this is the page we had online in 1995... The only changes are that the references to mtjeff.com have been changed to solid.net
 

Solid.net info

Solid.net has 17 physical machines on the net at this time. Most of these machines are 486dx-100's running LINUX. Our philosophy is to divide up the load among a number of affordable sets of hardware instead of a smaller number of more expensive servers. By doing this, we can easily add additional machines as the demands on the system increase. We are using 486 instead of pentium cpus because we have noticed only a 15-20% performance improvement when we have tested pentium systems and they cost significantly more. We feel that the increased cost is not worth it. The money is better spent on additional memory. Anyone wanting to verify the minor performance improvements of the pentium over the 486 only need to checkout any web page with serious benchmark results.

We prefer this to the virtual machine concept because it makes it much more difficult for an out of control task to seriously impact the total system.

We had a Netscape commerce server on line at one time but removed it when it became public knowledge that the commerce servers were not as secure at claimed. We believe that the whole concept of the secure server is marketing hype, but we will be putting it back on line in the near future because the public is demanding it. Anyone on one of our other servers will be able to use it for secure transactions.

We typically have enough spare parts on hand to completely replace two or more machines in case of any failure. However, the only failures we have had since we started was a disk drive failure and a loose cache chip on a mother board. The entire system is on a UPS capable of sustaining the system for over two hours in case of power failure.

We currently have one T1 connection to the net. With this connection, we are just milliseconds from MCI and SPRINT in both the bay area and Seattle.

Our targeted customer is a web developer who does the majority of the work for his customers but does not have the knowledge or time to maintain his own server(s). We provide this for not much more than someone would pay for a reliable 64k connection and telephone line costs in many areas of the country.

We also do cgi-bin and database programming for special web pages. We do not have graphic design personal on our staff but can put you in contact with some very good ones.

We are working with an online catalogue developer creating some online marketing opportunities. We should have some examples available in the near future.

We have no major restrictions on what you can do with a co-located server except that you must in general act like a good net citizen and don't do anything that might get the attention of Senator Exon or the local chief of police. Pictures with any amount of skin are likely to be targeted under the Exon bill. You also cannot sell to customers who resell bandwidth on our servers.

We have one web site here that typically gets 175000 or more hits per day, some that get only get a few hundred, and the rest run most of the range in between. We also have machines dedicated to maillist processing. One maillist located here has over 15600 subscribers and the owner of that list sends out two 10k messages per week.

If you would like a dedicated server, or would like to have your web pages on one of our servers, send an email message to newservice@solid.net with a note about what services you need. Within 48 hours we can have a new server configured for your needs.

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