All About MumbleDog
In 2008, a little company called Sabrienix who'd been offering web services and game servers happened upon a little VoIP application called Mumble. At first we were just using it for our own purposes, mainly because we had perfectly good servers and didn't want to pay another host for Ventrilo, and a new authorized Ventrilo host license is about impossible to get these days.
We really liked it, and the open-source nature and the ability to run on Linux sealed the deal. It also sounded pretty good too.
After a while, we realized there were no US-based commercial hosts. Indeed, when we started looking at hosting Mumble servers, there was exactly one commercial host: Mumble-Tower. At the time, scripts to manage Mumble were pretty sparse, so we began to develop our own. In the last quarter of 2008 we opened our doors to Mumble clients everywhere and began as the first (that we know of) US-based commercial host.
We started on modest VPS servers, and pledged to donate a portion of the profits to the Mumble project, which we did. Eventually however, it became apparent that Murmur's not terribly happy on VPSes. :(
In June of 2009, we upgraded both our server locations to dedicated machines. They both live on full 100mbps ports, connected to the internet via BGP and FCPs which is basically fancy technical talk for "should have a really good internet connection". We do our best to only select hosts with good networks spread across multiple carriers to make sure you get the best quality Murmur we can possibly offer.
MumbleDog is born
Eventually we realized that Sabrienix is probably not the greatest name for a Mumble host. Sabrienix does multiple services, so our website isn't Mumble-only. We got the name from Sabriena, the owner and operator, and thought it'd be cute for a little design/development/hosting company... but unfortunately some folks have a hard time remembering how to spell it.
So we came up with the name "MumbleDog" after being bugged by our dog during one too many late nights. We configured two easy to remember hostnames for our servers, then basically sat on the name ever since.
In May of 2010, we finally started working on the website and getting ready to market it. As of May, 2010, between web hosting and MumbleDog, Sabrienix is paying all it's own bills and our contracting gives us enough money to eat and sleep each month. We hope to begin making donations to Mumble again this summer!
We're Mumblers Too!
Our staff have all used Mumble at some point. Some of us far more than others, because some of us find themselves distracted by games like Team Fortress 2 and wind up on it more nights than not. We use the exact same servers as our clients, and we don't like lag spikes any more than you do, so our goal is simply to provide the type of server we'd like to use.
Jamie, our chief Mumbler, is almost always to be found in the #mumble IRC channel and does his best to help people who are having trouble. He's also submitted patches and written scripts which are contributed back to the community, as well as made numerous edits to the Mumble Wiki.
We like to think of ourselves as an enlightened little company and we realize that more people using Mumble is better for us, even if they're not directly paying for us to host their servers so we do our best to help people get up and running even if they're not customers!
