Steadfast Networks In 2018: How Would Steadfast Networks Clients Review Them?

Steadfast Web Hosting Introduction

Steadfast Web Hosting is an enterprise-grade server hosting company with a focus on business and financial industry clients.

Steadfast was founded by Karl Zimmerman when he was only 14 years old, back in 1998. He started offering web hosting services out of his bedroom, because he was especially excited about the newly developing technology at the time. The business was incorporated in 2000, and 16-year-old Zimmerman became the CEO, a position he has retained ever since. From there, Steadfast hosting has grown into a multi-million dollar company.

Services and Specializations

Steadfast does not offer low end or shared hosting services. They offer only VPS, Dedicated, and Collocation hosting plans.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) plans from Steadfast are highly configurable. Rather than having to choose from a small handful of pre-set options, each detail of the VPS plans can be selected independently with Steadfast’s innovative Service Builder. Configurable options include:

• CPU Cores
• CPU Frequency
• Public IPs
• Private IPs
• RAM
• Convention Spinning Disk Storage
• Solid-state storage

The available range for each specification is extremely wide, allowing customers to determine exactly how much computing power they need — from very little to extremely high.

Steadfast’s dedicated server plans work similarly, with a wide range of configurable options:

• Location (Chicago or New Jersey)
• Server Type (with 9 different options)
• Managed or Unmanaged
• Bandwidth
• Operating System (15 preconfigured options, including four Windows varieties, several Linux distros, VM Ware, Unix, and BSD — and the ability to provide your own)
• OS Architecture — 32 or 64 bit
• Control Panel (4 options)
• RAM
• RAID Controller (five options)
• DDos Protection
• 2 Hard Drive slots (four options for each, including SSD)

Steadfast also provides collocation services at three datacenters, with a similar array of setup options:

• Location
  • 2 Chicago Locations
  • New Jersy
• Number of Racks or Cabinets
• Amperage (for individual racks)
• Wattage (for half or full cabinets)
• Bandwidth

VPS, dedicated, and colo plans designed using the Service Builder can be shared with team members for comment before purchasing.

Financial Services and Trading

Steadfast’s real specialty hosting connected to the Financial Services and Trading industry.

Both of their Chicago datacenters are located just blocks away from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and one of them is in the same building as the servers powering the feeds from ZenFire, Rithmic, Mirus, and several other financial data sources.

This provides extremely low (sub-millisecond) latency both to data and to trade execution on several exchanges.

Steadfast even has specific pre-configured plan options for high-end “Trading Servers,” to help customers get set up quickly. Like their other plans, these can be edited as needed — Steadfast just provides a starting point for a high-quality trading rig.

Additional datacenters in Chicago and New Jersey can provide support to offices, call centers, and sales floors in two of the most important financial service markets.

Datacenters and Technology

As mentioned above, Steadfast operates out of three datacenters — two in Chicago and one in New Jersey — which provide close proximity to important data hubs in the financial services industry.

All three data centers feature:

• An advanced fire suppression system designed to limit damage when extinguishing fires
• Redundant Climate Control, maintaining precise temperature and humidity levels with a chilled water system
• Multiple-redundant backup power supplies, with batteries and diesel generators.
• SSAE16-audited security protocols including
  • 24/7 staffing
  • Hi-res color video
  • Photo ID verification

Specific server technology is largely dependent on the individual options selected by customers, but Steadfast tends to use extremely high-end equipment.

Support and Customer Service

Steadfast provides 24/7 customer and technical support via email, phone, or trouble ticket. Support is provided by staffers physically onsite at the data centers.

They also provide continuous announcements via their blog and Twitter accounts of any planned maintenance events, emergency situations, or ongoing management issues.

Security and Backups

Datacenter and network security is extremely robust. Managed server plans include security monitoring and automated backups. DDoS protection, automated backups, and other standard security feautres can be purchased with any plan.

Uptime Guarantees

For VPS and dedicated hosting plan customers, Strikingly provides 99.99% uptime guarantee for its own servers.

For its colocation services, Strikingly guarantees 100% uptime for power and network access.

As usual, these guarantees exclude downtime caused by customer actions or negligence.

While scheduled maintenance is also excluded, Strikingly’s SLA dictates that such maintenance events will always be pre-announced, and will never exceed 60 minutes in a month.

Costs

Strikingly’s services are not cheap, but neither are they unreasonable. Customers are paying for high-end equipment, in close proximity to a major financial exchange.

Summary and Conclusions

Strikingly is a very high-quality hosting company particularly well-suited to businesses in the financial services and fintech industries.