After months of searching for the right deal, I think we have found it with Gigenet who has servers based in their own DC outside of Chicago. Our current provider in the Chicago area is WiredTree, but they were not able to accommodate our needs at a price that we were looking for. Their prices are great for what they offer, but the service they provide for us is overkill for our needs and we don’t need to pay for a service that we aren’t actively utilizing.

The server that we have procured from Gigenet should be provisioned overnight and be ready for migration tomorrow sometime (official time TBA).

There should be no downtime associated with the migration, though, those of you with private name servers and dedicated IP addresses will have to make changes to your DNS for everything to work out well.

By increasing the capacity both in processing power and memory, we will have less slow-downs (especially at night) and overall a speedier performance.

We will be planning on making the migration sometime tomorrow afternoon so we can give enough notice to those with private name servers and dedicated IP addresses to make the dns changes in advance of the official migration.

powerMonster.net and this forum are currently running on the new server.

You can ping/traceroute the new server at the following IP address:
67.220.212.50

The new server is an Intel q9550 Quad with 4×2.83ghz processor with 8gb of RAM and a 1TB hard drive.

This is a beta test of the LiteSpeed web server for powerMonster and we’re truly excited to test it out.

We are looking for volunteers who wish to help us beta test the new server powered by LiteSpeed ahead of the official launch this Friday.

If you are interested, please submit a site-migration ticket and we will migrate your site(s) as soon as possible. We will be working the migration queue 9a-5p PT (GMT-8) daily until the official launch.

We hope that this move is the beginning of many more exciting things to come to powerMonster in the future!

the powerMonster team

Why? cPanel uses more resources than DirectAdmin, therefore reducing the available resources for our clients’ sites.

cPanel is a very resource intensive control panel that requires many other programs to run. Although, by doing this, it makes a server for the less-experienced easier to manage, it plays havoc on the server’s resources using up a minimum of 256MB of ram with its basic install.

By switching to DirectAdmin, we are able to customize the installations of our servers with more up-to-date software (without waiting for cPanel to catch up) or other software that is not compatible with cPanel. DirectAdmin is also a more secure panel in that it is updated more frequently, has fewer bugs, and isn’t tied directly to the operating system in the same way cPanel is. It also uses much fewer resources than cPanel which makes those resources available to our clients and their sites.

DirectAdmin has all the same features that cPanel has including a more robust script installer called Installatron. Installatron is Fantastico on steroids! It can not only import, update, and install popular scripts, it can also revert back to an older version. Installatron keeps its scripts more up-to-date than Fantastico, usually being only a day or two behind the official release from the software developers. DirectAdmin’s interface is more streamlined and efficient, causing a faster user experience. On top of all that, there are more webmail options by default with DirectAdmin than with cPanel. So if you’re used to using a particular webmail client, it’s there, but if you want to try something new, you can!

Although we are excited to migrate the last of our cPanel servers to DirectAdmin, we know that we nothing if it weren’t for you, our customers! 

So before move forward, we welcome your viewpoints on the matter. Please take the time to take the poll below and to add any comments expressing your opinions. Please feel free to openly express your views on the subject!

If we do decide to migrate the servers to DirectAdmin, rest assured, that we will take great care in migrating your sites over to the new control panel and get everything set up just the way it was.

Thanks for all your continued support!

Scott and the powerMonster team

[poll id="2"]

We’re growing!

Although we’ve been in the business of web hosting for years, we have only recently opened our doors to the public. But since, then, our customer base has been growing steadily and to accommodate our growing list of clients, we are adding two additional servers online.

Both servers will deploy DirectAdmin user control panels for quick and easy management of your website and Installatron script installer which will assist you in installing popular scripts with ease!

One of servers will be housed in LA in the heart of the telecommunications district. It’s located at 600 W 7th Street in downtown Los Angeles. Their powerful network features a BGP blended bandwidth solution that consists of 8 transit providers including Qwest, Sprint, Level 3, Global Crossing, Savvis, PCCW, Tiscali and Teleglobe.

This server will be primarily used to house our new Reseller division, so you, too, will be able to resell powerMonster.net’s fast hosting services under your own name.

The second server will be housed in the Kansas City metro area. This datacenter can withstand a F4 tornado and meets Tier 3 qualifications.

This server will be primarily used to house new shared-hosting customer accounts.

We are very excited here at powerMonster.net and hope you are too.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or comments!