We have had a lot of things in the works the past few weeks and we are happy to finally be able to announce some of the advancements we've made during that time.
Location Expansions
As of yesterday (Wednesday the 9th) we are happy to say that we have two OpenVZ nodes en route to two new locations which we hope to have live by next week. One OpenVZ node will be arriving this Friday to our new Chicago, IL location and the other will be arriving next Monday at our new Los Angeles, CA location (both in COLO@ facilities). We are especially excited about our Los Angeles location because we've done some extensive testing in other California locations and have found the COLO@ facility to have the best connectivity to Asia compared to the others we were looking into. Our new Chicago location is also a major expansion for us because of the excellent connectivity for both east and west coasts of the US for those who need a perfect central location for their US-based clients.
In addition to these immediate expansions. We also will be expanding to a new data center in Columbus, OH in the near future once the upgrades are complete to their infrastructure and we are scouting out other new locations to move into before the end of the year.
Payment Processor Changes
We are saddened to hear that Google will be discontinuing their payment processing service (Google Checkout/Wallet) and as such we will be removing that payment option on November 19th. We have added a new payment option to our billing system which is a popular credit card processor called Stripe which allows you to pay with your credit card directly instead of going through Paypal. For your security, no credit card information will be stored on our systems. We are also working with Amazon to add Amazon's Simple Pay option to our billing system so anybody with an Amazon account can make payments through that account.
We understand a lot of clients who use Google Checkout do not have another form of payment since it was a very readily available system around the world so we would like to work with those clients in any way possible to avoid any interruption of service. We are exploring other payment processors that are more globally accepted as well as opening the option for clients to mail in checks or money orders in advance to pay for their services if they wish. As always, we are willing to make arrangements to allow our clients to remain with us and not let Google's decision to impact them. If you have another payment processor in mind please open a ticket for us to review them. If you wish to work our an offline payment method then please open a ticket before your invoice is generated to ensure enough lead time for the payment to arrive before your due date.
One payment option we have been exploring is one that we've heard is popular in other countries but not so much here in the US so we would like some feedback on the option of SMS payments or cell phone billing. An initial look at this option shows that it may not exactly be the best fit for our type of services but with enough interest we would be willing to review this option more deeply along with the various companies that provide this service.
Pricing and Service Feedback
With the recent pricing changes, we've received 100% positive feedback from clients in our help desk along with others who became clients after the announcement. We're very happy with that but at this time we're more interested in those who remained silent, we're curious as to where you stand on these changes since we've seen some complaints on various websites that our lower prices could actually be scaring clients off because we're "too cheap to be good". So in order to help us determine how we will shape the future of Secure Dragon LLC., we've put together a short 9 question survey in hopes to gain some insight of our clients and help better ourselves and your experience with us. All of the questions on the survey are completely optional and are 100% anonymous unless you choose to provide your e-mail so we can contact you directly and discuss the survey with you.
New VPS Control Panel Update
When we last sent out an update e-mail like this, we made mention of a new control panel we are working on for our VPS clients. At this time we are happy to say that the amount of progress we've made on this has been intense. As it stands, we're more than 75% done with the client side of things and once that is complete the admin-side of things will also fall into place. We were hoping to have it ready to release with our new locations but we don't want to rush it and want to make sure it's tested thoroughly before putting it into production. Originally the control panel was called VPSM, but due to some changes in the original project we have renamed it to Wyvern to match our dragon theme. We've also revamped the client area layout a bit by making it more clean and easy to use, a picture of our working development install can be seen here: https://my.securedragon.net/link.php?id=17
VPS Backups
We have been testing various backup methods and solutions for our VPS nodes and have found one that we are satisfied with and are working towards implementing across our network. At this time, we are installing backup servers in Tampa and Denver to backup our OpenVZ and KVM nodes with something much better than our current paid weekly backup service we offer now. Our new solution, which will be included for free in all VPS services, will include multiple hourly, daily, and weekly backups. We are working on a solution to maintain off-site backups in the event of a major disaster but we are still working out the specifics on this due to our current expansion plans. We've been running this new backup solution in our Denver location on our OpenVZ node there with much success and virtually no impact to our clients on the node. As of this announcement, we have access to the following:
6 "hourly backups" (ever 4 hours)
7 daily backups
4 weekly backups
We had considered taking monthly backups also, but we felt that in the event of an emergency it would not make sense to restore from a backup that old. These backups are mainly being maintained in the event of catastrophic hardware failure but once these are implemented network-wide we will accept restore requests at the fee listed in our Terms of Service.
We hope to have more exciting news by next month since we're constantly focusing on growing. If you think you have an idea we can use we always welcome any and all feedback. Thanks again for your time and continued support.
-The Secure Dragon Staff
Thursday, October 10, 2013
