VoIP Spear Blog: News & Noise
Jan 29, 2013

VoIP Spear Refresh

VoIP Spear has been operating since 2008 and the site was starting to lose it's sheen, so we decided to do a refresh. At first, we were planning minor changes only, but one thing led to another and, before we knew it, two months of intense programming had passed.

The biggest change is the main chart page. We replaced the old Flash charts with Google charts. More significantly, we're now showing just one time period on the page. The default view is a six hour time period, and it's easy to change that. Also significant, we've broken the three main data points (MOS, packet loss, latency) out into their own charts.

Another welcome change is the My Account page. It now looks more like a dashboard with recent MOS for each endpoint shown in a gauge.

We've made countless other minor changes and fixes.

What do you think? Do you like the new chart presentation? Are the MOS gauges on the My Account page helpful to you?

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Jan 21, 2013

Short Maintenance Period for VoIP Spear

On January 20, 2013, between 11:00pm and 1:00am EST, we will be performing maintenance on the VoIP Spear web server. As a result, the web site may be unavailable for a period of up to one hour.

Testing results will be unaffected by this maintenance.

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Mar 7, 2009

"North America: North" Server Replaced

Just a quick posting to tell you that we've replaced our "North America: North" server. It's been giving us problems of late so we decided the best solution was to retire it. The new server is on the East Coast and we're pretty happy about that -- we now have servers on the West Coast, East Coast, and in the middle of North America.

It was a performance issue that finally caused us to make this decision. It had degrading to the point where the results from our VoIP testing was compromised. We found ourselves spending time diagnosing the issues and making little changes here and there to work around the problems. In the end, we're happy to rid ourselves of that headache.

We have automatically updated all VoIP tests to use the East server if they were using the North server previously.

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Feb 28, 2009

Up to 20% Discount When You Pre-pay Your Subscription to VoIP Spear

We're now offering pricing discounts for customers who pre-pay for multiple months. We've been planing this for a while but it wasn't until recently that we actually had the time to implement it.

Take a look at the discounts below. We wanted to get pretty aggressive with the discount on 1 year plans and I think we've succeeded.

  • 3 months: 5% discount
  • 6 months: 10% discount
  • 12 months: 20% discount

The savings can be quite substantial. For example, if you are on the Bronze plan and you pre-pay for 1 year, your savings will be $60.00!

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Feb 1, 2009

The VoIP Spear API is ready

The VoIP Spear API is ready at last. It's pretty easy to use, though you can judge for yourself after reading the instructions. The API is RESTful meaning that it's lightweight and easy to learn. I'd imagine it's easier to learn a RESTful API rather than one based on SOAP or XML-RPC.

We have a few customers who have been asking for the API already, so it will be interesting to see what they can come up for VoIP Spear mashups and add-ons.

The VoIP Spear API is available to those customers who are signed up on the Bronze plan ($25 per month) or greater. Check our prices to see if you can use the API with your VoIP Spear account.

One last thing: feel free to suggest any changes or additions to the API. We've left some of VoIP Spear's features out of the API because we thought they were unnecessary (in the API). If you think differently, let us know.

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