Customer Support

Yes. We support academics and other non-profits through dedicated low pricing. Staff referring their lab or PI can get a referral payment.

Our customers include international companies from the biotech, pharma and agro-industry sectors, non-profit organizations, academic and governmental research laboratories, universities, and students.

SequenceServer has tens of thousands of users worldwide. It has also been cited in more than 200 peer-reviewed publications. You can find a range of published academic usage examples of SequenceServer. These publications cover a range of different research fields including ecology, evolution and agriculture.

SequenceServer is also used in undergraduate, MSc, and PhD-level classes with hundreds of students (and educators love SequenceServer's optional ability to track student engagement).

Protection of our customers' data is our highest priority. Check our security overview for more details. We can answer more questions under NDA. Let us know if you need SOC2 or ISO certification.

Yes. We're only offline for a few minutes per year for critical updates or when there are general internet outages.

Your SequenceServer instance has a graphical administrator dashboard that allows you to upload sequence databases from your local computer or from another machine. You can upload individual FASTA files (raw or .gz or .zip compressed), or archives (.zip or .tar.gz) of multiple FASTA files or databases. SequenceServer will appropriately format each FASTA file into a BLAST database. Alternatively, provide a Dropbox/Google Drive share, or a set of http or ftp links. Finally, we can provide a secure AWS/S3 or ftp upload link.
You can also select from among common standard databases (e.g., SwissProt, Uniref50, hg38, etc.)

Do what you want: we have no hard limits on numbers of databases, blast searches, or query sizes. Our service is designed with scalability and flexibility in mind. So most people need not worry, just like you don't worry about the fair usage policy of your internet or mobile phone providers. However, there are some edge cases we cannot handle while still ensuring quality of service for all users. If you're unsure about your scenario, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Our graphical user interface dashboard enables administrators to easily add and remove databases and users. It's self-serve. Make as many changes as you want, as often as you want. Some screenshots here.

We automatically clean up filenames: We convert all '_' and '-' to spaces, and remove extensions such as '.fasta' or '.fa'. But if you want to change your database names even more, the easiest is to rename your fasta files before uploading them. Alternatively, you can specify the name in the upload interface. (For core facilities that may want to batch upload many files, provide a .title file alongside each fasta file.). The administrator dashboard also lets you rename existing databases.

We run the latest stable version of SequenceServer 2. and of NCBI BLAST+. We continually roll out upgrades so your analyses benefit from the highest sensitivity, specificity, visualizations and download options. We know that for specific projects it can be helpful to freeze your analyses to specific versions of BLAST and SequenceServer. Get in touch if you need this.

Yes.
1. BLAST search results remain at their URL - the https address at the top of the page. You can simply bookmark this.
2. You can check the history of all your BLAST searches.
3. You can click the 'Share' button to share your result with someone.

Yes. Just click the 'Share' button on the left.
Alternatively, save your BLAST report using the built-in functionality of your web browser (save as a PDF or as a Web archive).
Additionally, you can export the raw data (in table or XML formats). Finally, you can easily download figures from the BLAST report in publication ready PNG or SVG formats.

Through a web browser, at https://any_name_you_can_think_of.sequenceserver.com. By default, we'll use a secure 'magic-link' mechanism. But business customers typically prefer integration with single-sign-on (SSO) systems. We can do anything SAML, including AzureAD (the Microsoft one many companies and universities use), Okta, onelogin, Google, ADFS, PingIdentity and OpenID.

Yes. We can use a subdomain on your top-level domain, for example https://blast.growbetterplants.com, or we can also host in what appears to be a subfolder of your main site, e.g. https://bigcheeselab.org/blast, while you host the rest of the site.

Yes, if we run aardvarkgenomes.sequenceserver.com, there are essentially four manners through which you can integrate it with your website. We can help with each of them. First, you can simply use iframe embedding. This works (surprisingly well). Second, you can change DNS records to make blast.aardvarkgenomes.org, or even simply aardvarkgenomes.org be synonymous with aardvarkgenomes.sequenceserver.com. We can change the identity of what we are serving so it reflects the name you prefer. Third, we can pass information on the server side, by modifying your webserver's configuration file. If, for example you are running nginx, you can use its reverse proxy features. In that way, everything goes through your server, but the interface appears to your website users as if it's served from your site directly. Finally, we can host your normal aardvarkgenomes.org pages as well. Thus you don't need a separate webserver or hosting provider.

Yes, we can. Say you are hosting a community or departmental web page and want to enable your users to also download fasta files or protocols, view images, or access a jBrowse genome browser or other data. We are now able to also host such pages and data on our servers. Yes it works for static html pages, or for dynamic content (e.g., PHP/Lamp). So for example, you could have https://myorganismbase.com as a normal website, and https://myorganismbase.com/blast for SequenceServer searches. For small-scale usage (less than 5GB data) there is no extra cost for this on annual subscription plans. Please get in touch with your constraints if this is something you'd like to pursue.

No, we use a cookie in your browser to remember that you previously logged in successfully.

Subscription plans with single-sign-on (SSO) support rely on the criteria specified by the IT administrators managing SSO rules. We can work with SAML-identity providers including AzureAD, Okta, onelogin, Google, ADFS, PingIdentity and OpenID.
We can also additionally restrict access based on IP ranges, http password authentication, or VPC connections. Get in touch with your specific requirements.

Absolutely. While most customers have private servers, we can set up a server that is open to the public. Indeed, SequenceServer is the BLAST interface underpinning many community websites. The pricing depends on how much traffic you expect. Please get in touch.

Most of our users are happy to use a dedicated instance, served at https://myserver.sequenceserver.com. However, some enterprise customers prefer dedicated 'on-premises' servers that completely siloed from all of our infrastructure, or in a particular geographical region (e.g., within the EU, or within Japan). This is possible. Please reach out.

Sometimes, a database administrator wants extra restrictions. If you want us to block downloads, just contact us. Users will still be able to see database versions of HSP alignments, but downloading of entire hit sequences from the database will be impossible.

Yes. Get in touch with us, and let us know which plan and duration you want the quote to cover. We will get a quote back to you rapidly.

If payment by bank card, Apple Pay or Google Pay don't work for you, please get in touch. Some finance departments require going through a purchase order process. We unfortunately can only process purchase orders if the spend is $500 or more. Have your finance department contact us at contact@sequenceserver.com to get our details. We use Stripe as our main payments processor - in some jurisdictions they unfortunately don't accept Apple or Google Pay.

Yes - we understand that the need for this can arise. We offer an additional 10% discount for multi-year subscriptions. Please get in touch by email with your specific request and preferred payment mechanism, and we will rapidly get back to you.

We take security extremely seriously. We don't store your payment information. Instead, we process payments using the industry standard Stripe.com. You can thus pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, or by bank card. Stripe annually process hundreds of billions of dollars in payments, including for Booking.com, Zoom, Uber, Deliveroo and Unicef.

Many reasons :) Our tools do much more than just BLAST. We have DNA sequence visualizers, SRA-BLAST, protein annotation, and much more. Even if you only wanted minimalist BLAST, there are many challenges when running locally include server size, security for remote access, database and software updates, collisions when multiple users. Here are some more details on challenges of running your own server.

Anyone can of course run BLAST in the command-line too, but then you don't get any of the visualisations that are essential for interpreting results. We find them particularly helpful when there are many hits with many HSPs.

Yes. Your subscription will terminate at the end of your current billing period (month or year). If you would like to cancel, you can do it directly through your administrator dashboard.

No, there are no cancellation fees or charges. Your subscription will simply not renew at the end of your current billing period.

Sure - check our support page. Feel free to contact us by email or using the chat widget. We are also happy to arrange a demonstration or question/answer call over zoom.

Yes. Book a video meeting or contact support.