Paragent.com

We’ve been very busy since last fall. In September, I went to San Diego to present Paragent.com at the DEMO fall ’08 conference. We were well received by all of the folks we talked to, and Network World listed us as a “cool new tech.” It was a nice experience but requires a bit of overtime to prepare. Here is link to our presentation: http://www.paragent.com/demo.html.

It was good to speak to so many different people including investors and business development folks. There were many good ideas that we hope to add to Paragent.com in the near future.

When the economic slowdown hit, we were very curious to see if our low price, high value product would be seen as such by the market. To date, we can say that about half of our calls about the product involve a comment about switching to Paragent.com because their current system is many times more expensive, plus complaints that the expensive system doesn’t work as well as expected.

While it seems like every time we turn on the TV there is more bad news about the economy, this turns out to be good news for Paragent. There is a renewed focus on cost saving and value in IT departments, and we are gratified that our plan to make a low cost product that is highly usable is being well received by the market.

Paragent.com has moved. Not our company, but our servers. We are now colocating our servers at n|Frame. They have a very nice SAS 70 facility with all the redundancy and infrastructure we needed. What is even better, they are right in our back yard. While we have never felt the need to physically get close to our servers, it is a nice feeling knowing they are a short drive away just in case.

As part of the move, we have beefed up our servers to better support our existing customers, and prepare for future growth. We made the switch a couple weekends ago. For the first few days, we were noticing some unusual speed issues. Most times, the connection was fine, and we were seeing the throughput we would expect. However, periodically, we would see drops in bandwidth, or pages would timeout when we tried to load them. We worked with the network engineers at n|Frame to track the problem down to a physical port on one of our servers that was not properly negotiating the speed and duplex setting of the switch. This was causing the port to continuously disconnect and reconnect. The TCP protocol is designed to work around network outages by retransmitting packets, so other than the apparent speed issues, there wasn’t any overt indication where the problem might be. Once the auto-negotiation issue was tracked down and fixed, speed returned to normal.

We also took the opportunity while we were looking at the networking issue to tweak our Apache server settings. In particular, we altered the compression and expiration headers to make it easier for browsers to cache static content. Users of Paragent.com should see are marked improvement when revisiting pages. Most images will be cached properly now, so there is less to download.

In the weeks and months ahead we will be working on further improvements to our setup, including the use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve up static content. There are also changes happening in the product itself. At the moment, we can’t talk about them; however, we want you to know that we have been listening to feedback from our customers, and have some exciting things in store.