To Our Email Server Clients

I am very sorry that our email service has been unstable for the last few weeks. I would like to take this opportunity to explain what caused the system became so unstable all of a sudden. Before I do, I would also like to assure you that we are aware of all the issues and we are working very hard to provide a stable email platform.

As many of you know, PSPINC has been providing web and email solutions since 1996 and we have been updating the system every year for the last 17 years. We started with 50MB of email space back in 1996 and are now up to 10GB on our basic service -- an increase of 20,000%. As we are planning to provide more space to our clients in coming years, we have realized that there are three challenges that have prevented us from upgrading our email service.

The first challenge was the hardware that we use to host your email. Although the servers we use have ample hard disk space available, there always is a physical limit to how many hard disks we can fit inside a server. Also, when we say we provide 10GB, we are actually providing three times that amount of disk space to cover replication and backup for each account. In the interest of maintaining scalability as our clients' needs continue to grow, we decided to add more storage devices to our Data Center for the purpose of storing all email data. We invested over a hundred thousand dollars in new storage devices and replacement email servers to ensure that we will meet and exceed future demand.

The second challenge was our network's infrastructure. As we process more and more email, it was becoming clear that the network speed was not keeping up with the demand. So far we have upgraded our core routers to higher processing systems as well as upgraded our server and storage switches and cabling from 1Gbps to 10Gbps. We are still in the process of upgrading more switches and firewalls.

The third challenge was our email software. Although the open source software we use was highly optimized and customized, it was not keeping up with the demand and increased access caused by people using smart phones and tablets to retrieve their data. This increase in access has more than doubled the server load in last few years. For that reason, we decided to develop a brand new, state of the art, 64bit email server software.

We have been implementing these three changes for the last few months and have begun to move some of our clients to the new environment. Although we have been very careful to minimize the downtime caused by this move, we have encountered several unforeseen issues during the process. These issues have been caused by a combination of poor planning and failures in implementation and communication. We have taken what we have learned over the past few weeks and are doing everything within our power to make those changes as pain free as possible for you as we move forward.

I am sorry to report that we are not 100% done with implementing everything that we need to in order to provide the best email platform for you. Please bear with us for a few more weeks. We will inform you of any future implementations in advance. Our goal is to provide a better, faster, more secure and expandable platform that will ultimately be of great benefit to our end users.

If you have any questions, please let me know. I will be happy to give you a more detailed explanation. Let me assure you one more time, we are experiencing these challenges because we are in the process of implementing the biggest upgrade in our company’s history in order to provide a much better service for our clients. Thank you for choosing PSPINC.

Sincerely,

Kenichi Uchikura
Founder, PSPINC

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PSPINC CEO Kenichi Uchikura's Blog

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