Как BigScoots обеспечивает независимость: масштабный апгрейд инфраструктуры

In a major move that reflects the consolidation trends shaking the hosting industry, BigScoots has announced the launch of two brand-new, state-of-the-art data center locations in Chicago and Ashburn, VA. This initiative is more than a simple expansion. It represents a complete reimagining of the company’s network and hosting stack, designed to ensure independence and provide a competitive edge for the next decade.

The launch includes significantly faster hardware and a cutting-edge WordPress management stack, all changes necessitated by a series of corporate acquisitions involving BigScoots’ long-time infrastructure partner.

The Steadfast Legacy: A Partnership Built on Quality

For over a decade, BigScoots has called Chicago home. Since 2010, BigScoots was a proud customer of Steadfast Networks.

Steadfast wasn’t just a vendor to BigScoots; they were partners. The company was founded by Karl Zimmerman, a brilliant engineer who started the business in his bedroom and grew it into a Chicago institution. Karl was a “quality-first” kind of guy. He cared about uptime and engineering just as much as the team at BigScoots does. BigScoots built their business on top of the network he built, and for years, it was rock solid.

Tragically, Karl passed away unexpectedly in 2020. His passing left a void in the Chicago tech community, and it set off a chain of corporate events that would eventually change everything for BigScoots.

The Corporate Shuffle: A Choice to Be Independent

After Karl’s passing, the ownership landscape shifted:

• 2021: Steadfast Networks was acquired by ColoHouse.
• 2024: ColoHouse acquired another provider, Hivelocity.
• Recently: Those entities merged their operations, rebranding everything under the Hivelocity name.

While acquisitions are common in our industry, they often come with “synergies” that don’t benefit the end customer. As these companies merged their networks, policies changed. The new ownership structure decided to consolidate their network assets.

The result? The building management has informed BigScoots that they are reclaiming the IP address ranges that were originally owned by Steadfast. These are the IPs that many BigScoots legacy customers have been using for years.

BigScoots was faced with a choice:

1. Try to negotiate with a massive conglomerate that doesn’t operate with the same personal touch Karl did.
2. Build something better.

They chose option two.

“We decided that we never want to be in a position where an upstream provider can dictate terms to our clients again. So, we have spent the last year quietly building our own independent infrastructure that relies on no one but us.”

Justin Catello, VP and Co-Founder of BigScoots

Turning a Challenge into a Massive Upgrade

BigScoots’ solution was not a lateral migration. Instead it is a comprehensive infrastructure upgrade, leveraging proprietary hardware and network architecture that includes:

Two New Data Center Footprints

• Chicago, IL: The first data center will stay in their home turf of Chicago. But, it is being built in a new location with entirely new BigScoots-owned hardware.
• Ashburn, VA: The other new data center is being built in the “center of the internet” location and will provide ultra-low latency connections to the East Coast and Europe.

Network Capacity Increase

On the old legacy network, BigScoots was operating on standard 20Gbps uplinks. In the new facilities, BigScoots has installed 100Gbps pipes. This is a 5x increase in bandwidth capacity, ensuring that traffic spikes, DDoS attacks, or busy holiday sales seasons won’t even make our network blink.

Enterprise-Grade Hardware Refresh

BigScoots is replacing every single server. The new fleet runs on the latest enterprise processors with faster clock speeds and next-generation NVMe storage.

New Virtualization & WordPress Stack

BigScoots has rebuilt its virtualization layer and our WordPress management stack from scratch. They have taken 14 years of learning “what works best” and baked it into a new software environment that is more secure, more scalable, and significantly faster for PHP and database processing.

What This Means For BigScoots Clients (The IP Migration)

As a consequence of the former Steadfast network being reclaimed, BigScoots must migrate legacy customers to this new, independent network.

The company acknowledges that IP address changes (which require updating DNS records, firewalls, and third-party integrations) are an inconvenience for long-standing clients. However, they emphasize the long-term benefits of this short-term disruption:

• Unprecedented Speed: Driven by modern CPUs and 100G capacity.
• True Stability: A network fully controlled by BigScoots, isolated from external corporate acquisitions
• Future-Proofing: A modern stack ready for the next decade of the web.

Moving Forward

BigScoots’ bold move is a necessary response to the volatile nature of the hosting industry. By investing heavily in proprietary, self-owned infrastructure, the company is positioning itself not as a renter, but as an owner of its service quality and destiny, offering clients a promise of stability and speed that is increasingly rare in the market.

Need Assistance?

Legacy customers who have received migration tickets are advised to coordinate closely with the BigScoots team to ensure a seamless transition to the new, faster network.