Even more SSDs
We are excited that 7 out of our 9 locations are now running 100% SSD powered OpenVZ nodes! At this point it's easier to just name the two that don't have SSDs (yet) but where's the fun in that? Florida, Colorado, Arizona, California, Oregon, Illinois, and New Jersey are all feeling the speed of 100% Solid State goodness. You can check out the IO results yourself here if you're curious: http://drgn.biz/servers
Even more DDOS Protection options
An exciting surprise occurred from one of our data centers last week, we received word that DDOS protection has been added to our servers in Dallas, TX and Los Angeles, CA so that's a nice bonus for our clients currently there or clients who want to migrate there. The protection included is 3Gbps/1.5Mpps (Million Packets Per Second) of volumetric layer 3 protection (UDP, TCP, and ICMP). They did say their mitigation hardware does handle layer 7 (application), but they did not provide any details about it so we won't make any claims of such protection (if it works for you then it's another added bonus). The protection is not always on like in Oregon, instead it detects an attack and in a fraction of a second it will re-route the traffic over to their DDOS mitigation hardware to scrub out the bad traffic.
Apparently this protection has been in place for a while but not advertised and according to our logs we had one attack that was mitigated for over an hour and we never noticed (even our internal monitoring never even saw it meaning their protection kicked in before the attack reached our network port). While we understand 3Gbps isn't much these days, it's 3 times more than our network port capacity so it gives us and our clients a nice buffer before the IP is nullrouted and 3Gbps/1.5Mpps is enough to handle the vast majority of attacks we've seen over the past 6 months in Oregon. If you find yourself needing more protection than these two locations offer, we recommend migrating to our Oregon node which has handled some extremely massive attacks for us in the past.
FREE DDOS Protection
With the new SSD node in Oregon and the new DDOS protection in Texas and California, we also removed our DDOS Protected VPS plans from our website. Portland, OR. has been added to the normal OpenVZ VPS group so new OpenVZ orders can now select Oregon for their deployment location and clients can now migrate to and from there if they wish. This means you can now order our 64MB plans (only $11.99/year) in Oregon and take advantage of the awesome DDOS protection there without any additional costs. Current clients with our old DDOS Protected VPS plans can switch to the new pricing (and new resources) if they'd like (migrations are disabled for legacy plans).
Data Backups
We've made some changes to our backups and now maintain both local and off-site backups at all of our locations for all services. We will be making more changes to our backup scheme via our Wyvern control panel for our OpenVZ VPS clients also, but more of that to come.
We would like to take this opportunity to remind everybody about the importance of backups and how you should be making your own backups of your own data as frequently as possible. The backups we maintain are for emergencies only (such as massive hardware failure or data center issues), in the past 12 months the majority of restore requests from clients were either too old or too new and resulted in data loss for clients who deleted the wrong files on accident and didn't notice until it was too late (our backups are an exact mirror of your VPS so if you delete files a month ago, our weekly backup will not have those files anymore and likewise if you created a new file after our backups ran but deleted it before the next weekly backup).
And much much more!
2016 is going to be another great year for us. We have some projects in the works that will bring Secure Dragon to the next level and we will continue to exceed your expectations of us in the process. If you have any comments or suggestions about our services we would like to hear them so please open a ticket using the Contact Us form in the Client Area on our site.
Thanks again for all of your awesome support! It means the world to us how much we've grown with amazing clients like you.
-The Secure Dragon Staff
Friday, February 5, 2016
