Most of our customers will be unaffected by the Y2K bug, though we do anticipate disruptions on the Internet that may cause your website to be unavailable to *some* visitors. One of the major reasons is that at one minute after midnight, many people will be tempted to log onto the Internet to see if they can find the Y2K bug somewhere. In fact, many phone companies are requesting their subscribers not to pick up the phones just after midnight because if everyone in your neighborhood picks up the phone at the same time, it will overburden the circuits and crash the phone network.

Similarly, if everyone is logging onto the Internet at the same time, this is certainly going to cause massive traffic jams on the Internet. As a result, you may not be able to reach some sites or servers. It's not that the servers are down, it's just that traffic is too heavy for your page request to reach the server.

Windows95/98/NT/2000 users do the following procedure
* open a DOS window * at the command prompt C\>, type tracert www.domainname where domainname is the name of the Web site that you are trying to reach. For instance, if your domain name is abc.com, then try tracert www.abc.com

For email, change the www to pop, i.e. C\> tracert pop.domainname

* watch the output. If you see the star * character appear anywhere during the traceroute, that indicates that a traffic jam is occuring at that location on the Internet and is the cause of your not being able to reach the desired site. There is nothing that you or we can do about it. Just try again later.

* If you are located =>OUTSIDE<= the US and Northern Europe, you may expect longer outages as many systems in countries outside these regions are less prepared for Y2K and repairs will take longer.

If your OS is Windows 3.1 use a software utility called "Hop". If your system is a Mac, use Mac TCP Watcher. You should be able to download both utilities at http//www.shareware.com/ (be sure to download them in the next 24 hours).

You can expect sporadic service interuptions on the Internet days after the New Years as some networks will wait to reboot their systems until well into the New Year and will only fail then.

If you use an older version of an FTP program, such as Ws_Ftp 4.0 and older, be sure to upgrade to a newer version. Older versions of FTP programs are not Y2K compatible. Similarly, Netscape Navigator 4.1 and older have a Y2K related bug that will interfere when accessing secure sites and will give you error messages. To avoid the error messages, upgrade to a newer version.

Again, if you experience any type of interruption, do a traceroute first.

Sincerely,