At the end of last week our technical team sent out a notification to a group of clients to forewarn them of a pending IP renumbering.
As this kind of thing is quite technical I thought people might appreciate a more detailed explanation.
The explanation will include technical information, but hopefully it will be easier to understand from a non-technical point of view.
If anything is unclear please feel free to post a comment asking for clarification – that’s why this blog is here !!
Earlier this year we joined both Inex and RIPE.
Inex is the Irish Internet Neutral Exchange. Basically what that means is that ISPs are able to “meet” there and swap traffic. In practical terms that means that the way your website or server is connected to users is affected.
For example, we now peer with Eircom. If you are using an Eircom DSL or dialup connection you are “closer” to your website and email 
To see this in action do a traceroute from your computer to your website and you’ll see how many “hops” it has to take. If you need a reasonable comparison compare a traceroute from your desktop to irishisptest.com, which is on our Dublin network with one to nytimes.com, which is in the US.
The IP renumbering is a result of our joining RIPE and becoming a LIR (Local Internet Registry).
What this means for us is that we have become our own ISP. We now get our IP addresses directly from RIPE (a governing body for IP addresses in the EMEA) and we will never have to change them ever again.
Previously we got them from our ISP (bandwidth provider) and if we wanted to change ISP we had to give them back, which meant doing what we are doing now. Unfortunately this means that every time we changed ISP we’d have to do this change over, which is confusing and painful for both us and our clients.
Now we can pick and choose our ISP’s and basically just advertise our Ips to them and to the internet and it all works automatically.
This means that we can also plan and allocate our network more efficiently.
Most of our dedicated and colocation clients have already been moved to the new network while the migration of all the shared linux and windows server 2003 hosting accounts is almost finished.
We also have the opportunity to offer new and exciting technologies to our clientele at various levels… Watch this space to see more
In terms of our hardware we have also started work on upgrading all of our shared hosting servers from unbranded servers to Dell Xeons and HPs.
The new servers we are putting in have bigger hard drives, faster CPUs and more RAM, which has allowed us to greatly expand our hosting plans. Our entry level hosting plans are no longer “entry level”, as they now come with a generous 500 MB of disk space (equivalent to 347 floppy disks!) and 5 gigabytes of transfer per month. Combine that will all the other powerful features and the ability to host up to 4 sites on a hosting account and you get a really excellent combination.
If you have any queries about any of this please let us know.
About the Author: Michele Neylon
