FSK405|Server Procurement Announcement
Narrative: The Journey
It is with great pleasure to announce that FSK405 has procured servers for our social community. For roughly 9 years FSK405|Ghozt facilitated the community’s server requirements, renting from The Planet/Soft layer. Upon its conception, the servers were state of the art and at a solid value. Over the years and a few upgrades, Softlayer stepped away from providing stable servers at a reasonable price, forcing us to seek out other options.
What was offered and why we picked what we picked? The FSK405|Server_Team originally intended purchasing hardware, while building and co-locating it in a data center of our choosing. It was assumed this would give us better control and connectivity at a substantial discount. Further investigation found that co-locating a server could only parallel our service with Softlayer. When evaluating locations and hardware types, it made the most sense to pick an option that gave us the most flexibility. It soon came to light that building our own physical server might not make sense, IF, and a big if, we could find a home that would remove the uncertainty of performance. The type of performance we're talking about here is twofold, server performance and network performance. While we could guarantee server performance doing our own build, we couldn't guarantee network performance. We began to consider what would happen should we choose a data center that was affordable, but lacked that fantastic connectivity we wanted. What would happen should we experience a hardware failure? Can we put this responsibility in the hands of somebody else and still not lose?
Enter NFO Servers. Flexible, flexible, and flexible with 8 locations and 6 configurations to choose from. To top that off, web hosting on a separate dedicated web hosting server. Separating web traffic from game traffic is somewhat of a perk we hadn’t originally considered. Why NFO? Believe me, we didn’t rush into this. As you may recall, this has been a project in the works for nearly two years, with the bulk of the server procurement taking up the last 10 months. We wanted to be smart about this, do our homework, and make the “right” decision. This homework included talking to other clans, gathering information, going through the motions, testing providers, locations, & configurations. This required putting out money, money donated outside of normal FSK donation channels to remove that burden from our regular contributors. Nuclear Fallout Servers, “NFO”, is a gaming community that got fed up with poor game hosting services and thus evolved into a gaming server rental business. Focused on the gamer’s desires and requirements, NFO provides what gamers need, flexible and powerful configuration options.
How is flexibility defined at NFO Servers? Should we discover that we need more CPU horsepower, we simply put in a request for more, more, more and it’s automatically applied. Should we decide that a location just isn’t working out, we can opt to move our server to one of the other 7 locations. Given a few hours of downtime and server reconfig, we’re moved.
After months of testing, the FSK405|Server_Team found NFO suited our specific needs and was deemed the best solution to host our community’s core requirements. As all of the Superman regulars were aware, the Superman server was suffering terribly. Something had to be done immediately. The decision was made to pull the trigger and use the SM server as the guinea pig. We were confident in our choice, but this would prove that decision. After a month of complete success, we began testing locations for our Pub Servers. By the end of January, that test had morphed into our home, Denver, CO. Over the next two weeks we had smoothly slipped out of the grapple hold called “The Planet”.
Donation Update
FSK405 would like to thank the community for the continued support to maintain our online social environment. Every dollar donated is and will go towards the community and continued payment for the servers. Because of YOU, we may at some point be able to pay a full year in advance, reducing our overall costs by 15%, YEAH! Though we do have a small cushion, it is donations that keep this community a float. A task we couldn't do without your support, and for that again we thank you.
Questions?
When regarding FSK405 internal business, we are open to questions. We just ask you pull one of aside on Team Speak.
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