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
Today we have just turned up a major new transit customer, Wiscnet, Wisconsin's Research and Education network. This network connects over 400 sites counting for over 900,000 end users. That is 900,000 end users that have direct and easy access to your sites and servers, with no intermediary networks. Not many web hosts, dedicated server providers, or colocation providers can offer so many end users, directly on-net. We consider this relationship to be a great benefit to Wiscnet and it's members as we provide additional and complete network connectivity to them, but also a benefit to our existing customers due to the increased scope and diversity of our network as a whole.Wiscnet is a 501c3 non-profit member organization providing network access to it's members. There are over 400 higher-ed, K12 school districts, library systems (each one serving 15-40 libraries), city and county governments, and the Wisconsin state government that are WiscNet members. This includes all 26 University of Wisconsin campuses, the entire Technical College system, and about 70% of the K12 school districts in Wisconsin. A list of their members can be found at:
http://www.wiscnet.net/Members/
http://www.wiscnet.net/members-gmap.html
In order to simplify BGP and increase the efficiency of InterNAP FCP routing decisions, we will be doing maintenance on all core routers across our network between 12AM and 3AM Friday, January 15. This maintenance will likely result in some periods with frequent route changes, thus increased latency, and potentially some packet loss. There should be no downtime and redundancy will be maintained throughout the maintenance window. This will potentially affect all members, across all our sites and our hosted sites.
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
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.