Dear PingFu user, or casual web-surfer,

Since its been a while since we posted on this blog, time to update you on our activities.

We’ve just completed three years of PingFu! Seems like just yesterday that we were in beta and working with our valued testers to build a really great product.

Right now, our prime focus is on stability and uptime. After experiencing some difficult periods of downtime in February-March (which kept our focus on fixing the issue rather than celebrating three years of PingFu), we have restored the PingFu service to 100% uptime levels, and are working to ensure this remains the case no matter what happens.

We have also moved our web / login servers to a new webhost, since the old webhost is phasing out their services, and hence, did not adequately support us when we were trying to resolve the downtime issues.

This new webhost is also scaleable – we can easily add more capacity if we get overwhelmed. Of course, our tunneling servers were unaffected right through, they have plenty of spare capacity, and if that ever changes, we will sort it out!

Since some time has passed since our services began, and our various products were released, we’d love to hear more about what you currently think of the service, and what we can do to make it better for you. We do have some feature requests under consideration, but would like to hear from more users – many of you may want to speak out, but may not do so, thinking we arent listening.

We are! Talk to us!

We’re looking for testers from the following locations. Testers need to be behind just a firewall (or no firewall) – if your network is behind a proxy server, that is ineligible. You will be testing latencies with World of Warcraft (or similar TCP game that allows you to measure latency – no UDP games please) with PingFu Iris (US or Europe depending on your location).

How do you benefit? Get a free month of Iris. Work with us on testing our newest code and ideas. If you are good at testing, build a relationship with us – we have valued testers who are very close to us and have benefited from working with us, and have access to us for suggestions/advice/help/etc,  apart from the concrete goodies like free subscription time.

If interested, email dev.team (at) artofping.com with your location and the game you play. We’d love to hear from you!

Locations -

• USA
• France, Germany, UK, Italy or nearby
• UAE or nearby
• New Zealand (sorry Aussies, we have a bunch of you already!)
• Asia Pacific – Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand
• South Africa

We’re working on building a system that will automatically monitor all of our servers, figure out if they are tunneling fine, diagnose any issues with latency/load/instability, and take action, as well as alert us about the issue. The effects are already visible – downtime has come down considerably, and intermediate issues we faced have been eliminated – no more European serverfarm downtime for example!

We’re also working on eliminating all client crashes with Iris, UDP, AutoTunnel GG, so that we can release an update soon for all you folks.

When we have a rock-solid system out, then we can look at the more exciting new possibilities up ahead….more on that soon!

AutoTunnel GG

1. MisterX
2. David R
3. BelieveTheHype

PingFu Iris

1. Zane S
2. Eddie R
3. Laird S

PingFu UDP

1. Nestor G
2. John D
3. Tigahawk

You will shortly be notified directly, and we’ll update your accounts to reflect your winnings. Prizes will be as per the competition post.

Thanks to everybody who participated! This first competition will not be the last – so keep a watch out for more opportunities to win free subscriptions from us.

A big Thank-You to all of you who participated in the competition, those who joined the Art of Ping community during the promotional period, and finally all long term members of our community. We are always working on ways to give back to all of you – by improving on our technology, the service we provide, and by listening to you – so much so that we should be able to give you what you need, even when you don’t ask us for it.

Feel free to contact us via a comment on this post, or by emailing us – art.of.ping [at artofping.com] if you have suggestions, complaints, questions – we are always willing to listen and help, whether or not you are a customer.

Thanks goes out to all of you who have been part of the PingFu community for months – and to those new to the PingFu community, fasten your seatbelts!

It is now a year since the full release of our first product – Pingfu Iris. Over the year we have gone on to add two more products – Pingfu UDP and Autotunnel GG – to our product portfolio, and have also simultaneously enhanced each one of these products to make them simpler to use, provide better performance and work in unusual user environments. Some of the features that have been added are full-fledged NTLM support, Vista support, European Servers, elimination of the need for Sockscap etc. We have also continuously added to the base of supported applications and have recently added a feature where the user can add an application of his choice through the PingFu/AutoTunnel interface. Further we had the distinction this year of being the first to solve the issues that cropped up on account of the WoW 2.2 patch and announced a workaround.

All of the above has happened because, and only because of your support. There have been so many of you who have spent hours testing for us, or helping us address your specific problem by providing us inputs that have taken hours, and sometimes days of your time and effort. We thank you for this.

Our New Blog

At the end of the first year, we believe that we must have a forum where you can discuss your user applications, games that you play etc as well as one where we can communicate with you on non-support issues. To facilitate this we are putting out the ArtofPing blog http://www.artofping.com/blog which will have several categories. We will start with categories on news from the ArtofPing team, HTTP Tunneling, Latency, and of course – World of Warcraft. We invite you to write to us suggesting new categories of interest to you. This initiative, more than any other, requires sustained contributions from your end and we are confident that that will be available.

First Anniversary Celebration

The first page in the blog will definitely interest you – to celebrate our first Anniversary we will provide the PingFu service FREE to all existing users from March 11th to March 31st. This will be reflected by an increase in your subscription dates by 20 days. All new users who buy a 1 month subscription of Pingfu Iris or UDP between March 11th and March 31st will get the subscription for free. Check the blog page http://www.artofping.com/blog/?page_id=9 for details

Competition – Win Free Subscriptions!

The second initiative is in the form of a simple competition where the 9 winners will get free subscriptions of a year, 6 months and 3 months. The details can be found here http://www.artofping.com/blog/?page_id=10

Plans for the Future

The year ahead holds several plans in store for our customers. Apart from eliminating small residual issues with NTLM proxies and general stability issues, we plan to add support for Vista 64 bit, gaming consoles such as Xbox, Nintendo and PS3, Oceanic Servers for our Asia Pacific users and new latency improvement enhancements to our product.

We are also in the process of developing a new suite of products that will interest all online gamers – especially those desiring a low latency gaming experience. We will keep you updated.

We look forward to creating a greater online experience. Stay engaged with us!

Regards,
The ArtofPing Management