Effective January 15, 2012, Verisign will again be increasing the cost to register .com and .net TLD’s. This price increase, along with increases for other TLD's over the years, is currently almost annually and affects all registrars and subsequently, end users. This will be the third price increase, by Verisign, in the last few years. Up until now, we have absorbed the cost of these price increases, however, we can no longer continue to absorb these price increases.

On January 15, 2012, the cost of a new domain registration, renewal or transfer (for all TLD’s we offer) will increase from the current base rate of a domain registration, renewal or transfer from $10.00/year to a new domain registration, renewal or transfer rate of $12.00/year. We have enabled the ability for you to login to our account management website and renew any existing domains you have from anywhere between 1-10 years, at the current rate of $10.00/year per domain.

You can login to renew your domains at the current rate, here:
https://www.geekstorage.com/account

After January 15, 2012, all existing domain registrations maintained by GeekStorage.com will increase to the new base rate of $12.00/year per domain. If you have an existing coupon code discounting the cost of a domain registration, renewal or transfer, that coupon will still be valid after the price increase takes effect. We believe this new rate is a competitive rate and will allow us to continue to offer domain registrations, renewals and transfers for our customers.

Thank you for your understanding. If you have any questions about this notice, please do not hesitate to e-mail us at support@geekstorage.com.

Regards,

Matt & Jay, Head Geeks
GeekStorage.com, LLC

I just thought I would drop a note and let you know what's going on behind the scenes at Geek HQ.

2010

Last year was very exciting for us and it brought some major upgrades to both our network infrastructure and hosting architecture. Those upgrades included things like increased network capacity at our Chicago data center, the addition of Ksplice (rebootless kernels, yeah!), Softaculous (1-click installer for 175 scripts!) and CloudLinux OS (the best shared hosting OS!).

What's to come...

We are constantly working to try and improve the awesome web hosting we provide to you. Through new vendor partnerships, software additions, network improvements, etc. we are constantly looking ahead and trying to build the best website playground available, while still keeping it affordable.

Here are a few things to look forward to in 2011:

• Launch of our new Customer Portal (management of your GeekStorage account and other very cool features)

Back in April of 2010, I first spoke of a brand new customer portal that would be launching "soon". Well, almost a year later I can tell you that we are still hard at work on this awesome portal. There was a minor setback in the timeline as we made other business decisions that required further development within the portal. We anticipate the portal to be available to our geeks by the time we publish our 2011 version of our "State of GeekStorage" in April.

I can tell you that you will be very happy if you were an avid fan of our forums before its untimely demise! (*hint*)

• Launch of a new website (almost 4 years later, it's time for a new look!)

We have been working with a great web designer in creating a new look for GeekStorage. This new website will debut with some new major service offerings, keep an eye out!

• Knowledge Base Revamp (finally, a real Knowledge Base!)

For the longest time, we used our community forums as our knowledge base. Even though the forums of the past are gone, we have scoured its content, looked within our ticket system for common issues and reached out to our geeks.. all in an effort to create a comprehensive Knowledge Base. We are about 1/3 of the way through writing content for the new Knowledge Base and encourage you to e-mail us or post a comment on this blog if you have ideas for content you'd like to see addressed by us.

• 3 New Service Offerings with...
  

... details to come (/teaser). We have three major service offering additions we will be launching very soon. Keep your eyes peeled, I think you'll like them!

In Closing

Hopefully this brief post has given you an idea of what we are up to behind the scenes. We have a lot planned for 2011 and we can't wait to make it available to you! :)

Regards,

Jay

We are currently rebuilding our hosting knowledge base and we can use your help! If you have any topics you would like to see covered by our expert geeks, please let us know!

Thank you,

Jay

This update will improve service speeds significantly across all Shared & Reseller Hosting services, and implement improved resource tracking & management per account. Users of the "x3" cPanel theme will also find new statistics in their cPanel display, corresponding to their CPU Resource Usage and Concurrent Connections.

Major CloudLinux features include:

• Increased uptime since no one account can slow down or take down an entire shared server
• Better reliability and performance with a server that is running at peak operating capacity
• Better control over CPU resources
• Compatibility with cPanel, LiteSpeed and Ksplice... all major components of our shared hosting infrastructure

CloudLinux’s core technology is Lightweight Virtual Environment™ a kernel-level technology that limits the amount of resources (CPU, I/O, memory) available to a group of processes. While similar to container type virtualization technology, LVE is completely transparent and lightweight. Once installed, the LVE works transparently to manage resources that the hosting provider sets for the accounts on a server. It controls the CPU resources to ensure that each account on a shared server is allocated enough resources to run efficiently without jeopardizing the other tenants on that server, making the server more stable and delivering better performance.

CloudLinux has been thoroughly tested by Geek Support and we are extremely satisfied with the performance improvements seen with the addition of CloudLinux.

All Shared & Reseller Hosting servers must be rebooted as part of the installation of CloudLinux. As a result, we have scheduled maintenance for 11/29/2010 between the hours of 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM CST (GMT -6), with estimated downtime being approximately 10-15 minutes for each server.

If you have any questions regarding CloudLinux, please contact us at support@geekstorage.com.

We have the following UNMANAGED servers, in very limited quantity, available for immediate deployment. To order, all you need to do is e-mail sales@geekstorage.com.

These servers can be upgraded to MANAGED for an additional $75/mo., which also includes a cPanel/WHM license with the upgrade. These servers come standard with 5 free Dedicated IP Addresses.

Special #1:

"Jumbo Server"

DUAL Nehalem Quad-Core E5520 w/Hyper Threading
12 GB DDR-3 RAM
24 x 1 TB SATA HDD's
LSI MegaRAID 0/1/5/6/10 w/Battery Backup (configured as desired)
Dual Gigabit Nics (perfect for teaming!)
IPMI Remote Management Access (remote reboot, KVM/IP, and more!)
1 Gbps Burstable Uplink
500 Mbps DEDICATED Bandwidth

$899/month + FREE SETUP

Special #2:

"Unmetered Bonanza"

DUAL Nehalem Quad-Core E5520 w/Hyper Threading
12 GB DDR-3 RAM
2 x 1 TB SATA HDD's
3ware 9650SE RAID 0/1 (configured as desired)
IPMI Remote Management Access (remote reboot, KVM/IP, and more!)
100 Mbps Uplink Port
100 Mbps UNMETERED & DEDICATED Bandwidth

$349/month + FREE SETUP

How to Order

To order, please e-mail sales@geekstorage.com and reference this thread.

Interested in something else?

To view our other dedicated server offerings, please visit our website here: http://www.geekstorage.com

Operating Systems

CentOS 5.5 32-bit or 64-bit - FREE
Windows 2003 Web - $20 per month
Windows 2003 Standard - $30 per month

Other Operating Systems available upon request.

Control Panel Options

DirectAdmin - $10/month
cPanel - $25 per month
Plesk (10 Domain License) - FREE
Plesk (100 Domain License) - $15 per month
Plesk (Unlimited Domain License) - $30 per month
Plesk Power Pack - $10 per month

Hardware Addons

Please e-mail sales@geekstorage.com with your specific requirements and we'll provide you a quote.

Bandwidth

Please e-mail sales@geekstorage.com with your specific requirements and we'll provide you a quote.

Network

These servers are located within Steadfast's Chicago, IL Data Center located at 350 E. Cermak Rd.

Level(3), NTT Communications, nLayer and PCCW are the providers of our premium bandwidth at the Chicago, IL Data Center. For additional details, please visit http://www.geekstorage.com/.

Have any questions?

Please feel free to e-mail us at sales@geekstorage.com.

Sales and Billing telephone hours are every Monday thru Friday, from 8 AM to 5 PM, Central Standard Time.

Have a question after hours?

Geek Support is available, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, via our e-mail based ticketing system. Send an e-mail to support@geekstorage.com and we'll get you taken care of. :)

What You Will Need:

• A GeekStorage shared or reseller hosting account with SSH access.
• The latest stable version of Redmine (available here).
• At least one available MySQL database and Subdomain.

Getting Started:

The first step to getting the new Redmine application online is to get a Ruby on Rails environment ready. The best way to do this, is to first determine where we would like the Redmine application to be hosted, in this tutorial we will be using "redmine.ourdomain.com" but this can be any subdomain, addon domain, or even your primary domain. To get started we have created our new subdomain in cPanel:

Within the account cPanel control panel, select the "Subdomains" section, and create a new subdomain for Redmine installation.

Next, we need to create a MySQL database and user for the Redmine application. For this we will simply use the MySQL Database Wizard in cPanel.

Make sure to remember the database name, username, and password for use later when configuring Redmine.

After the database name is provided we need to supply a username for use with the database.

And next we need to make sure the new user has full privileges to the database.

Rails Application Setup:

Now we need to create our rails application directory, we recommend using a directory outside of your public_html folder for added security. In this case we will be using a directory in our home directory called "rubyapps" - we create it like so via our SSH account:

$ mkdir ~/rubyapps

Next, we will go ahead and download the Redmine software and get it placed under the ~/rubyapps/redmine directory:

$ wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/70486/redmine-0.9.4.tar.gz
$ tar zxf redmine-0.9.4.tar.gz
$ mv redmine-0.9.4 ~/rubyapps/redmine

Now we need to enter our MySQL connection details in to our Redmine configuration file. For most Ruby applications, this file is typically located at "config/database.yml" relative to the application folder. In this case, the file is named "database.yml.example", so we need to make sure it is renamed accordingly before we proceed. Via SSH, we move the file and open it to make our adjustments like so:

$ cd ~/rubyapps/redmine/config/
$ mv database.yml.example database.yml
$ nano database.yml

In this file we are going to see a number of entries, for this tutorial we will only be using the entries directly below the "production:" line. We now edit these lines to match MySQL details entered previously, in this case it looks like so:

production:
  adapter: mysql
  database: aries_redmine
  host: localhost
  username: aries_rubyusr
  password: ourpassword
  encoding: utf8

Now we need to generate a session store secret, this is used by Ruby to manage cookies for the application. This can be done via shell:

$ cd ~/rubyapps/redmine/
$ rake generate_session_store

The database must also be configured via shell, note the last command will ask the language to be configured with the Redmine installation, there are many languages available, in this case we have chosen "en" for English.

$ cd ~/rubyapps/redmine/
$ RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate
$ RAILS_ENV=production rake redmine:load_default_data

LiteSpeed Configuration:

Next, we are going to setup LiteSpeed to recognize the Redmine folder as a Ruby application folder. With LiteSpeed, this is a bit different than the usual Ruby on Rails configuration. For LiteSpeed to recognize there is a Ruby on Rails application on your account, we need to create a new file called ".ls_rails_config" in our home directory.

$ nano ~/.ls_rails_config

This file is going to tell LiteSpeed details about our Rails application, for now we will populate it like so:

#RailsApp <name> <App Path> <Rails Env> <Children Processes> <RunOnStart>
RailsApp redmine "/rubyapps/redmine" "production" 4 1

#RailsAppMap <name> <domain> <URI>
RailsAppMap redmine "redmine.ourdomain.com" "/"
RailsAppMap redmine "www.redmine.ourdomain.com" "/"

Now we are able to access Redmine at redmine.ourdomain.com! If you are following along, click the "Sign In" button in the top right corner, and use username "admin" password "admin" to login, and make sure to change your password to something more secure as soon as possible.

Reconfiguring The Application:

If any configuration changes need to be made, for example modifying the email.yml file to add email capabilities to the Redmine application, first make the desired adjustments, then run the following command via SSH to restart your Ruby application:

$ touch ~/.ls_rails_config

Notes For Other Rails Applications:

This tutorial shows a typical Redmine installation under the Ruby on Rails LiteSpeed configuration with our hosting services. If you want to install an application other than Redmine, the steps are exactly the same, just make sure to follow along your application installation guide after creating the database & subdomain, and use the ".ls_rails_config" file instead of any mongrel-rails or WEBrick configuration. Also note, it is also typically unnecessary to adjust folder write permissions with our hosting services, as the Ruby application will run under the account username, the application will have write access to necessary folders even at the default CHMOD 755 setting.