Why Choose Opus One?

Unfortunately, the business of being an ISP is a fairly technical one, and it is difficult for most people to identify the differences between ISPs---other than price. This document is designed to break down some of the technical barriers to help you understand what makes Opus One a good partner for your business.

To keep things short, we've broken it down into five "differences." Keep these in mind and ask pointed questions and you'll be able to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

1) Our business plan.

Our business plan is "provide the best service possible." We've been providing consulting services since 1981, and Internet services since 1989. This plan seems to be working.

So what's the difference? The difference is that quality service is the most important thing in all of our staffing, buying, and technology decisions. Not cost. Not saving money. But service.

That means that our staff are all high-level network consultants. There's no one working for Opus One who is a "technical support person" we hired for $15/hour. When you call us and talk to us, or when someone here acts on a support request, you're dealing with competent, professional, and dedicated people.

We work very often with other ISPs and are amazed at the quality of people we have to interact with. Generally, an ISP has a tiny core of very few, very bright people (although we have seen ISPs who have no bright people at all) and a large ring of people who have absolutely no clue how the Internet works. The goal of the ring is to keep you from talking to the core, and this means that getting a good technical answer or quick results out of most ISPs is a long-term exercise in frustration.

We don't do that. When you get someone in email or on the phone, you're talking with our best and brightest. It's more expensive to do things that way, but that's the way we want to do things.

2) Our network engineering plan.

We don't work that way. We have a fairly luxurious set of resources: 7.5 Mbits of external bandwidth, a moderate number of digital dial-in lines, over 100 Gbytes of disk storage, and a completely redundant network. That costs a lot of money to buy and maintain, but we do it because it gives us a tremendous tool to bring to bear on the Internet connectivity our customers want from us. Yet we only have about 200 customers.

Our customers have to shoulder a larger cost burden than those paying $14.95 a month, but they get much greater resources for their dollar. In fact, we are cheaper than the biggest of the big---you get a lot more bang for your buck.

If you're running a laundromat and want a single page to tell people that washes are still $0.75, you probably don't need us and you probably don't want to pay for us. But if you want to make a credible presence on the Internet, communicate quickly, reliably, and effectively with your customers, and have the option to grow quickly, well, we're here for you.

3) Our disaster recovery plan.

The Internet traditionally has taken a loose view of reliability. Started as a research experiment, the ethos of the Internet has been that if it's not up now, it will be later, and that's O.K. Well, that's not O.K. with us. Several ISPs have been advertising "99%" uptime. That figure is laughable. We could be down for two entire business weeks, all day, every day, and still be up 99% of the time.

We currently run at better than 99.999% uptime. That means no more than 9 hours of critical system downtime a year. In 1997, our downtime count for critical systems was about 6 hours, spread over the entire year. Of course, we've never been totally down---that would take a bomb.

In our computer room, we have designed so that no single failure will stop us.

• The building itself is served via diverse underground telecommunications carriers. If US West went totally off the air, we'd still be running. No single backhoe can take us down, because the conduits leave from different parts of the building and go in different directions.
• Uninterruptible power systems are ready to take the load for up to an hour. An off-site generator can keep us going as long as we can put diesel in it.
• Our digital phone lines are backed up by an extra set of analog lines. If the entire T1 clocks at US West went crazy, you would still be able to dial in and monitor and manage things.
• Our systems are constantly monitored by automated test systems. Should any system fail to respond, an automatic series of escalation procedures occur, starting with paging people and working up from there.
• Every computing element is doubled. Using high-end clustering technology, we know that if any CPU, disk, controller, network card, hub, router, or bridge were to fail, things would automatically keep on going. And not with a "failover" interval---it's always hot, always clustered, always non-stop.

4) Our security.

CERT, the organization which issues Internet-wide reports of serious security bugs, has issued 106 Unix alerts. During the same time, there were 4 VMS alerts. Opus One uses VMS. Now you know one of the reasons why.

We have had many security attacks---none of them successful---in the years we've been in the Internet business, and we've been hired by companies to clean up the mess after someone else broke into their networks.

We don't mean to suggest that ISPs running Unix are insecure. There are lots of high-end ISPs who understand how to build and manage secure systems. What we're pointing out is that we have systems which are proven, over time, to have fewer undiscovered security bugs in them. Even the best written application is a security problem if the operating system it's built on has a hidden problem---which is discovered by the wrong people.

Our seriousness about security extends to our clients as well. We carefully evaluate customers and their applications. Will this draw unnecessary attention to us? Could this be the subject of an attack? Opus One, as a company, has nothing against adult web sites, radical political viewpoints, or even hackers. We just don't want them to be in the same room with our systems. There are lots of ISPs who will enjoy taking on that risk---we're not one of them.

Similarly, we don't invite users to build their own web applications. It's too easy for a simple mistake to lock up an entire server and affect everybody using that system. If you feel that your business cannot survive without you running your own Perl scripts on your web server, we'd be happy to help you find a more appropriate hosting provider.

5) Our marketing plan.

Second, we know that when someone calls us, they already have the best advertising we could possibly have: a trusted recommendation. This works both ways: we don't want to work with clients who don't fit with our business model and who don't share the same goals and priorities.

You may recognize some of the people who have come to us for advice: MCI. AT&T. Cisco Systems. The White House. The United Nations. Digital Equipment Corporation. Price Waterhouse. Apple. The California State Legislature. Deutsche Bank. Fidelity Investments. Genentech. The Swiss Stock Exchange. Johnson and Johnson. Honeywell. Raytheon. USAA. Kaiser-Permanente. NASA. Schlumberger. The World Bank. Xerox.

If you'd like to join them, give us a call.