We've been busy as always here at Secure Dragon and we have made some changes we'd like to share with our clients. Some good, some not so good, but all for a better user experience. Here they are in no particular order:
KVM VPSs
We've been testing KVM over the past week with the help from some dedicated testers and we are very happy with the results. We plan to rebuild our KVM server tonight with more RAM, better CPUs, and more hard drives and after another 48 hours of testing we plan on releasing KVM stock this Friday. KVM stock will be very limited initially with only 20 of each plan from 128MB-512MB and only a handful of 1GB and 2GB plans (large plans will also be available if needed but will not be advertised and are based on resource availability). We will be adding a handful of ISO options to start with but feel free to open a ticket with any requests you may have (we plan to offer Windows licenses in the future but not at this time).
Here is the current specs for our KVM plans:
K128: 128MB of RAM, 5GB Disk Space, 250GB Bandwidth, 2 CPU Cores, 1 IPv4 = $40/year
K256: 256MB of RAM, 10GB Disk Space, 500GB Bandwidth, 2 CPU Cores, 1 IPv4 = $7.99/month
K512: 512MB of RAM, 25GB Disk Space, 1000GB Bandwidth, 2 CPU Cores, 1 IPv4 = $14.99/month
K1024: 1024MB of RAM, 50GB Disk Space, 1500GB Bandwidth, 4 CPU Cores, 1 IPv4 = $28.99/month
K2048: 2048MB of RAM, 100GB Disk Space, 2000GB Bandwidth, 4 CPU Cores, 1 IPv4 = $56.99/month
VPS Backups
After discussing and analysing data for almost a month, we've decided to make some changes to how we handle our backups for our VPS clients. As of 5/30/2012, we will no longer be offering free weekly backups for our VPS plans. The main reasons why we have decided on this is that it is now evident that if we were to double our capacity we would be unable to handle that volume of backups in terms of resources and that it is beginning to impact our clients. As it stands, when our backups are running on their normal schedule (Wednesday morning), the impact on the nodes is an issue for some of our clients for the duration of the backups (some nodes running for 12+ hours).
We understand that a lot of users maintain their own backups which we appreciate and fully support all clients do. We also understand that some clients do not wish to maintain their own backups and rely on us for backups which is why we will be offering the option starting 5/30/2012 for clients to purchase the option of a weekly backup for $0.50/month per VPS (this pricing is only for plans with 30GB of storage or less). If you wish to have control over your backups (frequency and method), we do offer Backup VPS plans in various sizes but will also be willing to provide custom plans to fit your needs if you would like to go that route instead. In the future, we hope to offer the ability for all clients to utilize the "Central Backup" feature in SolusVM if SolusLabs ever decides to restore that feature.
Xen PV VPSs
At this time we plan on continuing to offer Xen PV VPSs on the two current nodes we have now but we have no plans of adding additional Xen PV nodes so once the current two are filled, we will stop taking orders. Xen PV clients will be able to keep their Xen PV nodes for as long as they wish and there will be no changes to our Xen PV plans/pricing. Originally we were planning on price matching or offering discounts for current Xen PV clients but since we will not be touching our Xen PV nodes this is no longer the case and we apologize for those who received this information.
IPv6
We are working on obtaining IPv6 addresses at this time. Due to some confusion with the pricing structure, we have had to return the allocation we received from ARIN because the cost was not in our budget at this time. We are working on obtaining native IPv6 from our data center so we will continue working in this direction to allow our clients to be IPv6 ready. We've also discussed how we will handle the IPv6 for our clients and are still unsure how to proceed with this. The standard for autoconfiguration is a /64 but both software and hardware limitations would make this a difficult task so we may adopt the "standard" option of assigning a number of IPv6 addresses from the same /64 in SolusVM. We will post more information as we are closer to deployment.
Network
As you may know we had a bit of bad luck lately with some network issues, we have taken steps to prevent such incidents from repeating themselves and have setup a backup network for us to manage our hardware in the event our network becomes inaccessible so that we can troubleshoot and resolve the issue. At this time, we have a good idea of the cause of these network outages and are making plans on replacing our copper uplinks with fiber to eliminate the possibility that our hardware adapter is causing issues. In addition to these steps, we are in the process of building a fully redundant network with multiple routers, switches, and plenty of cross-connects (STP, VRRP, iBGP, and all that fun stuff).
Drawbridge
A few Saturdays back, we had some nasty DDoS attacks that was wreaking some havoc on on network causing up to 50% packet loss for our clients. This was a wake-up call for us and we immediately went into action and had a new system in place that same weekend. That system is named "Drawbridge" and it now handles DDoS attacks by automatically null routing target IPs so these attacks no longer impact other clients. At this time we do not offer any DDoS protection but this has been discussed in length and we have been investing hours a day in order to be able to offer some level of protection for our clients which will hopefully be soon. Drawbidge is our current solution to mitigate the problem so that 1 IP does not impact anybody else. We are working on integrating Drawbridge with SolusVM so that clients will receive an informative e-mail when they are the target of such attacks.
Szerda, Máj 30, 2012
