We finally got everything worked out for our HostingCon customer dinner... I definitely apologize for the late notice, but here is the notice sent to our dedicated server/colocation clients and posted on our forum:

First of all, I apologize for the extremely late notice, but our original plans kind of fell through. The good thing is, it results in free food and drinks for all dedicated server and colocation customers (also any shared hosting or VPS customers that find this notice) on Sunday the 22nd from 7PM - 10PM. We have picked this date as it is the day before HostingCon (http://www.hostingcon.com) and a good number of our customers should be in town. The event will be held at 350 E Cermak, Chicago, IL in the 8th floor library, simply enter the building at the north entrance, and will also involve tours of our new data center space, located at the same address.

We are planning to serve some barbecue from one of the staff's favorite spots in Chicago, Fat Willy's, as well as water, soda, and beer. Even if that doesn't sound like great stuff to you, it is still free, and the company should be well worth it. Also, for those of you then wanting to lose that weight you'll gain right away, we're also hopefully going to have a Nintendo Wii setup for your enjoyment.

Now, the important part, to assure we have enough food, is that if you are planning to make it, please email sales@steadfast.net with the subject RSVP and in the message include the number of people from your company/group that will be coming. Don't worry; we're not limiting the number of guests you can bring, as we're expecting a smaller turn-out than we had hoped because of the late notice anyway.

Hope to see you there!!

Directions/Notes: There should be street parking available in the area if you're driving down, just use your favorite map site for directions and remember to enter at the NORTH entrance of the building. Otherwise, the #3 bus stops at McCormick place and the entrance is only two blocks north from there. The red line stop, Cermak/Chinatown is also within walking distance, a little over half a mile away and the Metra Electric Line stops at McCormick Place, basically across the street. Just walk East, until you are almost at the Hyatt and turn left on Calumet, enter at the North side of the 8 story brick building at the corner of Cermak and Calumet. Otherwise, you can always take a cab (tell them 350 E 21st St. though so you don't need to walk around the whole building then), and if you're not far away, we can likely arrange to have someone pick you up as well.

Over the weekend, we turned up our Standard Network line to Savvis. With that change, the Value Network is now officially the Standard Network and the Premium Network is now the Performance Network. Those changes were announced here last month and are now reflected on our web site. Overall, we feel these new names are a much better reflection of the level of service provided, especially with the addition of a top Tier 1 network, Savvis, to the Value/Standard Network.

We will also be making further additions to the network in the coming weeks, including MCI/Verizon Business for the Performance Network and XO for the Performance and Standard Networks.

As we had announced, we are changing the names of our network offerings. Now, we are making the respective changes on our web site, so please pardon our dust. For a little bit here, there will be some references to both Value/Premium and Standard/Performance networks. We are also in the process of reorganizing some of the service offering pages, such as the Colocation page, which has already been completed.

Interworx 3.0 is finally out, and yes, I mean FINALLY... There is now absolutely no reason to not select Interworx as your control panel of choice since it now has full multi-domain support for each user, greatly improved reseller features, and some other things which you can read about here, as I don't have the time to go through all of them. We have been working with Interworx for well over a year now and we have had great experiences with the software and with the team behind the software. Now with this update, there is no reason we wouldn't recommend Interworx to anyone for any purpose. If you're not familiar with Interworx go to their site. Then when you change to Interworx you can get used to a fully featured control panel with a responsive and intuitive interface, one not full of bugs and which flexibly allows you to work inside of it, changing configurations manually and not breaking, etc.

We offer Interworx with all of our VPS accounts for the standard $5 a month fee and with all our dedicated servers in two flavors, 35 domain (Free) and unlimited domains ($10 a month). Interworx is also offered in clustered configurations for those situations where one server just isn't enough.

OK, I figured I'd give this a title that people would notice and then actually bother reading this blog post, though it is true, we are no longer going to have a "Value Network." Don't worry though, it is just getting a name change because of several improvements we are planning.

First of all, we have removed nLayer from our premium and value networks because of several issues with congested peering points while then extending our relationships with some of our other carriers, Savvis, PCCW Global, and TeliaSonera. This then leads to our improvements as we are replacing nLayer with Savvis on the value network and then MCI/Verizon Business on the premium network. Both of those changes are currently slated for July 1. In addition, we will be adding 10 GigE connectivity to both TeliaSonera and PCCW Global in the coming weeks.

Since we are adding a top tier one carrier, Savvis, to the value network we felt that the term "value network" was no longer a fitting name so we are going to make that our Standard Network. With it becoming our Standard Network we are also going to be offering 2000GB bandwidth plans on the Standard Network for the same price as our current Premium Network servers. For those of you not needing the high performance of our premium network, this is a great deal.

We're not stopping at renaming just the Value Network either, the Premium Network is going to become the Performance Network as we also feel that terminology better reflects the product being offered. To us, both of our networks are premium offerings, both with DDoS protection, 100% network uptime SLAs, fully redundant and multi-homed connectivity, etc. so it wasn't really fair only giving one of the configurations that title.

In the end then there will be:

Standard Network - Savvis, TeliaSonera, PCCW Global, and local peering

Performance Network - Savvis, AT&T, Level(3), MCI, PCCW Global, TeliaSonera, and local peering

These changes will likely be shown on our site shortly after July 1 when the additional lines are scheduled to be brought live.