Due the recent success and the overwhelming demand for additional auctions FastServers is proud to announce that server auctions will become a weekly tradition starting in 2005. Every Monday, staring on Monday Jan. 3rd, we will be launching a new auction with a minimum of 5 servers up on the auction block at a time. We our also going to start to incorporate our Velocity line of servers into the mix as well as the occasional Dual Xeon beast that will be thrown up on the auction block. We will continue to offer weekly auctions as long as there is ample participation occurring on a weekly basis.

We will be sending out occasional emails to the auctions subscriber list with updates on new auctions and the servers that will be offered in the upcoming auction. If you are currently not a part of the list it is recommended that you sign up by going to http://www.fastservers.net/auctions/ and signing up for the New Auction Notification.

How the auctions in 2005 will work:

All servers will start out at $1.00 per month with NO RESERVE! There will also be a “Buy it Now” option on all the servers that will be available until the first bid is made on the server.

All auctions will begin on Monday morning by 10:00AM and will end on Thursday Morning at 10:00am CST. Our Sales Team will contact the winners immediately to make arrangements for setups, payment, and choices of additional software.

All servers will come with the same support, bandwidth, network connectivity, and IPs as our standard offerings. All of these servers will also be housed in our Iowa based InterNAP facility.

Shane Reisner, Sales Engineer

We are very excited to continue to offer this medium of selling servers and want to remind you that you cannot win if you do not participate. If you have any questions about how the process works please don’t hesitate to contact myself or any of our sales engineers and we will be happy to help out in anyway.

Alright, relaxation time is over as the holidays have inevitably passed us by. What’s typically one of the busiest stretches of time in our sector of the internet is nearly upon us! It’s probably QUITE important that I remind everybody of the mandatory migrations of our elderly linux platforms that WILL begin 1st Quarter, 2005! RedHat 8 folks, you should *already* be underway, with 7.3 machines (which we still have updated errata for, and will continue to for while longer)… right on your heels.

Beyond our Pentagon.Fastservers.Net interface, please remember that there are a number of interfaces at your fingertips, including this newsletter, which exist keep you abreast of major issues involving security, pending migrations, new technologies, network flakiness… you name it! Have your bookmarks standing by.

http://forum.fastservers.net/forum/ Includes separate sections for global announcements, network anomalies, global security bulletins, and more ! ..

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/
http://www.fedoralegacy.org/updates/
http://www.securityfocus.com
http://www.iisfaq.com/
http://forums.cpanel.net
http://forum.sw-soft.com
http://forum.ensim.com

http://www.google.com/ (Seriously, you GOTTA try this…) Hahaha. To be completely truthful, you could say that Google is truly the backbone of our support department, from a certain perspective. It’s a huge part of my life. Sad? Probably. ……………………………………

Additionally, I’ve attached a condensed discussion on the Fedora / CentOS comparison that seems to be eternally brewing behind the scenes here at FastServers (and elsewhere I’m sure as well). Largely just a collection of basic concepts from my perspective- hopefully it will help clear the air a bit.

We look forward to working with you in 2005! Let’s make it a fantastic year. Thanks again for a supremely enjoyable 2004. The Fedora Project (http://www.fedora.us/) is essentially the continuation of the original RedHat line. That is, RedHat Linux… which ended in 9.x-that was utilized at Powersurge and subsequently FastServers since 1996 as our staple unix-based operating platform. The same original, RedHat code lives within Fedora Core 1, 2, and 3 flavors, and that original groundwork will continue to be layered upon and tweaked as the Fedora Project continues to progress.

Since Fedora implies original RedHat, that means the overwhelming majority of common webserver and server automation software will function MORE SANELY (won’t drive you to drink… well more than you already do), on systems run by Fedora. Such software has been tailored for the original RedHat architecture and updated packages and new technologies will be *initially* developed to interface with that original structure.

CentOS (http://www.centos.org/), is a free distribution of RedHat’s new Enterprise Class OS (RHEL). Now, obviously RHEL is not “brand spankin’ new” but it’s modified structure, being tailored especially for enterprise/clustering/high-volume solutions as well as the optimization of recent advances in webserver hardware, continues to leave it a minimum of ‘months’ behind being truly ’stable’ when utilized with the majority of common server automation software.

Yes, CPanel and Plesk can, have been, and will continue to be engineered to function on CentOS 3.x platforms in our environments in unique situations. A certain level of administrative savvy is required in order to stabilize these environments, in lieu of the fact that these panel softwares were ORIGINALLY developed for “original RedHat” environments.

How essential is your online business? How much do you value your customer base? What would you do if you lost all of your business do to hardware failure, virus, or if your server becomes exploited? Most of our readers have smirks on their faces now as they believe that they have a bulletproof system in place for backup & recovery of their critical environments. Others are wondering whether or not they do have the needed protection in place for their business. While the remainder are not even concerned with backups or even have an idea of how their environment is structured. Well, hopefully this newsletter will be a wakeup call for your business in 2005 — backups are as critical as your environment as your customers are to your overall business. Period.

This past year we have worked with a handful of customers who literally slept while their servers deterioted from missed updates, patches, virus definition enhancements, and critical disk maintenance. The most common question we were asked after their solutions went offline was…”Why aren’t you backing up our solutions?”. To be blunt: you didn’t select the service, nor ever asked. With each dedicated server that is sold there are a plethora of options made available to each customer — one in particular being backup services. Now, backup services, as with any other product, come in various shapes & sizes (ugly cliché, true). Secondary hard drives, external storage, tape storage, DVD storage – are various mediums that we offer that are often times ignored when a solution is purchased. RAID is not a backup solution! We had to explain this to three customers in 2004 that truly believed that RAID provided backup technology to a solution. Let’s put it to rest: RAID is not a backup solution. Period. RAID gives you another level of redundancy, but is not a legitimate backup solution. Look at RAID as being the spare donut in the trunk of your car. It’s there to get you to your destination so that you can get the repair work done on the primary tire and be back on your way.

For customers that currently have a single hard drive setup, please invest the time and energy to speak with your sales representative about how you can incorporate backups into your current solution. And to our customers who have multiple drives or using remote backup services, please review your backups needs and contact your sales representative if those needs have changed-for instance, requiring more space than what is already set aside. Finally, we ask that all customers look at their solutions more carefully: DEFCON services can only go so far. DEFCON is meant to compliment the services that you have — not replace them. Spend some time contemplating your backup and recovery procedures. Because not having any backup services incorporated into your solution is similar to playing Russian Roulette….but with all barrels loaded.

What a year it was for both FastServers.Net and more importantly the dedicated server industry as a whole. 2004 was one of the most exciting years for me personally, trumped only by our first year in ’96 when we signed up that proverbial first customer. A lot happened last year that has brought a new world of

opportunities to this company and our customers. As the President/CEO my greatest accomplishments are the major advances and improvement the organization makes, and 2004 had a lot of them! We completed the sale of “PowerSurge” our shared hosting company to a Chicago based Networking company. This sale allowed us to stay completely “dedicated” to our main focus – FastServers.Net. The company both officially changed names, web sites, and added a significant amount of new work force after the sale.

The year started out very goal oriented with each department getting prepared as we lay the foundation and building blocks for the year. First on the agenda was to redefine and clarify our service offers. Early this year we launch our DEFCON Management Levels to lay the foundation for the upcoming year. Following the DEFCON launch, new products were introduced such as Ensim, Plesk, and Urchin. Our technical staff had a major overhaul with upgrades to monitoring software, server tracking software, and a lot of backend tools customized to meet their needs.

After a lot of hard work with product development a new website was born. Working with the outstanding design team at W3-Edge (www.w3-edge.com) concepts went into production and live November of this year.

FastServers.Net biggest accomplishment of 2004 was the opening of our state of the art data center facility right in the middle of Cedar Falls, IA. Just five years ago this accomplishment would not have been possible, but through massive advancement in infrastructures and facilities coming into the state of Iowa our dream took form in reality as a 12,000 sq ft. facility was erected right in our own back yard.

The upcoming year is already gearing up to be a tremendous one for FastServers.Net, we will continue to develop and fine tune our products and services, become an industry leader in customer service, and expand network to meet your needs. Plans for a few new divisions are already in the work with one specializing in the backup and data storage industry, while the other remains top classified information. It is our hopes and dreams that in 2005 that FastServers.Net will be to you “More that a Server!”