Happy Pride Month

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We are proud to inform everyone this month is pride month in the USA, and this month we recognize the fight which is still going on this month for those in the LGBT(Lesbian, Gay, Bi, and Transgender) community. This is a close and personal to the CEO Timothy Rogers, as he is a homosexual who did have a hard time in his past because of his sexuality. Which we will get into a little later in this article, as we have a couple things to touch on.

Firstly, Zetamex just got a huge face lift and there is a bunch of free upgrades and changes coming your way. First we wanted to show off that we do actually encrypt all our billing traffic, even just your orders themselves. We wanted to ensure that you always get the HTTPS page so that if the page loads and doesn’t auto-switch to HTTPS you can “Force SSL” and encrypt your connection while ordering.
The next big thing that we changed was we dropped standalones and made owning a grid much easier. You can now get grid services for just $25/month and a 15% discount on your simulators that you connect to your grid, keeping it very affordable for all our clients. We dropped standalones, because they are simply not salable, and we want our clients to be able to scale infinite in size.
While improving this, we noticed that there is a demand of people who wish to remain on their hardware and we want to help with that. So introducing our latest service, call BYOS(Bring Your Own Servers) Service. Where we will setup our tools and many of our features and link it into your existing hardware and work with you. We have already been doing this on a customer to customer basis, but since there seem to be a demand we are happy to fill the need.
Lastly, because it is Pride Month we are introducing a nice 20% off re-occurring discount off all services. This means we will be allowing you all to save 20% off on any products purchased this month till you end those services with  us. Just use the coupon code “PRIDE2014” at checkout and it will come off instantly. (it should be noted that coupons cannot be combined)
That being said, we are announcing that also this month for Pride Month, we will be making a contribution based off the total sales this month to the “Women’s Resources Center of the New River Valley” in Radford, VA. The reason for donating to this specific organization, is because they are a small organization that because where they are located, cares for people of all genders and sexuality. The reason for this specific one is it is the organization that helped our CEO get on his feet after his 18th birthday where he ran away from home, due to his family’s nonacceptance of who he was. Provided him with the resources and tools he needed to stay in school and finish High School and get a job and on his feet. Timothy, now after years has finally been re-accepted by his family and they have apologized for the actions that happened in the past. But he wishes that Zetamex’s profits go towards an organization that helps all walks of lives.

Delays On Releases of Products & New Site

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We apologize, we wanted to launch our new site and pricing plans today. Also the much anticipated ZetaPanel v2.0, however unexpected emergency maintenance has been needed with two of our very large clients, there for slowing us to a halt on less pressing matters. We are doing our best to make sure our clients come first, and to deliver the best customer experience.

New Expected Release Date Range: Feb 3-7, 2014

Again our apologies, we are trying our hardest to get these tools into your hands so we can put more control in your hands, and have to rely less on our staff unless a matter needs to escalated.

~Zetamex Staff

Wolf Migration

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[RESOLVED 6:10 PM PST] Complete
Everything has been migrated successfully, please just bare in mind may take a few hours for wolf.zetamex.pw to resolve properly.

[UPDATE 5:05 PM PST] Simulators Moved
Simulators have been successfully migrated and restarted, we are now working on restoring Zadaroo.com and Panel.Zetamex.com

[UPDATE 3:00 PM PST] 80% Complete
We are almost finished transferring files, regions are coming back online on the new server, certain features will be inaccessible for the next few hours, however the ability to visit your regions will still be possible, just web tools will not be available.

[UPDATE 11:35 PM PST] In Progress
We apologize for this delay, this is one of our largest servers holding the most data we have. We are starting to bring up clients that have been transferred over now, please bare with us during this time.

[10:00 AM PST] Wolf Migration Begins
We have begun migration of all content on wolf to its new server, this means any clients on server wolf may experience brief downtime during this migration. Please stay tuned to this page for status updates, we are moving as quickly as possible to get all the data on the new server.

Migrations, Roll out, and Updates

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It is finally here, our steps to begin our migrations to our new setup. ZetaPanel 2.0 Roll out has been delayed for many reasons, and the version rolling out is a beta and is not 100% finished but is a working copy for everyone. But in order to make sure everything works correctly, we have ordered new servers to replace our older hardware with newer and more robust hardware. So this means migrations are going to happen this weekend.

Migrations will be occurring starting tonight through Friday. This does mean that there may be moments of inaccessibility, however we are moving in such a way that you shouldn’t experience much downtime at all. We are going to just simply shutdown the regions on the old, and bring up the exact copy on the new right afterwards, so it will seam the region just restarted.
We will also be rolling out our brand new site, our new plans, and our new billing software. The reason we are rolling out a new billing system, is due to the back-end of our current billing system causes much confusion of us on the back-end. The new billing system is going to be able to manage the ordering, payments, and going to allow us to start taking new methods of payment.

Choice, Cloud, Hybrid, Redesign

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The beginning of 2014 will be marking our largest expansion yet, we have already been making the move to Debian with most of our service, and the beginning of January we still have our planned downtime for the complete move over to Debian. But that is only the beginning, with ZetaPanel 2.0 coming out, there is even more to expect with the introduction of a few new things.

Hybrid Hosting
Techincally we are already now hybrid hosting between the cloud and dedicated servers. This has already significantly helped us lower our costs, and increase performance across the board. We plan to expand our hybrid approach this year, making our hybrid technology really stand up to the test, and do more than we every thought we could with the combined power of both dedicated servers and cloud servers.

Choice Savings
We have recently had many people coming to us, and the economy has been hitting many people hard, and we know that opensim hosting is not cheap. We have to pay our employees too, but we have come up with a solution we have seen in place at many different companies. Which we are rolling out as Choice Savings, which essentially allows you to pay a large setup fee, but then have a lower locked in price for the length of a year.

It will be appearing on both bundle plans and grid plans early next year, up to 35% monthly saving to be expected with a larger up front cost. Why we feel this is a great way to go, we figure if you are willing to fork up a larger setup cost, to keep it locked at a lower rate for a year, you will don’t plan on walking away from a larger upfront investment, which allows us to help cover the backend costs, of lower up front costs. Though you can still choose to pay our every day month to month prices, with the standard setup fees already in place on certain packages.

Cloud Hosting
We been planning this for a long time, and we been testing our butts off on this technology and we are happy to say that the beginning of the year we are finally going to bring affordable cloud hosting to every grid that wants it, and everyone that wants it on the cloud.

This is not normal cloud hosting you think of not online when not in use, we notice not a lot of people enjoyed that scenario. So we reinvented, affordable ALWAYS ONLINE cloud hosting. Not to mention you will not be sharing a cloud node with anyone but yourself, truly dedicated cloud hosting.

We have already ran the numbers and here are the projected plans, and projected prices, these are subject to change by release, however we are pretty positive they will not be changing.

Light Cloud – 30,000 Prims* – 50 Residents – 4 Regions –  $20usd/month
Steady Cloud – 60,000 Prims* – 100 Residents – 9 Regions – $40usd/month
Heavy Cloud – 120,000 Prims* – 100 Residents – 16 Regions – $80usd/month

* – Note that scripts and active users can effect allotted prim counts from being completely accurate as with any simulator cloud or dedicated.

Wrap Up
Well that is a lot of stuff to be looking forward to in the new year, and you better believe we are super excited to be rolling out our powerhouse of new features and we are just super excited to be getting ready. We wish everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Kwanzaa. For all the others who do not celebrate holidays this time of year, or a holiday I missed, we wish you well as we all enter the new year.

New Secure Billing

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Zetamex has just invested into a new billing system which now encrypts all data and connections in a 256-bit encryption. This means your billing data is now military grade encrypted, the new system is also cloud based so if one server is down, you will  just be redirected to the one that is online and running.

We have finished migrating all active clients over to the new system, we will be exporting all invoices later today of the old system to send to users for their own records. The new system does not hold the older invoices, reason we are exporting the old records. Clients wanting access to the old records will need to email us at support@zetamex.com with the email address they had on file to ask for the old records, if the so choose to want them.

Again, we are moving into a new age where data security is very important, so we are taking all the steps we can to ensure all our clients personal billing data is secured.

More ZetaPanel 2.0 Prep

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We are getting closer and closer to our ZetaPanel 2.0 launch, however we have realized that the distrobution we use now, is not what we really want to be relying on anymore. We currently run the last releases of Ubuntu on our machines, however in recent release we have been noticing that Ubuntu repo’s are starting to stay really stale, and not getting latest versions or even latest stable versions of important software we use to keep opensim up and running on top of our own infrastructure. So we are going to be migrating to Debian, one of the oldest linux distrobutions, that operates on rolling release. This is not a very large crazy change, as Ubuntu is actually built on top of Debian.

Why Going To Debian?
Debian unlike many distributions, is a rolling release with several branches. We can run from old, stable, and testing. This means, that we can use Debian on our servers, and just do our regular updates and pull in the latest stable code. Debian team is very large and backed by many enterprise and corporate sponsors. However, even thought that is said, it is much like opensim in the since that it is not owned by a pacific company and it is truly free and opensource operating system. However, it being in existence for so many years, it has made itself known as one of the most stable linux distributions around.

The other reason for Debian being our choice, is we believe in opensource software and technology. Debian by default only uses opensource free technology in their development. This means you can take any part of the Debian operating system and make changes to it legally, just like you can with opensim. We feel that this is a perfect match for us, to have both the operating system being as opensource like the platform opensim is opensource.  This makes us feel more comfortable, as we continue our development of ZetaPanel 2.0 which we will be offering as SaaS(Software as a Service) and giving out parts of its source code on github and bitbucket.

What Does This Mean For Me?
This doesn’t mean to much directly effect you the customer, other than we will experience a breif interruption in our services when we migrate from Ubuntu to Debian. However, we will just be moving you to our redundant servers and just cycle people through until we get everyone moved around successfully. So in other words, very little downtime and some small interruptions.

When Does This Go Down?
We are planning to do this the first week of the new year, so from January 6 to the 8th. Again, our customers will only experience up to 1 to 2 hours of downtime during this whole process, this is because we plan to rotate our clients around on other servers, and do them one at a time. Meaning, little to no downtime for many.

So will ZetaPanel 2.0 Be Ready Aftwards?
Yes, in fact this is part of the reason we are doing this transition. We needed a system that has up to date packages we can rely on that will make sure our ZetaPanel 2.0 software will run properly. It will be our final step to bringing ZetaPanel 2.0 to the public for thier public usage. We are very excited about this and can’t wait for everyone to start enjoying ZetaPanel 2.0.