After yet another meeting today, we've finally ironed out some things and want to provide everybody with some updates on current happenings as well as our plans for future events (some very soon, some a little ways away).
Network Outages and Resolution
First off, we want to address the network outages we've experienced in the past, yes all of them. Every single outage was a result of an issue with our BGP sessions, we still don't know why or how, all we know is that our data center's routers would not establish a connection so our IPs were not being announced to the world.
After countless attempts to fix this, we finally decided to drop BGP all together and stick to very basic (and very reliable) static routes for our networks. The downside to this is that we no longer have the automated Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) mitigation like before but we are actively testing a replacement and currently have this running on the network so this will hopefully be a thing of the past also.
We are still working on getting full network redundancy back in place and will be working on our backup router tomorrow, once this is complete and stable we will release an official Reason For Outage (RFO) for the January outage and provide more specifics. We also have 2 new routers being shipped later this month to offer us more options to work with.
We will be performing network maintenance on February 12th while on-site. Downtime is expected to be less than 1 minute while we move cables around.
Pro-rated Billing
In December we started implementing pro-rated billing, after over a month of using this setup we took a look at the numbers and realized this was hurting us more than helping us so we have switched back to our original setup but we've enabled "sign-up anniversaries" which means the first service you order will mark your anniversary, subsequent orders will be set to that date so all invoices will be due on one day which makes accounting easier for us and our clients. If you order an O128 plan on February 11th for a year then all future orders will also be on the 11th (monthly will be on the 11th for each month while yearly will be on the 11th for the current month for the following year). This is only for new orders, current clients will not be impacted by this change.
DDOS Protection and 3rd Data center
Back on to the topic of DDOS protection, originally we were offering it as an add-on, but we've decided that we will be putting a much bigger focus on this and will be shipping out a new OpenVZ node tomorrow (2/12) to CNServers in Portland, OR which is our current DDOS protection provider for our Tampa location that we utilize.
All current DDOS Protected OpenVZ clients will be migrated to our new node once it is up and running to allow complete isolation from other services. This will also significantly reduce the latency clients are currently experiencing.
There will be no change to any DDOS Protected cPanel or KVM plans at this time.
We will be discontinuing our DDOS Protected KVM services and will be making some changes to our OpenVZ plans to better fit the new location. Current OpenVZ clients will not be impacted and will be able to switch to the new plans if they wish to. My advice to any clients interested in purchasing one of our OpenVZ plans at DDOSProtect.Us is to do it now before the new node arrives next week because some plans will no longer be offered and the ones that will be will have different resources.
We will also be offering DDOS proxy services for domains for those who have a specific website elsewhere that they wish to protect from DDOS attacks at a fraction of the price that others are advertising.
Our Denver data center will benefit from the lower latency of this location so we plan to have a private network setup between Denver and Portland to provide better service to our clients who wish to host in Denver bu t with DDOS protection.
We expect this to be up and running by the last week of February. We are uncertain how we will be doing this migration of current OpenVZ clients and how the tunnels will be setup for cPanel and KVM clients so there will most likely be an outage while this is configured. We will contact these clients individually with more details as we get closer to bringing the node online.
Server Name Changes
While this has very little impact on 99% of our clients, we felt it was best to include this in the e-mail to avoid confusion later on. With the rapid expansion outside of Florida, we will be making some changes to our naming convention for our servers to make them easier to identify at first glance. Our new naming convention will include the State and function in the name. Again, this will have no impact on your services, just th e way we identify nodes.
Denver Data center
We've been receiving a lot of good reviews for our newest location and are very pleased with how it is shaping up. Joe will be taking a trip to Denver next week for unrelated matters but will be stopping in to personally take a look at the facility and meet the staff there sometime during his trip. Support response times may also be longer for the week of February 18th while Joe is in Denver.
Atlanta Data center
Yup, you've read it right. We're looking at a 4th location already! CNServers is expected to open an Atlanta location by March and, as we said before, our new focus on DDOS Protection has brought us to look for an East Coast location also to meet the needs of all of our clients. This also means we plan to setup a private network between Atlanta and Tampa so our Tampa clients can benefit from low latency DDOS protection. There is no ETA on when we expect to do this and will most likely depend on how well our new Portland location performs.
Possible E-mail Delivery Issues
Lastly, we want to include this in this e-mail to explain why some of you may have received duplicates of this e-mail. Our system has been having frequent timeouts when performing batch processes and we expect that sending a mass e-mail to all of our active clients will be no different. If you are receiving duplicate e-mails, we apologize. You may delete any other e-mails with the same subject as they are just duplicates with no additional information.
Thank you all for all of your continued support. We have been busting our backs trying to give you the hosting experience you deserve at an affordable rate and hope that all of these steps we've taken are in the right di rection to meeting your expectations of us. Joe has been trying to be more active on our Twitter (@SecureDragonLLC) so be sure to follow him for random updates on various happenings around here.
-The Secure Dragon Staff-
