If users report a busy signal, CIFNet has the ability to connect as many phone lines as necessary to relieve the problem. Some Internet providers run all their services from one or two servers. CIFNet uses eight servers to keep its services up and running. These servers range from our dedicated news and IRC servers right down to the secure commercial web servers. All these servers run Unix variants, which CIFNet feels is the only operating system that should be used for networking.
All machines run on PC stations with power backups.
If one of these machines should go down, CIFNet's engineers are on call 24 hours a day to fix any problems. Our news server offers over 30,000 real up-to date newsgroups, including the full alt. The news server has enough hard disk space to hold newsgroups for an average time of one week, although times vary due to newsgroup volume. CIFNet also provides an IRC server so its customers can use the Internet Relay Chat to talk to people around the world. For those users that have problems, CIFNet provides technical support 7 days a week, including holidays.