Sectarios: Foro de la Llamada de Cthulhu

I’ll get right to the point: Steadfast Networks is selling its entire shared hosting operation to Fluid Hosting effective immediately. We have been in the shared hosting business for 12 years now, but the direction and core of our business has changed drastically over those 12 years. Our focus has shifted to managed dedicated servers and colocation, while shared hosting now makes up a very small percent of our business. We do not feel that with so few resources dedicated to shared hosting that we can continue to provide the level of service our customers expect. After over a year of researching options, this sale appears to be the best way to help us concentrate on our core business while, at the same time, assure our shared hosting customers are still given the best level of service possible. This decision is not being taken lightly, as most of our shared hosting customers have been with us for many years, some for 5+ years. Our goal in the end is to assure that everyone continues to receive the high levels of service they have come to expect.

A sale would not be possible if it weren’t for a company such as Fluid Hosting, as we were only interested in selling to a company with a similar platform and the same high standards of service. Fluid Hosting uses the same H-Sphere control panel you have become used to, offers true 24/7 ticket based support, has shared hosting at the core of its business, and has a strong track record of nearly 10 years in this industry. In addition, Fluid Hosting provides phone support without requiring you to open a ticket in advance and offers web based chat support from 9AM – Midnight Eastern Time during weekdays. Both are improvements over our current support offerings.

Starting immediately, Fluid Hosting staff will take over all support/billing/sales inquiries and all payments. These inquiries are to be submitted directly through the H-Sphere control panel or by calling Fluid Hosting at (800) 653-1019. We are confident that Fluid Hosting will handle this transition as professionally as possible. Over the next several months the Steadfast Networks staff will continue to provide assistance to assure that the transition goes on smoothly and all customers are getting the best treatment possible.

Over the next couple days Fluid Hosting will be contacting you with more details regarding this transition.

It is sad to see you go, but at this time we are certain it is the best for all involved. As your business/site continues to grow, Fluid Hosting will continue to take a good care of you. We wish you well in your future endeavors.

Karl Zimmerman
President
Steadfast Networks/NoZone, Inc.

Dexter Willoughby escribió:Lo peor pasará...

Conocen a un tal Murphy?

1. Yo no conozco a Murphy, pero el conoce a todos y cada uno de nosotros
2. Si Murphy trabajase, sería informatico

As you are aware, on October 27th, 2010 we acquired Steadfast's H-Sphere shared and reseller hosting operation. Since that time, all sites and accounts have stayed on their original servers at Steadfast's Chicago datacenter. During the past three months, we have been preparing the migration of all accounts off their old servers to our newer and more powerful servers powered by our Cloud Infrastructure which utilizes Citrix XenServer and Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage. We are now ready to make that move.

As part of the move, we'll be migrating all customers from Steadfast's Chicago datacenter, to our private cage within Equinix's Secaucus, NJ datacenter. We had initially planned on keeping everyone within Steadfast's facility. But after much discussion we decided that it wasn't the best option, due to the close proximity between Chicago and New York. Thus our migration plan had changed. In the near future, we are planning to open a POP in US west coast, at which point you will have a more geographically diverse option to choose in terms of where you can choose your account hosted: US east coast, with better trans-Atlantic connections to Europe, or US west coast, with a better trans-Pacific connections to Asia and Australia, or both.

This migration will be done in three phases. Every effort will be made to minimize any effect to your services. We will briefly outline the three phases below:
1. In the first phase, we will perform migration of all servers off Steadfast’s network to our own New York metro network. To simplify the migration, we will keep the number of servers the same and will continue to use Steadfast’s *.steadfast.net or *.nozonenet.com hostname. We plan to complete this first phase by January 27th, 2011.
2. Our objective on the second phase is to reduce load across all servers by adding more servers to the cluster. As some of you are already made aware, Steadfast’s servers, by our standard, are overloaded by a factor of 4-7 to one. Steadfast’s mail server, for example, is in average overloaded by a factor of ~7 to 1 compared to our mail servers. Steadfast’s mysql servers are overloaded by a factor of ~5 to 1 compared to ours. And Steadfast’s web servers are overloaded by a factor of ~4 to 1 compared to ours. This is the reason why some customers have complained about performance issue. We intend to correct this by adding more servers to the cluster and start balancing loads across the servers. By the end of the second phase, we will triple the number of mail servers and double the number of mysql and web servers. For this reason, your web sites, mysql, and database may be moved and there might be IP changes. We plan to complete this second phase by March 15th, 2011.
3. In the last phase, we will integrate all servers to our main cluster, a necessary move to simplify our operation. Because of this migration, the server hostname will change. We will no longer use *.steadfast.net or *.nozonenet.com. At the end of this migration, all shared hosting and reseller customers will have access to our Windows resources (ASP, ASP.Net, MSSQL, Sharepoint, and so on). As with the second phase, there might be IP changes on this last phase. We expect to complete this final phase by the May 31st, 2011.

We have created a thread on our community forums at http://forums.fluidhosting.com/showthread.php?t=4594. Feel free to carry on any discussion on our community forums should you have any further questions/concerns. You may also create a ticket from your control panel and our team will address you.

Following this email, we will send out another email detailing the first phase of this three-phase migration plan.

Sincerely,
Dave Tong
Founder and Owner
Fluid Hosting, LLC

Earlier tonight we attempted to migrate the H-Sphere control panel server. This migration involves using an H-Sphere tool to update the server configuration, and IP settings on the server. Unfortunately, this tool can't be run in a test mode, or pretested so we encountered an unexpected error. We're working to identify the cause, and correct it. At this point, we're rescheduling the H-Sphere control panel migration for 10:00PM ET, Thursday, January 20. If any changes come up, we'll notify you.

If you have any questions, please contact our support department by opening a ticket from your account control panel.

Regards,
John Yocum
IT Manager
Fluid Hosting, LLC

Earlier tonight we migrated mysql, pgsql, and mysql2 from Steadfast's datacenter to ours. Downtime for mysql was 40 minutes, downtime for pgsql was 45 minutes, and downtime for mysql2 was 30 minutes. If you are using hostnames such as mysql2.steadfast.net to access your database, everything should be working properly. If you are using IPs to access your database, you'll need to update the IPs or better yet, switch to hostnames.

If you are using 67.202.70.201 for your database server name, please use mysql2.nozonenet.com or 208.87.24.7. If you are using 216.86.146.7, please use mysql.nozonenet.com or pgsql.nozonenet.com, or 208.87.24.6. That said, we recommend using hostnames, as you won't need to update settings if IP changes occurs.

If you have any questions, please contact our support department by opening a ticket from your account control panel.

Regards,
John Yocum
IT Manager
Fluid Hosting, LLC