eQSL.cc is the first and only global electronic QSL card exchange for amateur radio operators and SWLs.
It is designed to be the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to exchange QSO confirmations, eliminating the cost and time
that regular QSL cards have required for the past half century.
Ownership
The company is registered in the State of Texas and owned by David L. Morris, N5UP.
Dave has over 30 years of experience architecting computer hardware and software systems and has been involved in
other pioneering software projects involving amateur radio and artificial intelligence.
He experimented and developed the eQSL concept over a period of several years, designed the system,
wrote all the software, developed the SQL database, designed the graphics, and currently handles much of the technical support.
You can read more about the history of the company on our 10th Anniversary page.
Non-profit Status
Although the company is not legally a "non-profit" in the technical sense of the term, it is operated very much similar to a non-profit organization.
One can easily calculate the amount of revenue that would be generated from a membership base of over 120,000 members if each member were charged
even as little as $1 per month.
But the company's mission is to provide basic electronic QSL card exchange services to all amateurs and SWLs
around the world FREE of charge. Thus, we do not charge a mandatory membership or subscription fee in order to participate.
We do this at a huge loss to us, as you can easily calculate.
The failure of "dot-coms" during the year 2000 has been widely publicized. Despite the popular demand for "FREE"
services on the web, it is finally becoming apparent to everyone that this is not a realistic expectation.
Nevertheless, eQSL.cc does NOT have any plans to begin charging for its basic QSL exchange service.
The company's primary purpose in all revenue generation activities is to offset monthly expenses for
Commissions on sales of items through Amazon.com and other affliates
Sales of award plaques and other items
Business Plans
In January 2009 we launched an interface with CQ magazine, allowing our members to submit credits directly to CQ awards managers.
In March 2010 we launched an electronic interface to the DARC servers to allow our users to transmit credits into the DCL contest log.
Some organizations such as 10-10 and JARL have had informal acceptance policies toward our electronic QSLs.
It is a goal of ours to make arrangements with ARRL, IOTA, and other amateur organizations
to accept our eQSLs for awards and contests. We believe our authenticated
eQSLs are even more reliable than traditional QSL cards as confirmation of QSOs!
You can find out which organizations currently accept our eQSLs by going to the Organization List page.
Advisory Board
The company has daily discussions among a group of Advisory Board members.
While not binding on the management of eQSL.cc, the suggestions and recommendations of the Advisory Board are usually accepted,
and these have resulted in many significant improvements and new features.
Advisory Board members are appointed by the management of eQSL.cc and serve a term that ends December 31 of each year.
They are chosen for their experience with web technologies, logging software, contesting, their affiliation with amateur organizations,
standing in the amateur community, foreign language expertise, journalistic background, SWL experiences,
or other assets of benefit to eQSL.cc.
They volunteer their time and energy to the advancement of this aspect of amateur radio,
and their efforts have resulted in improved ease of use, enhanced features, and greater
popularity of eQSL.cc in the amateur community.
Some of them are involved in daily support activities, such as answering e-mail, checking licenses, correcting mistakes in user profiles,
approving awards, and other things.
Data Center
The Electronic QSL Card Centre eQSL.cc is located in a state-of-the-art data center in Dallas, Texas. It is certified by an independent auditor to be SAS 70 Type II compliant, with raised floors, climate control, fire-suppression system, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems and standby power generators, as well as 24 hour-a-day live human staff monitoring the systems from 2 separate, redundant network operations centers.
One of the most significant benefits of selecting eQSL.cc as your QSL exchange is the high level of security and fault-tolerance that is offered from a facility designed to house E-Commerce sites.
Servers are located in an extra-secure environment featuring top-of-the-line security systems that incorporate biometric identification systems, closed-circuit cameras, security patrols, social engineering practices and restricted floor access.
In January 2008 we retired our single server that had performed flawlessly for 4 years, and replaced it with 2 new servers. In June 2010, we migrated our system to 2 even larger and faster servers.
(
The Application server has dual quad-core 2.26GHz processors and 3 each 250GB disks in RAID5.
The Database Server has dual quad-core 2.26GHz processors, 64-bit OS, 24GB of RAM, 4 each 300GB SAS 15K RPM Cheetah disks in RAID10 and a 1 Terabyte side operations disk.
Collectively, these two servers are able to handle over 99.6% of all database requests directly from memory without requiring a disk access, and can handle over 200 simultaneous user connections with only 10% of the processor resources, generally resulting in less than 4 second response times for most pages.)
)
Beginning in February 2009 we have also had a 3rd server located in Houston, Texas, just to do backups and keep them in a completely different location, in case of natural disasters.
Privacy and Security
We have a strong privacy policy which you can read online.
From our earliest days in the 1990s, we have employed third parties to help us build a secure system.
Early on, we would hire well-known hackers to try to break into our systems.
Now we employ professional services such as HackerAlert and TrustWave to hammer on our systems and try to break in. They issue certifications, some of which we publish online for you to look at.
These agencies employ known hacking exploits in an attempt to gain entry to our databases or to corrupt our data, and then notify us of any back doors or other entry modes they were able to find.
We fix these whenever they are reported, and they continue to employ the latest knowledge of attack paths to test our security.
All our data runs on RAID arrays of fault-tolerant disks. This means we have 3 or 4 disks doing the job of 1, to provide duplication and faster access times. We do server backups every 6 hours, and the two servers back each other up daily.
In the event of a natural disaster (tornadoes, explosions, terrorist attacks), we have a 3rd server located in Houston, Texas, that stores copies of both servers and updates them periodically as a last-chance disaster recovery method.
Our servers are monitored around the clock by several different automated monitoring systems in different parts of the world.
Any outage automatically triggers a multi-tier support system.
The first notification occurs within seconds of a web server or mail server failure and will be detected by on-premises monitors as well as remote monitors in other parts of the world.
The data center NOC is notified on a monitoring screen, and the webmaster is notified by cellphone.
If nothing is corrected within 30 minutes, NOC personnel begin calling a series of phone numbers for the webmaster, backup support personnel, and Advisory Board members.
Several of the Advisory Board members on our Support Committee are constantly monitoring the system, and they notify the webmaster by cellphone whenever something unusual occurs that might not be considered a web server or mail server failure,
but which affect the usability of the system.
If you experience a server outage, chances are that it will be fixed automatically within a couple of minutes, and you can just hit the REFRESH button on your browser until it returns to normal.
In the event of an extended outage, we maintain a System Status page on a completely different server at eQSLcc.BlogSpot.com where we will report the status of any outage lasting more than 15 minutes. You should bookmark that page for future reference.
Other Internet ventures by Dave Morris N5UP
Air-Wave Productions - Adventure videos in high definition for aviation and travel enthusiasts
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