Hi everyone!

First of all, thanks for hosting with PhireFast - You rock!

So, we’ve seen some impressive growth in the last quarter and at this time are now able to switch to a more desirable network configuration.

What does that mean? It means we’re transferring PF3, PF4 and PF5 (for starters) to new boxes, still in Houston, Texas, USA.

Your website may appear to be down for short periods of time, but I assure you, this is just your Internet Service Provider re-propagating the new DNS information. (Information on Propagation)

RESELLERS: Website monitoring tools will NOT see your site as down during this time. This should be a seamless transfer.

Please, if you have any questions, feel free to submit a ticket via our Help Desk.

Thank you for your understanding! I’ll keep you posted through the night.

It’s a simple story, with potential for tradgedy - I went out of town this week (to meet our credit card processing team face-to-face.) I was gone for a total of 5 days, 4 nights. On night 2, my personal laptop decided to die, claiming “a system file has been deleted or corrupted and windows cannot start.”

Thanks to the always-abundant help from the folks over at my local computer shop, we were able to get it back up-and-running today.

But the question everybody’s been asking is “DIDN’T YOU LOSE ALL YOUR DATA?!?!”

Again, paralleling the theme of simplicity, the short answer is “NO.”

Thanks to the technology from R1Soft (which we’ve been using since earlier this year,) like PhireFast’s servers, my personal laptop is also backed up to an offsite secure server every hour that it’s powered on.

The process was as simple as reinstalling windows (with full NTFS re-format) and having the backup system restore the files to the laptop.

Much success and a big thanks to R1Soft for developing great software!

I can take a mental trip down our network, picturing switches, network cables, racks, and our servers. Classical music seems to play in my head when I do that, illustrating the greatness of something when it’s working the way it should.

Let’s flash back to April 2003 for a minute. I had just started PhireFast and I didn’t know what I was doing or why the heck I chose the hosting industry as the one I wanted to be part of. All I know is there was no ‘we’ back then, it was just ‘I’, and I was hosting PhireFast and our three clients (which still host with us to-date) on a reseller package from a company that shall remain nameless in this posting. :-p

There were certain things about this provider that drove me crazy:
- The packages were very restrictive on resources
- It was expensive per gigabyte, which made the profit margin so narrow it was a joke
- Their servers would go down on a monthly basis
- Their support was slow
- Their staff spoke broken English which made it nearly impossible to troubleshoot situations

So, lesson learned. I decided when PhireFast hit some growth, we’d pull our business from this provider and become their newest competitor, and we would keep those key points (above) in mind while providing our hosting services to the world.

I had seen it done the wrong way, I developed my philosophy on how hosting should be done. From that, we developed the company around the following:
- We made sure our packages had extensive resources and were affordable, so our resellers could actually make profit
- We enlisted the data center with the best network and server hardware in the dedicated hosting industry and signed an equipment lease with them to ensure optimal uptime and quality of service to our clients
- We made sure to have Support Team Members working our HelpDESK around the clock, every day
- We made sure our Support Team Members were trained well and are fluent in English

As always, I hope by sharing my viewpoints in regards to quality has helped you understand why PhireFast does things the way we do - It all revolves around providing a superior service to you, the client.

Happy hosting.

Many web hosting companies host at The Planet, including PhireFast. Their network is world-famous and their hardware of high quality.

With the recent 100 hour outage at The Planet, the largest privately-held dedicated server provider, many shared website hosts (including PhireFast) were affected. Unfortunately for those other hosts, they didn’t properly communicate with their clients, and many of them don’t keep backup systems. As a result, PhireFast has seen many of our fellow hosting companies fall off the map in the last two weeks due to their clients leaving them.

The good news is that many of those fine people have made PhireFast their new home, and we’ve found surprising growth in the past two weeks.

With this new growth, PhireFast has noticed a surprising percentage of new clients are in need of E-Commerce services.

It didn’t take us long to establish the goal of creating some type of an all-in-one solution. We’ve built the new E-Commerce Pack just for you. It will take care of your E-Commerce needs from A-Z, with:

- Domain Name: .com, .net or .org - Your choice
- 30GB Disk Space: A massive amount of space to ensure there’s plenty of space when your store grows
- 300GB Bandwidth: Roughly 500,000 visitors (based on an average store) per month
- Unlimited Email Accounts: You@yourstore.com
- E-Commerce Software: We’ll install it for you! Choose from Cubecart, OS Commerce or ZenCart!
- Merchant Account: Process credit card payments automatically through your store with a merchant account through our friends over at ProcessingPoint, LLC.

Why did we choose CubeCart, OS Commerce and ZenCart?
Our team reviewed approximately 30 popular (self hosted) shopping cart software applications. From those seen, we liked CubeCart, OS Commerce and ZenCart the best (in that order.) Specifically, we wanted software that is Open Source (so we can give it to you for free,) Secure, Flexible and Feature Rich.

Why did we choose ProcessingPoint, LLC. as our Merchant Account Partner?
PhireFast has worked with ProcessoingPoint, LLC. for about one year now. We personally use them to collect monthly hosting fees from our clients and couldn’t be more satisfied with them. Their prices are outstanding for the support and service they offer. When they agreed to give discounted merchant accounts to buyers of our E-Commerce Pack, we were ecstatic!

Located in Carlsbad, California, ProcessingPoint, LLC. is local to us. PhireFast insists on our providers in the United States of America, and heck, they’re right here in our own state! (ProcessingPoint is a registered ISO/MSP of Merrick Bank and a registered ISO/MSP of Harris Bank.)

Readers, please enjoy the new E-Commerce Pack! As always, please feel free to post comments/question about my words. Thanks for reading!

About The Client
Nes247.com is the hub of three of the web’s most popular sports-related forums, boasting several thousand members. When their old host started placing unreasonable restrictions on their account, we assisted Nes247.com in transferring all of their data to their new account with PhireFast.

What the Client has to say about PhireFast
“From day one, PhireFast has been there to help us with any problems we’ve have had. Their speedy technical support and friendly employees ranks them number one in my book.”

Nes247.com has hosted with PhireFast since February 2007.

Sites Hosted with PhireFast:
Nes247.com
Redsox247.com
Patriots247.com
Celtics247.com

Hi Everybody,

I’d like to be the first to welcome you to PhireFast’s new blog!

Why a Blog?
Why not! We thought a blog would be an effective, fresh way for our Team Members to communicate what’s on their minds… Not to mention weekly specials on Hosting Packages!

Who will post here?
PhireFast’s Team Members will be contributing content to the blog on a regular basis while you, as a clever PhireFast Hoster, contribute funny, clever and informative comments.

With that said, we have a lot of work to do here at PhireFast Today, so I better stop playing around and get back to work. You’ll hear from us soon.

At 1:05pm Pacific, Friday June 6th 2008, there are no network incidents to report.