The Steadfast Networks Blog

The LiteSpeed web server 4.0 release landed just last week. This new release features, among other things, support for Server Side Includes (SSI), large file delivery (greater than 2 GB files) and mod_security 2.0 support.

To address capacity expansion needs, we've just deployed a new shared hosting web server, web 6. This server has been deployed with the new 4.0 version and it appears to be working well. Our SimGames.net hosting users have been testing the 4.0 version for several weeks, going back to the RC1 release, and everything has been stable and reliable, so, barring any issues, we are hoping that by next week we'll be ready to upgrade across the board to 4.0 on all existing servers. Web 4 will remain Apache and we do not plan to make any changes to that server at this time.

Web 6 is receiving all new accounts effective immediately. If you'd like to try out the new SSI features or other 4.0 related features early and are an existing customer, please contact our support team to have your site moved over to the new server. We'd especially like feedback from any customers currently using SSI on web 4 that are adventurous enough to see if their SSI usage translates well to the LiteSpeed implementation.

We'll post an announcement next week to schedule the cut-over of existing servers.

We had noted the demand for more in-depth backup solutions, so we are now providing R1Soft CDP Backups. The CDP (Continuous Data Protection) Backups allow you to run backups much more frequently, as the backups use significantly less system resources than a standard rsync operation.

We have been using this software for the last month on our own shared hosting systems, thus our shared hosting systems are now being backed up hourly instead of daily, and everything has been working beautifully.

Overall, the R1soft software allows you to easily manage your backups through a web based control panel. You can schedule as many backups as you wish, backing up any data at any schedule you wish. This can then be changed at any time directly from the web panel. You can then download this data directly to your home system, restore it back to the server, if the R1soft software is still running on the server, or do a full system restore using PXE boot, through our network.

The cost of this software is $10 a month per server you are backing up and $5 a month per MySQL license. It will work on all Linux and Windows based systems. The R1Soft backup software is also available for no additional charge to all fully managed server customers and can be added to existing backup accounts for just $10 a month, though that would require the old backup account, with all data in it, to be removed.

Today cPanel has announced a price increase on their VPS licenses. This price increase is forcing us to raise the pricing for cPanel on VPS accounts from $5 a month to $8 a month. The price increase is not because of any changes on our side or in our policy, but strictly the price increase passed down from cPanel directly. If you would still like to only pay $5 a month we would highly recommend using Interworx or Plesk, both of which are fully capable control panels on the VPS platform.

Note: This pricing change will only affect new orders for cPanel. Existing cPanel based accounts will not be affected, as we are dedicated to providing consistent pricing to our existing clients.

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.

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.