From BBS to Commercial Host

We saw a BBS on the ISP-Lists, got in touch, and learned the company's story, dating from before the invention of the web browser to the present day.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [January 23, 2006]

Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based BBS-LA was founded in 1994 as a bulletin board system. In 1994, the company had one phone line and used WorldGroup BBS software. By June 1995, the company had fourteen lines. It eventually switched to ISDN, and in 1997 obtained digital PRI lines.

The company started with a 56 Kbps dedicated Primenet account, expanded to 384 Kbps Frame Relay from Digilink, and eventually moved over to variable rate T-1, also at 384 Kbps. They are currently colocated at in a data center in Downtown Los Angeles, with "pretty much unlimited Tier 1 bandwidth."

Doric Jemison-Ball II is the company's co-founder. "We used to call it the most expensive hobby in the world."

During the startup days, Jemison-Ball says, the founders weren't able to take money out of the business, and often found themselves putting more of it back in. "Every time we got to the point where we'd be able to take money out, we would have to take the next incremental technological step to keep up and stay in business," he remembers.

Jemison-Ball says he and his partner, Steve Foster, know what they're good at providing: a high quality internet connection and real customer service. "We're not the cheapest but we have good coverage and it works! We deal with folks who want customer service, who want to talk to a human being, and have something other than basic cookie cutter problems to deal with."

He says they learned what customers wanted when they themselves did not get what they wanted from Primenet. "We found we could call them for sales, but that they never answered the phone for support. We realized we could differentiate our service just by answering the phone."

It worked. Jemison-Ball is proud of BBS-LA's low customer turnover. During its entire existence, the turnover has been about 75 percent of customers. Many ISPs have higher churn in a single year.

A bulletproof mail system
Of course, an ISP has to deliver both technology and customer service to have happy customers. Jemison-Ball says his company went the extra mile with their mail system.

"Years ago, we started seeing viruses that looked like they were written by professional programmers, not by kids. We wondered why they would do it, and realized it had to be about bot nets. So we put three front end screening servers to keep the load off our primary mail server. I remember sitting and watching the delay at major e-mail servers when the big botnets hit the first time and the spam influx came in. I was watching hotmail run 32 hours behind, and we were running 4 minutes behind."

He says the company gets 3 million to 5 million connection attempts per day, and the front end servers drop 90 percent of them. "We use custom screening routines, RBLs, and check for addresses that are actually on our server with the front end screening servers. We send what passes the screens to the main server. The main server then screens what's left with anti-spam and anti-virus software, and delivers good e-mail to each user's inbox and bad mail to each user's quarantine folder."

The ratio of good mail to bad, he says, is declining. "A year, or a year and a half ago, we had 1 mail for each 100, now it's 1 good mail in each 1,000. We're hoping there was a seasonal Christmas rush in spam, but we're expecting it to reach 1 in 10,000 next year, and we're changing our mail server configuration to handle it."

He says BBS-LA doesn't need a cluster of mail servers (though it would need a cluster if the company were larger). Instead, it uses many front end screening servers. "We can throw on one or two additional $500 or $700 Linux servers on front end screening and to do DNS lookups. If we need to do more, we can probably move some of the more arcane screening routines off the front end, to avoid needing 15 front end screening servers."

All of this is impressive, of course, but it's not the only reason customers love BBS-LA mail. Jemison-Ball says the company seriously encourages its business customers to use IMAP, and operates without quotas. "POP3 just isn't the best protocol for business users who need to access their e-mail from the office, from home and while on the road. With IMAP4 they can access all their e-mail, organized the same way from any place they need to access it from. It's their mail, and we'll keep it forever. Some of our customers have their entire business history in their mail. We used to do this when hard drives cost serious money, but now they cost nothing, so who cares? We've had customers leave us for DSL, but stick with us for the e-mail."

The company is using a highly customized setup based on Vircom's ModusMail.

"We don't recommend that anyone put a direct accessible mail server in their own network. We front end and relay for a lot of SMBs that need their own MS Exchange servers but are smart enough to not put them directly on the web. For that, we use ModusGates, a server designed to do that kind of interface in front of MS Exchange."

The company does front end scanning for a few other local ISPs, Jemison-Ball says.

Webhosting is key
Several changes turned BBS-LA from an expensive hobby into a business, but the most significant of them, Jemison-Ball says, was colocation. "We used to have 2000 sq. ft of light industrial space in North Hollywood with our own dialup and backbone lines. We cut our overhead significantly when we switched to colocation," he says.

The company developed a positive relationship with a young guy who was just starting out and ended up building data centers. BBS-LA teamed up with him and is now in a carrier neutral datacenter in downtown L.A.

Another significant change was moving from facilities-based dialup to virtual, using MegaPOP. The company claims to be one of MegaPOP's earliest customers. Jemison-Ball says that the acquisition of MegaPOP by US LEC has not ditracted from service at all, because he's dealing with the same people he has always worked with (we're updating the MegaPOP listing in our Wholesale Dialup Directory on Wednesday).

The BBS-LA future
The founders always knew their company would remain a certain size. "Our original goal was not to have to take money out of our own pockets," says Jemison-Ball. "If we had any shortcoming at all, we were shit at marketing and seriously undercapitalized at the beginning, but we've done things that folks with capital were never able to do. It's me, Steve, and a group of eight to ten folks in the 'friends and hangers-on' category. We can field a real good crew who have been with us since the beginning. They get some free service and they pitch in and they can try out new ideas and play with stuff."

Another key business goal is remaining human. "We take pride in the fact that we can do business like human beings," says Jemison-Ball. "We provide free hosting for community organizations, soccer teams, and non-profits. We've helped poor people too. In the early days, we had a dialup customer who was a cop. He called us and told us he'd been shot. He was on disability and needed to cancel because he couldn't afford to pay. We told him to keep the service and gave him a free line. About a year later, he went back to work and started paying again. It cost so little and made us feel good. That kind of thing has done a lot for us in indirect ways, though that's not why we did it. It developed a lot of loyalty, and it made us feel good about what we were doing."

—End