Meet Travis Schaffner, Chief Technical Officer

Travis Schaffner, Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of FastServers.Net. He's been in the trenches with Ian Andrusyk since the beginning. Many late nights and absences from high school became a normal routine for Travis when he helped found the company (formerly PowerSurge) back in 1996. "It was a ton of work and required a tremendous amount of multitasking. Some nights I only got about three to five hours of sleep, but I made up for it on the weekends with about twenty hours of sleep each night." Travis said balancing school, athletics, farm work, and an Internet company was not the easiest thing to do at the time. He was obsessed with learning the technology and put forth the effort until the company became self-sustaining without his attention.

Born and raised in Sumner, Iowa, Travis was confined to the chores of farm work from baling hay to rock picking, walking beans, shoveling grain, and painting everything. "I lived in a farming community of approximately 2,000 people. It's true what they say about small towns. You know everything about everyone and they know absolutely everything about you." Travis didn't live on a farm. The surrounding farms provided plenty of work for him to stay busy, but not quite as busy as his plans for the future of FastServers.Net. "We'll eventually sponsor January 1st style bowl games. I honestly believe our company will be very large and tremendously influential in the hosting arena, though we'll grow within our controlled standards, as always."

To describe Travis as a sports fanatic would be an understatement. Bar none, his favorite team makes their home in St. Louis as the St. Louis Cardinals. "My father is and always has been a huge Cardinals fan. I've followed in his footsteps, especially since the Cards championships-or-nearly teams of the 1980s with Ozzie, Herzog, and the like." Travis will tell you endlessly about his obsession with baseball. He still says he should be a major league pitcher, but got roped into farm work during the summers instead. And sadly, he does shed a tear or two when describing his hardships on the farm.

Now he spends his days overseeing and optimizing operations, including maintenance, of all FastServers.Net hosting environments. "I am essentially every where, and nowhere, making sure our networks are healthy, our support ticket responses are magnificent and aptly-conceived, and I'm perpetually looking to improve upon our plethora of services and the enhancement of security of existing platforms." When Travis is not working hard to keep all three data centers running top-notch, you can find him at one of his favorite places - a water park, a tennis court, the beach (any beach), or the Wrigley Field bleachers. "I had much rather be outside working on my tan. As a system administrator I spend way too much time indoors. Typhoon Lagoon, an incredible water park at Walt Disney World, may just be at the top of my list as favorite places to hang out. Of course, Orlando is quite a hike from Chicago."

Travis rarely watches television. If he does, you can bet the channel stays on baseball 24/7, especially during the spring and summer months. Occasionally he will watch Entourage, Arrested Development, Family Guy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Rome, The Sopranos, and MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann. "Keith has endless genius on that show. To get my fix, I usually stream it to one of my multiple monitors for background fodder at the office." Since The Sopranos is a favorite among many FastServers.Net employees, we asked Travis which character he favors the most. "Sylvio Dante, played by Steve Van Zandt, is a smooth 'n' solid operator of the core mafia group. And he owns a hot dance club. His character represents high quality personnel and he is the most productive and steady earner. Plus he's never been in any real trouble of being whacked."

Every once and a while Travis will travel to far off places. He said traveling is the only way he can escape from his laptop fleet. "I always enjoy London. Its large, vast sprawling neighborhood makes it a great place to visit. However, Munich, Germany is probably my favorite." He said Oktoberfest and the required procedures that such an event demands makes it a great time. "My brother, a former FastServers.Net employee, lives in Heidelburg, Germany. And I have other family and friends that live in and around Europe so I have plenty of excuses to cross the Atlantic."

Travis and Ian have plans to one day own the first-ever FastServers One aircraft, a Cirrus SR 20 or SR 22 plane. Travis said he will leave the piloting of the craft to Ian. "I am a novice sky diver. That means I have enough experience to jump out of the plane when Ian decides to crash into a mountain. Sure, I'll let him pilot the plane as long as I have a parachute attached to my back." Travis believes the FastServers One plane may be farther into the future than he and Ian initially anticipated. "I'm going to require, at minimum, a hot tub and a ping pong table on the plane. Yes, I'll still have the parachute on while sitting in the hot tub - the chute will be waterproof." He continued to tell us that Mississippi River water landings are a possibility.

Growing up Travis was not allowed to own any video games. His parents were elementary school teachers and believed children should be more active and participate in things that will help them grow and prosper. "I now have every game system known to man sitting in my apartment. Unfortunately I only play a few times a month, especially during the spring and summer months when it's nice outside." Travis said Icarus, Contra, and Zelda are his favorite games of all time. He said they are the originals, the core of gaming lore, particularly Zelda. "I have a Triforce on my back, in ink, if that tells you anything about my love towards the game. As a child I did play, but only on those rare occasions when I rented or played one at somebody else's house."

Mogwai, Silverchair, Weezer, and REM are some of Travis' favorite bands. And he enjoys listening to music composed by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, a popular theatre and Broadway composer of the late 20th century. "I enjoy music I can work to or sing to while driving. Most or all of these musical geniuses are calming and anti-stressful, which is very necessary in the trenches of a hosting company." Travis particularly likes Jesus Christ Superstar by Lloyd-Webber. "I enjoy a good musical, especially a retelling of prehistoric stories or other reformed and refined fables of the past. Lloyd-Webber is very, very good at doing just that, and I can play many of his musical scores from memory on the piano." Travis said he may be a bit rusty now.

We asked Travis to tell us his opinion on the hosting industry as of today. "The hosting industry is stale and needs a renaissance of sorts. We could be doing so much more, and I fully intend on continuing to distance FastServers.Net from the pack by realizing these aims in the very near future." He plans on enhancing the company's approach to preventative maintenance. As a result, the company as a whole will know much more about the insides of servers from the hardware layer to the application layer. "By learning everything there is to know about the hardware and applications we support, we can plan much farther ahead both in terms of circumventing emergencies and in respect to optimizing existing and expanding solutions." Travis concluded that the general state of the hosting realm has become stagnant to some extent in relation to new technologies. "FastServers.Net will reverse that trend in 2007. I guarantee it."

Travis told us what he likes most about FastServers.Net. "I enjoy working hard to make my creations perfect, in all aspects of my life. Internet technology and the optimization thereof is an endless voyage, a battle than can never be thoroughly won." He said security, applications, and innovations are all perpetually being molded and re-formed, sometimes from scratch. "You have to stay on your toes, be zealously devoted, and you have to see everything, everywhere. It's ultimately daunting and cannot easily be duplicated in other environments or career avenues." Travis believes it's the most rewarding and challenging hobby that a kid like him could possibly have that has ultimately turned into a career.