The Steadfast Networks Blog

Litespeed is now being used for all new Steadfast Networks Shared Web Hosting services.

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.