Welcome to SimGames.net
SimGames.net has been providing free hosting to the gaming community for over five years. Please take a look around and review what we have to offer: Quality, free, ad-supported web hosting services for gaming fans like you.
If you're interested in finding out more about hosting with SimGames.net, check out our hosting page.
If for some reason, you don't meet our hosting requirements here at SimGames.net, we encourage you to consider paid hosting services from our parent company, Steadfast Networks, which provides a wide variety of quality ad-free, paid hosting plans with similar features.
SimGames.net Network News
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 at 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
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.
Earlier today at 7:30PM CDT, SimGames.net suffered a partial outage on our web server for a duration of approximately 4 hours. Sites utilizing static HTML pages were unaffected by this outage. Sites utilizing PHP file extensions, however, were affected by this outage.
The outage knocked out our PHP processing ability and subsequent attempts to restart the PHP process were unsuccessful. The issue has since been resolved with the help of our parent company, Steadfast Networks.
We're looking into the matter in more depth to advert such an outage again. We hope this outage did not affect your members and we appreciate your patience while we attempted to resolve this matter.
If there are any questions, please feel free to open a support ticket or discuss this at our forums.
Over the previous two mornings we had scheduled network maintenance. The maintenance from Friday morning went through without a hitch and we have improved network capacity and reliability as well as general organization. The maintenance should not have caused any outages, as everything went through smoothly. We were unable to complete the Saturday morning maintenance though, as several of the involved parties were unable to participate due to flight delays (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89583845). This maintenance will be rescheduled this coming week and at least one week notice will be given of the new date. As the Saturday morning maintenance was not completed, no customers were affected.
On the morning of Friday April 11th, we will have a scheduled network maintenance from midnight to 4AM CDT. This maintenance will involve bringing down several carriers to update DDoS mitigation, re-adjust some network configurations, and to perform standard upgrades. This maintenance should not involve any downtime and should be relatively transparent as links being worked on will be taken down gracefully and only a single carrier at a time should be down.
There will then be a second maintenance on Saturday April 12th, from 2AM to 3AM CDT, which was scheduled over the weekend as it will definitely involve downtime for most of our customers. There will be upgrades made to a majority of our core routing equipment at this time. Total downtime should not exceed 30 minutes.
The official end of life for PHP 4 has been set for August 8th, 2008 by the PHP Group. As a result, this version will no longer receive bug fixes or security fixes after this date. At that this time, we will also discontinue support for PHP 4 completely on our hosting systems. As the date approaches, we will schedule a specific time to cut over all customers to PHP 5 and eliminate PHP 4 use entirely from our servers. If you are still using PHP scripts that require PHP 4, you should pursue upgrades to these scripts through their publishers or make the necessary modifications within the next several months.
If you have any questions or concerns about this change, please let us know by opening a support ticket or discussing the matter on our forums.