For Immediate Release:

Richmond KY - February 14th, 2009

After experiencing one of the greatest natural disasters in Kentucky's history, data hosting specialist Chapel Communications has developed and deployed one of the Internet's most stable web hosting environments.   Chapel Communications, a leading provider of electronic commerce web hosting and credit card processing services, today announced a powerful deployment of clustered services for data hosting, making use of specialized software and regionally diverse clustered servers.  

"On Monday January 26th a light rain turned into a disaster, one of the greatest in Kentucky history," said Lee Murphy, President of Chapel Communications.  "As the light rain fell, temperatures dropped over 20 degrees in a very short period of time, causing massive amounts of ice to build up on trees and power lines. This resulted in broken lines and power outages, even collapsed roofs," stated Murphy.  "Our staff basically moved into the Richmond datacenter and monitored operations while helping assure backup communications for the City of Richmond.  This disaster resulted in the deaths of over 30 Kentucky citizens. Power was lost to over 800,000 homes.  The National Guard was activated to help deal with the crisis.”

While power was out across Kentucky, Chapel Communications managed to switch to backup power and keep the data network active.

"The majority of Chapel's customers are located outside of Kentucky, some are located in other countries around the world.  During this crisis many did not know we were under a declared disaster,"  Murphy said.  "The generators reached critical temperatures a several times causing slight hiccups in the network, but overall things were as good as could be expected."

"Many of our clients called to make sure we were ok, it was a very humbling experience to see folks we have never met expressing such concern for our personal safety," stated Kevin Boneta, Vice President of Chapel.  "I really felt like many of these people became friends rather than just business clients."

"This crisis caused us to look for an alternative in the event a disaster occurs in our region again," Murphy added.    The answer was to look at software and hardware that would allow clustered servers to be located at the nation’s major access exchanges (MAE’s) in DC, California, Texas, Chicago and other strategic areas.  All the systems are tied to monitors and servers in the Kentucky DataCenter.  Each node or cluster can stand independently in the event a disaster or crisis takes out one or more of the centers. 

"We are very excited about the possibilities.  Sometimes it takes a crisis to motivate new inventions," added Boneta.    The new software adds a tremendous amount of new functionality.  Such things as blogs and discussion groups can now be added to client websites with the click of a button.  Entire websites can be migrated from regional node to regional node in seconds should a need arise.  Load balancing can occur automatically and geographically.    The new data system will be marketed as "DataCenter PLUS", and is available immediately.

"As our customers’ requirements evolve and the market continues to grow, the need for a standardized, scaleable regionally diverse, Internet commerce platform is essential in order to continue delivering superior service," said Boneta. "DataCenter PLUS is a unique solution that will enable Chapel Communications to seamlessly expand its service offerings to our growing customer base."

Chapel focuses on assisting small to medium sized merchants in gaining a position on the Internet's World Wide Web (WWW).  Chapel provides services ranging from consulting to design as well as dedicated high speed Internet connections,"  Boneta stated.

Chapel Services Inc., a 14-year-old privately held Kentucky company, specializes in E-Commerce and web hosting as well as all aspects of Internet connection and communications. 

For more information on Chapel, visit the new offices, located at 1212 West  Mai Street, Richmond, KY 40475, 859 623-1500, or visit the web site at http://chapel.us