HostTDS Internet Servcies

Well, I’ve been up all night long crunching numbers and talking with our investors as to how to be able to put the whole HostTDS Expansion together.

To say the least, HostTDS has been growing at a phenominal rate. In fact, it has been necessary to hire new employees lately to help keep up with the demand and to ensure that all support, billing, abuse, and accounting tickets are answered in a timely manner.

(Once again) To say the least, We’ve secured $2,250,000 to purchase servers, build a new office, and do much, much more to renovate and let HostTDS grow to it’s fullest potential.

With an office linked to the datacenter over a dedicated MetroE Fiber line, 24/7 phone, online chat, and ticket support staff, and much more coming, HostTDS Clients and Future Clients will see massive improvements in services all across the board. HostTDS should be able to take off and soar while being able to keep up with demand as well as keeping up with our current clients and keeping everyone happy.

Once I rest for the first time in weeks, I’ll write a new update and tell you all how things are going with the construction.

-Matthew Rosenblatt

HostTDS President/CEO

Today, HostTDS has secured over $750,000 in fund to expand it’s current infrastructure to bring our services to a whole new level.

HostTDS will be building up 1500 Sq. Ft. of datacenter cage space over the next few months, spread over multiple datacenters in the USA, Starting with Host.net in Boca Raton, Florida. Host.net is a datacenter of which is one of the top 20 bandwidth couriers in the world. It’s buildings can withstand Category 5 hurricanes and have multiple fiber and electrical redundancy systems so you do not have to worry about network or power outages at any time.

Each new facility will carry over 2500 servers at it’s opening with a Maximum of 25,000 servers per cage. Each cage will offer 3 on-hand server technicians at all times, 24/7.

We are also opening up a new office here in Boca Raton, Florida with a 24/7 manned call center to offer full time telephone, email, and online chat support. There will always be at least one person from Accounting and Sales on staff at all times as well.

We are very proud of our recent ability to be able to provide such services to you, our customers. What’s better is the feeling of that we are able to provide for you directly without needing to consult third parties.

We will be releasing more details in the upcoming months as we build our offices and Datacenter infrastructure.

As always, Thank you very much for your continued support.

- Matthew Rosenblatt

Presiden/CEO of HostTDS Internet Services

We at HostTDS are frequently looking into new ways to offer new products to our customers. This week, we at HostTDS have made the decision to offer Windows Server 2003 based hosting services in an effort to be able to provide access to ASP, ASP.Net, and other Microsoft based frameworks. In the near future, Coldfusion will also be offered as well.

We now have over 25 servers offering Linux based hosting services with cPanel as well as 5 Windows Server 2003 Enterprise servers with Plesk to be able to offer the most comprehensive options to you, our clients.

Any questions can be forwarded to our sales department in response to this blog posts. Comments can also be left for response.

I have always wanted to venture into the forbidden realm of Ruby after working so much in PHP and MySQL, I figured Ruby would be fun to use. So I wanted to fire up a Rails server. Turns out that its not as easy to do on Mac as it is to do on Windows, where it is a one-click solution. I’m going to publish this guide on the quick and dirty way to get Rails set up on your computer.

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126
Download Ruby Gems. It comes packaged as a tgz. You can use the tar command or you can just let stuffit expand it for you. When its done, pop open a terminal window and browse to the location of the file.

ryan$ sudo ruby setup.rb

You will be prompted for your password, enter it and Ruby Gems will be installed. You may have noticed that we didn’t install Ruby. Leopard comes with a Ruby interpreter onboard. Cool beans! Next we’re going to get Rails from the gems repository with the gem command.

ryan$ sudo gem install rails --remote

Once rails is done installing, we need to get MAMP.

http://www.mamp.info/en/download.html

Run MAMP personal and the lights will go green indicating that your Apache and MySQL servers are running. Hide the MAMP window, and now you’re ready to roll. Pick up in the middle of any Rails on Windows tutorial to finish.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html?page=2

Default servers are:

127.0.0.1:3000 Rails server
127.0.0.1:8888 Apache server
127.0.0.1:8898 MySQL server

Have fun playing with Rails!

HostTDS experience it’s first network downtime in over 300 days today.

We a proud to say that we were able to keep that kind of uptime, but we are not pleased about the downtime.

It is our understanding that the Softlayer Datacenter in Dallas Texas had a hardware failure somewhere along the network which lead to a downtime of approximately 30-45 minutes earlier today.

We have made the decision to purchase more servers in their Seattle Datacenter to help alleviate down time.

What this means for you-

If you are hosted on a server located in Dallas Texas and a network fault comes about, your website will still remain down until that fault is corrected due to IP litigation.

BUT we are capable of continuing to communicate with you, as customers through our support and billing web-interfaces as well as email to ensure that you know what is going on.

If possible, traffic will be re-routed from the servers in Seattle through the Softlayer Private Network to help keep your web site online.

I understand that this might not seem like the best of contingency plans to most, but being able to continue communication when multiple servers are down is a must for us at HostTDS.

We don’t hide things from our customers, nor do we cover things up with lies to make us look better. I am honest in saying that the benefit wouldn’t be all that great, but it is better than nothing. This is also the basis of as to why we even installed a blog in the first place. To keep you, as the clients informed as to what is going on at HostTDS as well as the industry in general.

Either way, I hope that the server upgrades will benefit everyone as best as possible.

On another note, we also plan to set up a load-balancing system on multiple server clusters to help make your sites load as quickly as possible and be able to perform at maximum capabilities. One of our rules here at HostTDS are to not put more than 300 accounts on a single server. Server Clustering will being that to an even higher level — Since services will be split between multiple servers, we will put no more than 500 clients on a cluster of 5 servers at a time. This increases uptime, performance, and server load all across the boards. All at once.

How will the affect you and will there be any negative affects during the process of migrating?

No! This is what we are going for. All servers will be configured ahead of time before attaching them as a cluster and brining it live so you don’t even know that the change has happened.

And in case you are wondering, we will also keep to our number one rule of which states that we will not oversell to an insane degree like a good majority of other hosting companies do.

We are not in this industry for a quick buck - HostTDS was started as a learning experience 5 years ago and has grown drastically. We are here to serve you as best as possible, to keep the clients happy and trouble free.

As many readers may know, Ubuntu Linux has been picking up a lot of pace in many areas including the Professional World as well as the Consumer World.

Being an Open-Source operating system of which you an acquire for free, have the ability to purchase computers from Brand-Name companies such as Dell with the operating system installed, and being able to do what ever you want with the operating system are just three of the countless options you have with an Open Source operating system such as Linux.

For the professional world, Ubuntu comes installed in a very minimalistic form. Now, it’s not as minimalistic as a Gentoo installation, but at the same time, it is very easy to manage and comes preinstalled as a LAMP system. Offering Apache, MySQL, and PHP by default as well as SSH access and the IPTables firewall, it comes as a decently secure server operating system. You can also use it for Network Address Transfer routing, a remote login system for your corporate offices, VPN server, and much more. All for free.

On the Consumer side of things, there are numerous versions of Ubuntu Linux available to you — All suited to your different needs. It comes pre-installed with Firefox, Thunderbird, Openoffice, and many other applications to make your daily life easier (and of course, less costly) than on other operating systems. The applications installer is also a massive bonus for the average user. Being able point and click to install software rather than having to compile it from source is another wake-up-call to the average user to make the move to Linux.

Now, there are some pretty cool features on newer versions of Linux such as Beryl/Compiz desktop effects, but to say the least they can still be pretty buggy. Especially with ATI graphics cards.

But all-in-all, I can see quite a lot of people moving towards the Linux community over the next few years. If not just Linux, the entire open-source world.

If you have not yet experience the loveliness of the Open Source world, give it a shot. Ubuntu can be installed with Windows next to it without damaging your installation of windows

Ok well, I made it up in my mind that I would not write anything here other than on Fridays for a short computer coolness/rant thing, but I decided today that the proximity of my birthday has created in me a need to put my thoughts down on paper. This would create my list of things I want for my birthday but it should universally apply to most geeks.

Cell phone with a full keyboard this is one amazing gift for the geeks in your life who are required to text people in order to contact them. We geeks generally hate typing messages with 9 buttons, and the whole keyboard just makes an awesome gift for $50 and up.

Apple TV in a dorm room that has a TV that does nothing and a wireless router, an Apple TV would appear to be the perfect companion. Wirelessly stream media to your TV and rent movies from the iTunes store. At $229 this is a good way to get some use out of your dormant TV.

Big flash drives mobile storage for something is something that has become an essential staple in geeky life. Flash drives used to be small and expensive, but now they are spacious and affordable. Flash drives with sizes that rival old hard disks cost a couple hundred dollars, but you can pick up an 8gb drive for $40, and the geek in your life will have enough space for his numerous unmentionables.

Laptop backpack know a geek that has to use a bulky briefcase or a traditional backpack to carry around their laptops? Those are not happy geeks, crumbs get all over their chassis and briefcases add another thing to carry to class. A laptop backpack will run you about $100 and will add comfort and style to your geek for a few years.

Camera ok, I guess this item is only really on my personal list. I’m quite the photography nerd, and I’m sick of borrowing my mother’s camera. For between $100 and $200 you can get a very nice camera that uses swappable large storage. SD cards are starting to become archival and people are starting to just buy new ones when the old ones fill.

Users of Personal COBOL Animator 2 will be sadly disappointed when they find out that their software is horribly outdated and riddled with bugs. First things first is when you try to recompile an .int file that has been changed, you get a .msg file missing error and are required to restart the program before you can compile your code. Trying to write and make minor tweaks at all to your code in this environment will end up with you getting very good at launching Animator, but that’s just one of the many side effects. You also have to deal with the speed at which the “full speed” feature runs at, and among other things delayed keyboard input and lack of mouse support. But hey, for a program sporting a Windows 3.1 interface, this baby is hot. Another bug in the software is that when you hit a “Stop Run” and hit ok, it brings Animator back up for working in. But if you hit the X to close the oh-so-informative-and-necessary “Stop Run encountered with a code of 0×0000″ box, the entire program closes! Good thing you need to save your work to run your code, or I would have had a lot of unsaved data loss in those few hours. Overall, the whole experience will leave you cursing and slowly crying yourself to sleep.