The Steadfast Networks Blog

I am sure many of you have heard about the 5.4 (smaller or larger depending on who you hear it from) earthquake that hit Illinois at about 4:40AM Central followed by a smaller aftershock about 6 hours later. I am just informing you that the affects of the quake were minor here in Chicago, as we’re over 200 miles from the center of the earthquake zone. There has been no noted damage to any of the data center subsystems during the checks performed this morning, and there is no reason for concern.

Personally, the earthquake did wake me up this morning. It was a bit of a surprise here in Chicago, but it was just a gentle rocking motion, a little like a train ride. It took me a bit to figure out what was going on. After realizing it was lasting too long (about 15 seconds) to be a wind gust against the side of the building (or similar) and that it was an earthquake, my first concern was that it was a large 8.0 quake in the New Madrid fault zone, as I figured that was what was necessary for me to actually feel it here. Such an earthquake would have been potentially devastating to cities such as Memphis and St. Louis. We were saved from the damage here, but some in St. Louis and Louisville, which are both much closer to the center of the quake, didn’t fair as well, though there is no major structural damage reported, last I heard. You can see some pictures of the damage office furniture in Bulgaria
here.

After extensive evaluation of various game server control panels, we are now supporting TCAdmin on all of our dedicated Windows server packages. This offering is being made to benefit our game server provider and gaming customers by offering them full support of TCAdmin systems, along with over 60 game servers, at a reduced license rate, $10 a month. You can see the list of supported game and voice servers here.

I know there has been concern that this may compete with our existing game server customers, but we never plan to compete with our game server provider customers by offering individual game server. Also, this is not intended to compete with our game server clients, but to offer them greater support and lower pricing for their current operations.

OK, I had said in a previous post that we’d soon be announcing some new changes to our server offerings, so now I’m announcing them. First of all, ALL servers will use Supermicro motherboards and Supermicro cases with hot swap drive bays. Second, ALL new servers will be put on a gigabit internal network, with access to the backup servers. Then the higher end systems, Core 2 Duo E6600 (which is not currently in stock on the new configuration) or better, will be put on a gigabit network port by default and have IPMI, which will offer KVM over IP capabilities.

We are also changing the standard hardware specs. The Sempron 3000+ is being replaced by the Celeron 430 at $109.95 a month, the Athlon64 3500+ is being replaced by the Core 2 Duo E4500 at $149.95 a month, and the Dual Clovertown 5335 is being replaced by the Dual Harpertown 5410 at $439.95 a month. All of those should offer performance upgrades for the same price.

You can order the new servers on the dedicated servers page of our web site.

This press release was issued today regarding our partnership with LiteSpeed Technologies, as we are now offering their web server software with dedicated server packages and on our shared hosting platform:

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) April 2, 2008 — Steadfast Networks, a leading Chicago based data center and dedicated server hosting provider, announced today its new partnership with LiteSpeed Technologies. Steadfast Networks hosting customers on all services including shared, reseller, and dedicated hosting will experience faster load times and increased speed in their web applications.
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“LiteSpeed’s web server technology provides a great incentive for our hosting customers by improving website load times and allowing them to do more with less hardware,” said Karl Zimmerman, CEO of Steadfast Networks. “Few data centers and dedicated hosting companies are willing to keep up with the latest technology to help their customers get the most out of their hosting services.”

Steadfast added the new web server technology at no additional cost to shared hosting customers. Dedicated server and colocation customers will be charged a fee, but at reduced pricing. The technology will increase web server speed to nearly nine times faster than traditional hosting services running Apache. Customers using PHP based websites will experience faster page load times by as much as fifty percent compared to using Apache.

“By using LiteSpeed’s web server, Steadfast customers will immediately see an increase in performance across all their website applications from standard websites to the most resource intensive web applications,” said Zimmerman. “Other added benefits of using LiteSpeed Web Server include zero down time graceful restart, support for thousands of concurrent connections, and improved security measures.”

The LiteSpeed Web Server technology recovers from service failure instantly, providing longer server and website uptime. Customers still receive the same features as the Apache web server including .htaccess support. In addition, Steadfast Networks is the only H-Sphere shared hosting company to utilize LiteSpeed technology.

“We are very pleased to have Steadfast Networks on board as our partner,” said George Wang, president of LiteSpeed Technologies. “Steadfast’s technical expertise, knowledge of the web hosting market, and their existing customer base, make Steadfast a great fit for our partner program.”

About Steadfast Networks
Established in 1998, Chicago based hosting company Steadfast Networks, delivers high quality, powerful servers through reliable dedicated server hosting, colocation server hosting, virtual private servers, shared web hosting, and dedicated game server hosting. Steadfast’s award-winning services and dedicated support staff help customers from all over the world 24/7/365. Customers can choose basic hosting or a customized, fully managed dedicated server hosting solution.

To learn more about Steadfast Networks, visit http://www.steadfast.net.

Media Contact:
Karl Zimmerman
Steadfast Networks
312-602-2689
karl @ steadfast.net

About LiteSpeed Technologies
Based in New Jersey with a satellite branch in Los Angeles, LiteSpeed Technologies is a next-generation web platform company that is dedicated to providing businesses with technology to improve the speed of internet content delivery while reducing operational costs for large web sites, service providers, and enterprise data centers.

For more information, please visit LiteSpeed’s website at www.litespeedtech.com or contact sales @ litespeedtech.com.

Media Contact:
Xing Li
LiteSpeed Technologies
(908) 745-2118 x 403
xing @ litespeedtech.com

As we have just introduced the new line of Intel based dedicated servers we are now selling off all of our older AMD based system, thus we are having a nice big sale.

Here are the systems available:

Dual Opteron 244, 2GB, 250GB  SATA Drive - $169.95, free setup - Buy Now
Opteron 170 (Dual Core), 2GB RAM, 250GB SATA Drive - $169.95 a month, free setup - Buy Now
Dual Opteron 270 (Dual Core), 2GB RAM, 250GB SATA Drive - $239.95 a month, free setup - Buy Now

Note: Either of the last two may get upgraded to an Opteron 1212 or 2212.

As you can see on our current dedicated servers page, we are currently sold out of our Sempron and Athlon64 systems. This is because we have just received a new shipment of servers and will begin selling them this coming week. As part of the new shipment we are replacing the AMD based systems with all Intel based systems, due to their higher processing power and greater power efficiency. In addition, starting with this next shipment we will be using 100% Supermicro motherboards with rackmount hot swap Supermicro chassis, even on our lowest end systems. We are not cutting any corners, and delivering only the best when it comes to hardware.

Here are the changes:

Sempron 3000+ is being replaced by the Celeron 430 (Conroe based 1.8Ghz Celeron) - $109.95 a month
Athlon64 3500+ is being replaced by the Core 2 Duo E4500 (2.2Ghz Dual-Core) - $149.95 a month

As a note, we will also be announcing several more changes, which will be starting with this new order, this coming week. Don’t worry, all the changes are good.

OK, we’ve been getting it requested on an almost daily basis, so I have caved in.  Steadfast Networks now has an affiliate program, paying $20 or 35% on each shared hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated server, or colocation sale you bring to us.  We provide a full back-end system to track your clicks and sales as well.  I won’t repeat everything I put on the web site, so you can read more about our Affiliate Program at: http://steadfast.net/services/affiliate.php

Basically, there are a couple things I feel our program offers above many others even though we aren’t offer $100+ per referal or whatever some of the places are offering these days.

1) You can honestly recommend our product as we offer a high level of service and support.
2) We do not require long-term contracts.  They are not going to have to sign-up for one year to get you your commission, meaning more commission for you in the end as more people sign-up.
3) We are offering a wider array of services than most, not just shared hosting, but VPSes, reseller accounts, dedicated servers, and colocation, increasing the likelihood that we are offering what your friend, site visitor or whoever you end up sending our way wants.
4) This is a sustainable model, so you can count on us continuing to provide you quality service and for this program to be around for years to come.

If you have any questions just put a comment in the blog here or contact our sales department and we’ll be more than happy to assist you.  It is a new program, so I am certainly assuming we’ll run into some bugs and other issues along the way.

Letter sent to all shared hosting customers on March 19, 2008:

After a week of thorough beta testing and many weeks of internal testing, we are proud to announce that Steadfast Networks has partnered with LiteSpeed Technologies to provide LiteSpeed based web hosting. LiteSpeed is web server software which offers greater speed, reliability, and security than Apache, the current web server software we are using. All new shared hosting accounts will be established on the new LiteSpeed servers and existing customers can be moved to the new servers by emailing support@steadfast.net or opening a support ticket at https://support.steadfast.net and including your account username or ID along with the request to be moved to the new LiteSpeed servers. Anyone requesting the move will still use the same control panel, mail server, MySQL server and DNS and the transfer should not involve any downtime as long as the account is setup according to our recommendations.

LiteSpeed offers many advantages over Apache, and you can read all about them here: http://steadfast.net/services/litespeed.php As far as disadvantages, there are currently a couple, though the features are planned to be added by LiteSpeed Technologies over the coming months. These lost features are: Server Side Includes, mono (for ASP.Net support), agent logs, referrer logs, and error logs. LiteSpeed does fully support any .htaccess files you may be using and any Perl or PHP scripts you may have, so there should be no difference there, though I would like to note that new servers are only deployed with PHP 5, as PHP 4 is nearing its end of life. If you are not using any of the above features which are currently not included, we highly recommend you request a switch to LiteSpeed to take advantage of the increased speed, reliability, and security.

Notes: When you request a move you will not be able to add or edit most items in your control panel for a period of 24 hours, to assure that the old and new copies (one on the old server and one on the new) of your account remain consistent in case there ends up being an issue with the account transfer. If you do notice any issues after being transferred to the LiteSpeed server please contact our support department and they will be able to assist you, or get you moved back to your original server. In addition, we are now officially offering support for Ruby on Rails on LiteSpeed based servers. Finally, we will likely always be keeping Apache based web servers for existing customers. There are no plans to ever force existing customers to move to LiteSpeed.

I had said last week that we would begin offering LiteSpeed based web servers, and we are now open for Beta testing. To be moved to our new web server just contact our support staff, email or ticket, and request that they move your account to the new LiteSpeed web server. Make sure to note the username and/or account ID on your account and there will be no downtime with the move, assuming you are using the Steadfast name servers.

As the subject says, this is still a Beta product. We do not see reliability being an issue, but there are some features that are not fully functional at this time. Some changes include no SSI, no mono (ASP.Net support), only support for access logs (no error or referrer logs, etc.), and the cgi-bin directory (and thus AWStats) does not work, though you can install CGIs outside of the cgi-bin directory. If everything works out as it should, the new web server should definitely be faster and more reliable than any web server you’re on with us currently, but as it is still in beta there could also still be some unresolved issues.

Note: This has since been released to the public, you can order here: http://steadfast.net/services/shared.php 

We have decided to completely change our VPS plan offerings to appeal to a wider array of customers and to make the experience better for all of our customers. This involved adding new plans at both the low and high end of the plan spectrum and offering more RAM with the plans at a lower price point. In addition, we have changed all the names, though still sticking with the metal theme, to assure that there is no confusion between the old and new plans.

With the new plans we have added some more variety. First of all, we offer a low cost VPS option, just $14.95 a month and $19.95 setup (the setup fee is dropped if you pay 3 or more months in advance) which offers 128MB of RAM, 5GB of disk space, and 100GB of bandwidth. The plan does not contain enough RAM to support any of the usual control panels, thus none are supported on this plan, but the plan would work perfectly for someone to use as a DNS server, a developmental server, etc. On the high end of the plans, we are now offering VPS accounts with dedicated processing cores and 1-2GB of RAM. These high end plans are designed to eliminate the need for some people to migrate to a dedicated server and offering more growth options for existing VPS customers.

We haven’t only added additional plans, but we have basically upgraded all the plans, giving more RAM, disk space, and bandwidth for the same prices. Now existing customers will not get the new pricing by default, but they will be able to upgrade to the new plans by using the “Upgrade Center” from the control panel at https://hspc.nozonenet.com. Note: Some customers may need to cancel their old VPS and sign-up for a new one if their VPS is based on old OS templates, though the new templates will also offer higher efficiency and a better overall user experience.

Well, that is all I have to say here, but you can see all the new plans on the VPS page of our web site: http://steadfast.net/services/vps.php