Zetamex Network Blog

Dear Customers,
Zetamex is now called Zetamex Network and is also now registered in Germany.

Dear Customers,

I would like to deeply apologize for the recent slow down in tickets and temporary holds on orders. This is because of a few different factors:

Database Services

 We have recently had our final strike using dedicated hardware for our databases. As a result of this, we have decided to move to Amazon Web Services for our databases. We are now using Amazon RDS to run our databases. This has significantly improved database performance and sets us up for protection against hardware related downtimes.

With this shift to Amazon RDS, it will allow us the ability to decrease downtime significantly. By using Multi-AZ Deployment, there is always a secondary copy of our database server running that will seamlessly take over in the event of any issue whether hardware or networking related. This provides us with better stability that we can make sure your content is online with much higher up times. Amazon RDS also does built in data back-up and snapshots that makes it easier for us to roll stuff back in the event of a possible data corruption or failures.

Leaving Budget Providers

Zetamex, if you haven’t already heard, has left some of the budget providers we have used in the past due to multiple problems and unreliable connections. In many instances, we were experiencing packet loss of up to 57% and that is absolutely unacceptable. So we have moved to more reliable, and enterprise ready datacenters, using companies like Amazon Web Services, SoftLayer, and a few German providers as well. This has resulted in our standards being raised, as well as being able to promise better uptime and more reliable connectivity for both you and your customers.

Thank You,
Zetamex Team

Weekly updates are back, and we are going to stay on top of them. These will be short and to the point blogs, explaining what is going on at Zetamex and its sub-projects.

Discontinued GoDaddy Usage – Zetamex has made the executive decision to move away from shared hosting and start hosting all websites on our own hardware. Sites will continue to be hosted on separate machines from the simulator and grid servers, to maintain the utmost security.

My Zetamex Updates

• Issue with Grid Database Connections – This was a result of us moving everything behind our own network and off of GoDaddy. Some database servers failed to do a proper Privilege Flush, however we have corrected this issue on all grid servers.
• Web Interactive Simulator Console – During our move, we have had several complaints about the console not staying updated or working properly. We have since then, found out the issue was people’s connection was timing out, because we had the timeout set to an insanely low count. This has since been changed to a 45 second time out. NOTE: This feature is not turned on for all users, to request this service enabled please send in a ticket.
• Grid Client’s UserCP – The current back-end for My Zetamex doesn’t allow us to do this securely, we have begun a rewrite of our back-end and are running it on our dev systems. As soon as it is stable enough, we will have people move over to begin testing. ETA: March 20, 2015
• Secure Re-Write of My Zetamex Has Begun [Completion ETA March 20, 2015] – Upon research, we have found multiple possible improvements to be made in our current system. We have already begun the process of patching some of those in the current My Zetamex. We have started on the new version, which we are building to look the same to the user. The changes will only be on the back-end. However some cosmetic changes are being made, as per customer responses to our survey. These are as follows:
• Simplified Location Of Services: Users have stated that it is complicated to find the list of their services. We are now bringing this to the Dashboard, meaning the instant you login, all services will be listed on that screen.
• Tutorials/Video Guides: We will be adding documentation to our Knowledge Base, giving users access to tons of resources.
• Login Notifications: To become more compliant with security concerns, we will be adding in a notification for whenever a login has occurred. The panel will send an email with the IP address the login came from to the account holders email. This will allow customers to have a better feeling of security, knowing they can track who logs into their services.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to send an email to support[at]zetamex.com to have your questions answered.

It has been pretty quiet over at Zetamex in terms of getting updates on what we are doing. So we wanted to publish this quick news update about what’s going on, and our release schedule for the stuff coming out of Zetamex in the New Year.

Break Down:

Zetamex Re-Opens Simulator Ordering: Jan 3, 2015
Zetamex Re-Opens Grid Ordering: Jan 5, 2015
ZetaWorlds Hits Release Candidate: Jan 15, 2015
Zetamex Offers True Mini-Grids: Feb 1, 2015
ZetaWorlds Offering Sub-Grids: Feb 1, 2015

ZetaWorlds Open Grid, has a back-end like no other. The grid’s services run entirely out of the cloud, behind a distributed setup. This distributed setup, allows us to provide a more reliable and steadfast grid. There are two sets of robust running, a group of robust services for regions hosted by Zetamex and a group of robust services running for those who connect their own regions. We have designed it this way, so that people connecting and attempting to abuse the grid cannot effect regions customers are paying for or the core working regions of the grid.

On top of this, ZetaWorlds being put into the same technology that all our grids that Zetamex hosts are. Put directly into the cloud, this provides us the ability to have backups that are of the entire machine. ZetaWorld’s core grid services, as well as other grids we host. The entire virtual server is snapshotted every night, allowing if something bad does happen we can spin up another server instantly using the snapshot, and even in a different region if the need arises. This provides us the ability to make sure data integrity remains high.

While assets are of biggest concern, we backup our assets server hourly. While if something does happen to the grid we roll back 1 day at worse case. You would lose up to 24hours of work, but if you had it rezzed on a region it would be safe and with us backing up hourly the asset would still be in the asset server. This allows us to ensure reliably even in the worse cases. The fact that we use SRAS gives us two advantages; the ability to have assets saved as files making hourly backup easy, and having the ability to have a fast and reliable asset server that can take a beating.

ZetaWorlds Sub-Grids, is a service we are working on after seeing so many grids merging into one another because of costs and other various reasons. We want to provide a service to allow grids to merge into a ZetaWorlds, while still keeping track of their residents inside of ZetaWorlds. This means all Sub-Grids of ZetaWorlds will be in ZetaWorld regions and residents. This allows the owners of the Sub-Grids to have their own registration page, starting region, list of their users inside of ZetaWorlds, and residents register in the Sub-Grid will have in their profile “Tims World Resident” or whatever the Sub-Grid’s name is.

These are just some of the things we are working on here at Zetamex, just so you know we are not sitting on our hands we are hard at work developing new and great things for everyone to enjoy. We look forward to the New Year, with us all this coming pubic for everyone to use.

During our re-launch, I Timothy Rogers, made a clerical error in the new DNS configuration for the new site. This resulted in our unfinished site being on the root domain Zetamex.com which did attract some media attention. The countdown timer did expire, and did state a new web design was coming but that had to be delayed as we are trying to not let new orders happen or work on the new site that much until My Zetamex is fully finished. We don’t want another unfinished product to tarnish us, and that is why we brought back our old site, so we can show users we are still here and still strong. Unfortunately because of my mistake, media attention was attracted to our unfinished re-design.

I personally want to address some of the issues with the media attention the new site that is in development brought up. Starting with the title, stating we are taking a step backwards and well a new site looks like we are going backwards let me explain. The new site is a site in development, that has not even passed our Q&A(Quality Assurance) yet meaning it may or may not even become the new look. The new site, was going show the change in who and what we are and give us that fresh new slate.

Addressing the concern that I am lapsing back on my plans of changing everything again. I want to point out that our plans have not changed. Not only that, we are not going to be changing our plans as I am locking in these prices for a minimum of 2 years, and it will most likely stay the same after that. The only change, which we already spoke on before we closed, is the dropping of Region Plans. This was because of shared performance caused a mix of abuse and confusion, the best course of action was discontinuing and going back to focus on quality and performance. I personally take the blame for the failure of the Region Plans, as they caused increase work for us over time, due to the confusion of usage that wasn’t well defined. Going back to selling full simulators, allows us not to worry about one customer’s regions effecting the performance of others.

Remember that we respect and protect your privacy, something that our customers admire most about us. So in regards to us using “cartoon pictures” (words of Maria Korolov) for the people whom provide us with testimonials, we do this to protect our customer’s privacy. While some people may like to show their faces, some do not, which is honestly understandable with how hard it is these days to keep your privacy on the Internet. In fact, most commonly from out analytics and those of some of the grids we host, people normally leave the Real Name fields blank till the last step, and many attempt to submit without filling those fields in. This shows us statistically many people are afraid to put their real name out there. So we respect our customer’s privacy, by not publishing anything they are not comfortable with sharing.

Lastly, we did prematurely launch into My Zetamex (formally ZetaPanel v3) and I will take the blame for this. However, staying true to my statement we are not accepting the new orders until it is fully functioning and operating as intended. As of right now, the only feature still being debugged is the Grid Interface service. Which is already functional, just working out the last few kinks. Once that is complete, the system will be entering a freeze and all new features and services will be ran on our development servers, and introduced into a preview site that users can opt-in to using if they want to test the latest features, or keep using the stable. We will continue to strive and keep the panel’s design the consistent and simple to use.

Thank you, all for your continued service with us. We hope to exceed your expectations into the New Year, moving into reliable services for everyone.