Every year the FastServers engineering team conducts major upgrades throughout all of our facilities for ongoing stability, network enhancements, and some consolidation effort.

The time has come again for us to make our annual review of all our environments and on the docket: Fremont, CA. Therefore, beginning August 1, 2008, and throughout the entire weekend ending August 3, 2008, FastServers will be performing mandatory datacenter floor maintenance to our Fremont facility. These activities will consist of the realignment of all FS-owned and operated servers, switches, and routing cores within the hosting facility in question. The purpose of this dispatch is to alert all of our Fremont customers, dedicated or co-located, of these planned events occurring at the beginning of August 2008.

If you happened to miss LTPACT 2008, there are some videos on the way. John Pozadzides & Film Crew circled the event and took Terabytes of HD Videos. Upon return to the great state of Texas, Team Pozadzides started the transfer process and we will be releasing upcoming shots and videos in the near future.

Initial phase of dedicated management services offering is now available to a select group of current customers.

Layered Technologies, a leading worldwide provider of “on demand” IT infrastructure, announces today DEFCON Management Services, a dedicated management services offering. DEFCON Management Services provides a tiered class of management services specific to dedicated server needs. This exclusive service allows the distinct classification of service level that provides server monitoring, security, server software updates, and advanced support. Integration efforts as a result of the recent acquisition of FastServers.Net by Layered Technologies are now enabling Layered Technologies to provide their current customers with the ability to utilize the server management expertise of FastServers.Net

As seen on nationwide television stories, the Midwest has been host to some pretty extreme weather conditions in the last month. The severe weather included a tornado that destroyed a small town called Parkersburg and massive rainfall that resulted in flooding throughout the state.

As recent email communication has been sent to the customer based of FastServers.Net. It is important enough that we wanted to reach out via various mediums, including this blog post to establish updates to both existing and potential new customers. We appreciate your business and if you have any questions do not hesitate to give us a call or discuss this with us.

Three years ago, in a distant galaxy (called Texas) I was privileged to attend the first cPanel Conference. Attendance was mostly based on curiosity of how a company with a very technical demographic employee base would pull together an event. To our surprise the event was well worth while. Now fast forward to 2008 and you are able to see that their experience has paid off with tighter organization, sessions based on feedback, and a group of cPanel employees committed to pulling of an educational event for their customer base. This year also introduced a few new welcome surprises including Microsoft Sponsorship, Ask cPanel Anything Session, and a jam session designed for tone deaf participants.

The new FastServers.Net (A Layered Technologies Company) is hard at work with many different projects relating to integration. One of these is the promotion and open invitation to FastServers.Net, to join the new team in Las Vegas during the 3rd annual LT Pact.

Layered Technologies, Inc., one of the world’s largest providers of “on demand” IT infrastructure, today announced the acquisition of FastServers.net, a leading Chicago – based managed hosting company. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

The acquisition will combine the expertise of FastServers.net in managed dedicated hosting with Layered Technologies’ leading Grid and unmanaged offerings. The combination of Layered Technologies and FastServers will offer a new range of superior services significantly benefiting customers.

Hello FastServers.net Community,

We have just received notice that our billing software provider will be performing maintenance and updates on one of their servers tomorrow morning. This will not affect the servers/services you lease through FastServers, however it could potentially affect you ability to log into or perform tasks in your Pentagon account while the maintenance is being performed.

The maintenance is scheduled for tomorrow - Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 - from 8:00 AM EDT (12:00 UTC) to 9:00 AM EDT (13:00 UTC). Efforts will be made to minimize downtime during this maintenance window.

If you have an emergency based support request and are unable to log into your Pentagon account to submit a support ticket during the scheduled maintenance time please call our support team at 1-866-753-3278. If you have non-emergency questions/issues during the scheduled maintenance time and cannot log into your Pentagon account please try logging in again after 9:00 AM EDT.

Thank you for your time.

So what do you do with a passing listing or comment about your company in the public domain? Good or Bad? In my opinion, leave well enough alone.

Back in the day when Elvis could enter the building without turning sideways, coating himself with WD40 and wriggling in, there was a saying, “500,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong” (based on disputable record sales). Totally valid or not, it’s hard to argue with those types of numbers. The big “E” has sold a ton of vinyl, tape, and digital media…and still does…from that Heartbreak Hotel in the sky (or spaceship or secret room on the top floor of Graceland if you believe the conspiracy theories.)

Everyone here at FastServers.Net knows that I have an affinity of New Orleans…the music, the food, the atmosphere, and of course, the Abita beer. So it’s pretty obvious that I’d do a little somethin’ somethin’ (or should I say lagniappe) for Fat Tuesday here at the office.

As winter is in full effect there is one sure sign that spring is just around the corner… Pitchers and catchers report in less than one week! Not only does this mean that there is an end in sight to the bitterly cold and snowy winter but it also means opening day for the 2008 Major League Baseball season is almost here. Every team and every player has a fresh start: Even the Devil Rays technically have a chance to win the World Series and Alfonso Soriano could conceivably hit a curve ball. Pot holes will eventually get filled and your favorite ball parks will eventually reopen to thousands of screaming fans and all the good things that come along with America’s pastime; beer, hot dogs, bench clearing brawls, home runs, double steals and great entertainment.

The FastServers’ team has great camaraderie but the baseball season definitely makes FastServers’ employees choose sides… FastServers’ President Ian Andrusyk and VP of HR Jara Andrusyk root for the Minnesota Twins, Chief Technical Officer Travis Schaffner is a Cardinals fan, Director of Business Development Mark Luptak is a Blue Jays fan, Account Rep Mo Kabre and Tech Team Member Nick Shredders are KC Royals fans, Director of Inside Sales Steven Anderson and Tech Team Member Greg Kuiper root for Chicago's south side White Sox. As for myself, I root for the 1907 – 1908, back to back World Series champion, Chicago Cubs. Although other Chicago teams haven’t fared well this year, could this be the year that Cubs return to the World Series? Not likely as most sports books have them at 12/1 but what the hell do they know, the New York Giants were 12 point underdogs.

The last time I wrote a blog post I predicted that the Chicago Bears would win the Super Bowl (we all know how that turned out) so I won’t go that far for the Cubs but I will say that they will win the National League Central. Other prognostications include the following playoff teams…

National League:
West - Diamondbacks
Central - Cubs
East - Mets
Wild Card – Dodgers

American League:
West - Mariners
Central - Tigers
East –Red Sox
Wild Card - Indians

I apologize to those FastServers employees whose teams aren’t listed, better luck next year.

In any event, enjoy the last few weeks of winter because baseball season is just around the corner. Get your office fantasy team started and get ready for another great season!

One of my good friends works for a major marketing firm specializing in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Well “works for” sounds like he grabs people who know what they are doing coffee. No, this guy more or less runs the SEO division of his company and is in constant high demand. (Parents take note: if your college kids are marketing majors and you want to do them the greatest favor of their lives, steer them in the direction of SEO.) Well onto my point. “Gilbert,” as we’ll refer to this guy, showed me this diamond in the rough which, well for lack of my ability to use certain less than FCC approved words, caught his goad.

Behold: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22504312/

Now Gilbert is a somewhat opinionated guy when it comes to this stuff. Somewhat in the way Rush Limbaugh is opinionated when the name “Clinton” is brought up. For entertainment purposes I’ve copied and pasted a post from his personal blog with about 30 edits to bring it up to FCC standards, Enjoy!

I almost made it through the day without a holiday post. With a great post already handled by our CEO, I didn't see the need to provide everyone with a duplicate message. That was until a unique event took place in Chicago and I became filled with "Blog Posting" Energy (it's the same as 3 Red Bulls.