VoIP switch so QOS can be set up point to point.   Many VoIP Service Providers will position that their hosted managed solution can work over any broadband Internet connection.  The hosted voice solution will work most of the time, but there will also be some troublesome times when it flat out does not work at all.  This has to do with QOS.  The voice call is very delay sensitive and when there is too much delay voice quality suffers with dropped packets and garbled messages.  The voice call is contending with downloads (ftp sessions, streaming videos).  if there is no priority given of voice over other applications there is no way that voice packets are delivered on time.   This is especially troublesome for customers who are looking for small business Server hosting or managed servers hosting because in most cases they don't have IT & telecom staff with the expertise to know how to set up QOS or why QOS matters.   The small business customers are many times subject to a bait and switch tactic to get the deal for voice with a long term goal of getting the broadband circuit business.  The VoIP service provider will set the hosted voice solution at a low cost per seat versus current service which will attract the customer to sign a contract usually for several years at what appears to be a lower cost of service.  But usually after a few months of being frustrated with the occasional voice problems the customer will switch from their broadband Internet provider to a dedicated circuit to the VoIP Service Provider they contracted service with.  This will usually be at a premium.   It's best work work with VoIP service providers who address the QOS issue up front and are honest with the customers.  

How many businesses in Central Indiana can afford to maintain a staff 24x7x365 to support their IT systems?   How many businesses need 24x7x365 to remain competitive in today's always business environment?  All of them!   In order to do so many businesses are migrating to an environment that provides business continuity 24 x 7 in order to accomplish this.   Moving critical applications to managed servers hosting environment or server collocation in an Indiana Server Hosting Data Center can accomplish this.  A data center that has 24x7 network operations center staff can provide data disaster recover in the event an issue happens with one of the servers.   In additional moving to a VoIP PBX and locating in the data center using voice services from a VoIP service provide can bring an extra level of business continuity.  This type of service is not only for large Enterprise customers.  Small Business server hosting can also be done quite cost effectively.   WAN consolidation can also provide enhanced business continuity by centralizing in a data center where business applications reside.  WAN consolidation also provides considerable cost savings in many cases.    The only way this will work for companies is by using high speed Internet in Indiana.   Providers of Indiana DSL Internet, Ethernet or T1 Internet can provide this high speed Internet Connectivity.  The  data  center and managed services can provide  round the clock support in a  highly available and reliable facility at a fraction of the cost of employee staff to perform the IT support functions.   To keep businesses running 24x7 this should be a key part of a successful business strategy.

Today has been a day full of explaining how different providers actually regulate Quality of Service on your Internet Access Connections.

Not all Internet Access is the same, what do I mean by that.

What I mean is, and I am not a gamer(but in the gamer world this is paramount), but end to end performance is the key and can you really afford to have your customers waiting on data back from your web servers.  You may be sitting there saying my server is running at 5 percent utilization and my customers are calling about poor performance.

They will go somewhere else, that is why every Internet Access Provider is not the same.  Make sure you understand your needs before you go out and buy the cheapest solution.  If your goal is just surfing that is different than hosting servers.

If you can remember that end to end performance is what you are after you do find and maybe that will indirectly make your business more profitable.

Have a great day!

jack

www.lightbound.com
jcarr@iquest.net

Hi everyone -

It was a crazy week in Server Collocation business, spent most week with a client with several needs from Disaster Recover and Off Site Data Backup Service to Mail Server Host.

The service providers (including us) are really changing from offering one or two IP Services to completing outsourcing customer application.  Most clients are just wanting to run their application and not spend their time taking care of networks and servers infrastructures.

That is what is making service providers changing business plans every few years.  It makes the job fun.

regards - jack