DarkStar Communications

Rick Rolled.

In gaming related news, WOW gold farmers got Rick Rolled legally.

As you have probably noticed, we’ve launched a new site. With this, we have streamlined our product line, mostly by reinventing our gameservers line. From top to bottom, we’ve renewed the way we do game servers, allowing for greater flexibility and increased quality of service.

We have a new AJAX order form and soon we’ll be launching forums for our clients to communicate both with us and each other. We have a realtime network graph showing how many gamers are connected to the DarkStar voice network (which may look strange for a day or two as we tweak the code.)

I’m personally excited about this blog being integrated more prominently into the new site. I really think this blog lets users have an inside glimpse into the world’s leading TeamSpeak and Ventrilo host.

Well, that was the surprise I had been talking about. But if the whispers around the office are true, we’ve got another thing coming. Namely a new Ventrilo and TeamSpeak location - how’s Tokyo sound? Sounds good to me. Don’t count this as a promise, but it’s looking like we’ll expand there next.

You want more new stuff? Well you’ll just need to let us know and we’ll look into it. Want a game that we don’t have listed on our site? Let us know, we might be able to work something out. Wanna earn money? We’ve started an affiliate program, so check that out.

A favorite holiday as far away as Mars (they also make pet food, by the way), Halloween is a great time to go door to door attempting to collect as close to 100 Grand Whatchamacallits as possible. (For our Canadian friends, an American 100 grand bar is sold in your country as a $95,350 bar.)

We want to, but we can’t possibly mail out candy to all of you. By my estimates, it wouldn’t even be practical to send just one M&M to each Ventrilo and TeamSpeak user. If you are in the contiguous United States and would like a piece of candy, please contact our support department and we’ll see what we can do to make sure we mail you one (while supplies last.) Be sure to mention this blog.

The big surprise I’ve been talking about is coming soon. I know you’ll love it.

Oh, and I read in Modern Witch Magazine that this year brooms are out and vacuums are in.

The new office is great, we can handle twice the support now. Additionally, it allowed us to wall-mount two 32 inch Philips LCD TVs in front of our support reps. These screens are monitoring (excuse the pun) all of our servers, so we’ll have an instant visual warning if a server goes down.

The fish are still at the old office, we moved all the furniture ourselves, but a 30 gallon tank is too much. We’ll have professional movers help us with the fish tank. The tricky part is saving the water because it contains all of the microorganisms we’ve been breeding for a few weeks.

We’re proud to say we have been able to offer 100% uptime and support throughout the move. Before our network at the old office was shut down, a new network was fully operational at the new office. If we hadn’t blogged the move, you never would have known about it from our support response times. I’d like to personally thank our support techs for being so cooperative throughout the move.

I really can’t wait to update you on our next big thing. Hopefully by the end of the month I’ll be able to announce it. Stay tuned!

I get a lot of people asking me what the difference is between DarkStar and our competitors. At the risk of starting some mudslinging, I’ll dive into that here, with the nitty-gritty deep down differences.

We wear underwear with the Teamspeak logo on it. I thought that would look cool as a paragraph opener. Actually we don’t do this, and you shouldn’t believe any competitor that claims it. It’s a whole mess of copyright law, and anyone who actually does wear the underwear should probably be avoided.

Most importantly, DarkStar uses Mzima bandwidth. Mzima is route optimized for home users, making it the lowest latency bandwidth possible. It’s more expensive than normal bandwidth, but they took it out of my paycheck, so the company breaks even on the difference in cost. Most bandwidth, such as what our competitors use, is standard commercial bandwidth. It is designed to transfer data from a server at one datacenter to a server at another datacenter – and it does this very well. But that isn’t what a voice server does. Your server transfers data from you, to the server, to another end-user. Mzima works directly with ISPs to limit hops – we use bandwidth designed with stuff like Ventrilo and Teamspeak in mind.

Secondly, DarkStar gives all possible administrator rights to the owner of the server. Not everyone does this. Through advanced proprietary software, we are able to offer all administrative rights. This isn’t possible without Brett, our programmer that lives in a cage. Its August, my month to feed him, and I’m too busy blogging.

DarkStar has size. With size we can buy larger bandwidth commits, allowing us to buy bandwidth cheaper than our competitors. We pass this savings on to you. Through that savings, we are able to offer premium codecs at our regular price, which is rare in the voice server industry. At any given time, 300,000 users are connected to our servers. If you laid those users end to end, it’d be twice the distance that Ohio State will travel to the University of Michigan in a battle royal this November. If you rounded up all those users, and measured their body heat, it might be enough to possibly power a server or more, possibly, if the power was enough. You know, math and stuff.

We provide true 24/7/365 support. No really, I worked last Fourth of July. Send us a ticket on Christmas. Send our competitor a ticket on Christmas. See who responds. We answer support tickets when even Santa doesn’t. That’s a guarantee.

If you want to research this, feel free. You’ll probably also find that our locations, variety of payment options including ClanPay, and our custom control panel all set us far above the competition.

Oh, and instant setup. But everyone does that, and it’s really the same anywhere. I can’t really think of a way to improve on *instant*. But, you’ll still find a whole lot of competitors who use that as their main selling point. Watch for it.