SimGames.net Helpdesk News

August 22 Outage

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 18:35:22 +0000

We'd like to apologize for the recent outage here at SimGames.net. We pride ourselves in trying to ensure we maintain excellent uptime that rivals paid competitors.

Unfortunately this wasn't the case as we experienced a Power Supply Failure earlier this morning. That resulted in a 10 hour outage for our web server. Our control panel server, SQL servers, DNS and Mail servers continued to operate despite the web server being offline.

All services have been restored and we will continue to do our best in maintaining excellence here at SimGames.net.

Emergency Network Maintenance 1AM July 2

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:20:23 +0000

Due to some recent issues with intermittent packet loss we will be performing an emergency network maintenance from 1AM - 2AM Central on the morning of July 2 on one of our core routers.

This maintenance will include some hardware changes and software upgrades which will likely result in intermittent connectivity issues for most customers and potentially some complete outages.

Updated Corporate Terms of Service

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:04:48 +0000

SimGames.net's parent company, Steadfast Networks, have recently hired a new general council and this has resulted in the updating of many of our internal documents, contracts, etc. and has now resulted in an updated Terms of Service. Attempts were made to keep the legal jargon to a minimum and to keep the agreement as easy to understand as possible, but if you do have any questions, just contact our helpdesk at http://helpdesk.simgames.net, and we will be more than happy to walk you through it.

The terms of service will be changed immediately for any new sign-ups. For existing members, this announcement is 10 day notice to as to the change of terms and the new terms will be active for existing members starting April 8. If any existing members have any issues with the updates in the new terms of service please bring these issues to our attention as soon as possible by sending an email to sales@steadfast.net. Unless we receive notice of an objection to these terms it will be assumed that you accept the new terms by your continued use of our services.

You can read the new terms of service here: http://steadfast.net/corporate/legal.aup.php

The old terms are located here: http://steadfast.net/corporate/legal.aup.old.php

Mail / DNS Server Upgrade

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:12:51 +0000

As many members have noted, the performance of our hosting mail server has been poor recently with a number of behavioral quirks as a result. To facilitate better reliability and performance for the foreseeable future, we have scheduled a major upgrade to all components of the mail server, including hard drives, RAM, and operating system.

We have done preliminary hardware preparations to ensure that the downtime is minimal, but due to the scope of changes, the outage will be substantial. The upgrade process will be as follows:

At 1:00 AM US Central Time on Friday, March 20th, all services including SMTP, POP3, IMAP and webmail will be taken offline. At that time, the new server will be configured with all services disabled and we will begin a final data migration process which is expected to take between 2 and 4 hours to complete. Once the migration is completed, we will do final software configuration and testing and services will be brought online one at a time as they are verified.

In addition to being the shared hosting mail server, this server also provides primary DNS as "ns1.steadfast.net" or also known as "ns1.simgames.net." Backup DNS will be provided by "ns2.steadfast.net" (also known as "ns2.simgames.net") during this time, but you may experience some slowness in resolving domains during this maintenance. DNS will be the first service to be brought back online as soon as its information is migrated.

Please be aware that while we do not anticipate any complications, it is possible that this process may result in the reappearance of email that was already deleted, or duplication of delivery of some messages. It should not result in lost messages, though mail delayed during the outage could take several hours to reach its final destination. No incoming or outgoing email will be able to be processed during the maintenance.

This outage will not affect web sites or databases in any way, and control panel service will remain available.

We expect that the maintenance will be completed by 6 AM and that all services will be fully online at that time. If you have any questions, please contact support.