Xeon X3220 Quad Core 2.4
4096MB RAM - 500GB DISK
100Mbps Unmetered Bandwidth
Linux, FreeBSD, or Windows
Free Remote Reboot
Show your server some love! Today is a great time to upgrade to DDoS protection, before it’s too late. It’s not always better to have loved and lost your data, than to never have loved at all.
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Redundancy Matters in Your Server
Most people who are looking into buying/renting a dedicated server are tech savvy enough to have chosen computer hardware before. Amongst those, many have built a PC from scratch. This usually involves a fair amount of research into the components, and what will deliver the highest amount of performance per dollar spent. While these principles still apply when picking out server components, there are a few more issues to take into consideration. In a normal desktop PC, it’s generally acceptable for it to be occasionally overwhelmed and lock up. Not often, of course, but in general use these things do tend to happen. But servers on the other hand, have to be rock solid and stable 24/7. You cant risk having your business shut down for a while because your server has to reboot. Or worse, if your data becomes corrupted and you lose your user data. Luckily, there are ways of ways of adding reliability that are generally overlooked when building a desktop PC. To start with, you’ll want to invest in a high quality CPU. This means forgetting about the Celeron / Sempron etc, and stepping up to a Xeon or equivalent. The extra cache means that your system won’t be overwhelmed by requests, and it can handle a large number of users. Switching to a server CPU usually means using server RAM. This is where the redundancy starts to kick in on your new server. Server RAM (ECC) has error protection. Every piece of data is double checked, and if anything looks out of line you’ll get an instant warning. This means you won’t write garbage over your important data, and you can rest safely knowing that everything is going smoothly. And finally, you can have an instant backup of your data by using RAID. When a normal desktop PC hard disk dies, your data is gone. Hopefully you’ve backed it up, but there’s no way of getting anything back from a dead disk (other than incredibly expensive forensic services). In order to keep everything running, it’s possible to set up a RAID array. Rather than having a single drive with your data, the exact same data is duplicated to a second identical drive. This means that your data is always backed up in case one drive fails, and you can instantly swap in a replacement, but it also means that the speed at which the information can be read is twice as fast, as you have 2 copies to read from. So to keep your business going, invest in a quality server. If you skimp now, it will hurt you later. Top 5 Reasons To Choose Dedicated Hosting
If you’re starting out online with your first blog or personal site, it’s okay to use shared hosting. Might as well test the waters and see if it’s something you want to commit to. But for a business or other professional site, you should really look into a dedicated server. There are a lot of benefits to this: You can upgrade easily, with minimal downtime. No days of being transferred between virtual hosts and editing everything. Just a few minutes of switching off (and redirecting to a backup server) and a technician can put in the new pieces. You can have your own blocks of IP addresses, which makes things a little more dependent when you scale up. No depending on DNS to update, just plug in the IP. The reliability is determined by the quality of the hardware, and that’s up to you. Without having to share resources, you can improve your security. You’re the only one with access to the entire server, at the OS level, and can make any changes very quickly. You have far more flexibility in how you want to set it up. No more having to deal with support tickets in order to make any little change, and often having your requests denied. So take a serious look at dedicated servers, it’s an investment worth looking into for your online business. Give us a call to get started. Gigabit Servers!
I admit, our adoption of 1 gigabit ports has been unusually slow. Staminus is usually bleeding edge with the delivery of new services. Historically, at least with our DDoS Mitigation service, SecurePort, we have been able to deliver the latest security technology to customers faster than any other vendor or service provider. However, with servers, the story is a bit different. Thus, with great pleasure, I would like to announce the immediate availability of our new 1 gigabit unmetered servers, equipped with Dual Xeon E5620 processors, 16GB of RAM upgradable to 128GB, and one 1TB drive, upgradeable to four. The server can be found at http://www.staminus.net/UNMETERED. These servers are truly unmetered! You can literally push and pull 1 gigabit per second of traffic around the clock, all year long. The Need For DDoS Protection
DDoS protection is a requirement for websites (especially commerce sites) who need to stay up and running 24/7, even when malicious hackers are attempting to shut them down. Short for “Distributed Denial of Service”, DDoS attacks can take an unprepared site down for hours, or even days. This not only leads to lost sales – but also to lost reputation, as unknowing visitors will assume the site is unreliable. A normal website visitor will use only a small fraction of the available resources on a server. Most quality web servers can support hundreds, or thousands of simultaneous visitors. And it’s easy to scale up, when your server is inadequate for your business you can easily upgrade to add the resources that you need. The problem is that this is dependent on people “playing fair”. A normal viewer will load a page, read it for few seconds, and move on. But computers aren’t necessarily limited to the speed at which the normal person can read. A fast computer on a good connection can load pages thousands of times faster than could ever be read by a human. This has been exploited by hackers who wish to take down a site. By using up all the resources available to the site, no legitimate users will be able to visit it. Most big sites will be able to handle the extra wasted resources of a single attacker. Even smaller sites can simply block the IP of that user (if they’re not using proxies). But what about multiple attackers? In the past few years we’ve seen the rise of new tools (such as LOIC from Anonymous) which allow large scale attacks to be carried out very easily. If a person wants to participate in an attack but does not have the skills to do it themselves, they can install a simple program that allows their computer to act as a zombie, under full control of the hackers in charge of the operation. With hundreds or thousands of willing attackers participating in this larger, Distributed Denial of Service attack, it becomes much more difficult to defend against. You may not think that you’re vulnerable to such things, but this isn’t the case. Many DDoS attacks are political in nature, or the result of bad customer service or false advertising. However, many attacks are not from outside vigilantes. Many DDoS attacks come from competitors, hoping to drive people away from your site and on to theirs. It’s underhanded, sleazy, and dishonest, but it does happen. At this point the legal ramifications of DDoS attacks aren’t clear. Even if it’s possible to prosecute attackers for it, gathering the necessary evidence to prove it in court would be incredibly difficult. So don’t wait until it’s already too late and you’re losing business. Get a good DDoS protection package today and be able to rest easily knowing that your site is in good hands. It’s the easiest and best insurance you can get for the site that you’ve invested your time and energy into. VPS
It is no secret that we specialize in servers and security. We have traditionally let our customers provide the end user hosting services so that we can focus on metered and unmetered dedicated servers and DDoS protection and mitigation services using our SecurePort technology. However, there seems to be a real need in the market for very large scale VPS services. Many customers have asked us to start providing VPS solutions. We have good news. After an extensive testing period with XenServer, we plan to deploy a full line of VPS products, beginning with a 1 Gbps unmetered VPS. Stay tuned for more information! Managed Services
Many people have asked us why we don’t offer managed solutions. Some have even been a bit upset that we don’t offer an in-house management service. Managed solutions simply don’t make sense for us on a large scale at low prices. We are not able to deliver inexpensive management because our team of in-house administrators are extremely skilled (and expensive). Instead, we have outsourced management for our line of metered and unmetered dedicated servers and VPS services. Enterprise grade managed solutions is going to be a good stepping stone for us to start providing managed hosting services. We plan to offer a cloud based SaaS product, fully managed by our staff, coupled with our SecurePort DDoS mitigation and protection service. We should have more information regarding this over the next few weeks. 
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01/10/2012
