In this update:

COVID-19 Response
Payments
Folding@Home
Amazon WorkSpaces

COVID-19 Response
It's hard to comprehend the changes over the last few weeks as the COVID-19 pandemic has spread around the world. Fortunately the Internet infrastructure has remained stable even under the massive increase in traffic from "work-from-home", video conferencing, NetFlix and more. As always Reliable Penguin is committed to providing reliable service regardless of the circumstances.

We encourage everyone to maximize social distancing and show your support to the front line health care workers who are fighting the COVID-19 battle every day. Our thoughts and prayers go out to them, our staff and their families and the families and staff of our clients.

Reliable Penguin has always been a distributed organization with most of our staff working from home offices. On March 10th we cancelled all travel, in-person meetings and use of shared work spaces. Additionally, we advised our team to begin aggressive social distancing and hygiene practices. As of the date of this post we have had no confirmed cases or known exposures within the organization.

We are in daily contact with our critical infrastructure partners including RackSpace, Amazon Web Services, CloudFlare, and OpenSRS. To date, all are reporting that the network infrastructure is secure and stable. We will continue to monitor the status of critical services and share updates as appropriate.

Originally we adjusted our support priorities to assist our clients transitioning to a work-from-home model. We have now returned to our normal support priorities.

Payments
As announced previously all payments should be made electronically by credit card, debit card, ACH, wire transfer, Paypal or Zelle.

Details can be found on your invoice and our payment portal here:

https://payments.reliablepenguin.com/

If you are unable to make electronic payments, then checks by postal mail will be accepted but processing will be delayed up to fourteen (14) days. Please send payments early enough to factor in this delay.

Please be aware that payments for services must be completed within the terms of your contract or service plan. Failure to make payments on schedule will result in late fees and service termination. If your payment will be delayed for any reason please contact our team to make arrangements.

Folding@home
Looking for ways to help fight COVID-19? Checkout the Folding@home project.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together citizen scientists who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers. Insights from this data is helping scientists to better understand biology, and providing new opportunities for developing therapeutics.

For COVID-19, the project is is running small molecule screening simulations and visualizing the demogorgon or spike opening. These simulations will contribute towards the development of new therapeutic treatments. Over the last month Folding@home has grown from 30,000 computers to over 700,000 and is not arguably the largest super computer in the world.

You can download the Folding@home software for your computer here:

https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/

Additionally if you have a managed server at Reliable Penguin then you can donate spare processing power. Just email support@reliablepenguin.com and we'll install the software free of charge.

Amazon WorkSpaces
Struggling with "work-from-home"? Consider Amazon WorkSpaces.

Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. You can use Amazon WorkSpaces to provision either Windows or Linux desktops in just a few minutes and quickly scale to provide thousands of desktops to workers across the globe. You can pay either monthly or hourly, just for the WorkSpaces you launch, which helps you save money when compared to traditional desktops and on-premises virtual desktop solutions. Amazon WorkSpaces helps you eliminate the complexity in managing hardware inventory, OS versions and patches, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which helps simplify your desktop delivery strategy. With Amazon WorkSpaces, your users get a fast, responsive desktop of their choice that they can access anywhere, anytime, from any supported device including desktop, mobile and web browser.

Reliable Penguin uses Amazon WorkSpaces and we've implemented for a number clients. For more information just email support@reliablepenguin.com.