2010 Weekly Update

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Terry Myers

It appears we meet again newsletter! Luckily for you, readership rates are up, and unsubscribe rates are down. This means that the boss is happy, and Terry is able to keep his job for at least another week. Hopefully you guys keep reading, and don’t unsubscribe, otherwise I could be in some serious trouble!

Fantasy Football
All work and no play makes you a dull boy. That’s why we’ve setup a VPS.NET fantasy football league at Yahoo. There are no prizes other than bragging rights, and it’s purely for fun. Nick and I are both big into the NFL, so we’re definitely going to be talking some serious smack talk through Twitter the entire season. I hope to see some of y’all join in with us!

Support Stats
I thought it’d be fun to go over some statistics, and fill you in on the work load our guys have. I’ve honestly never seen a support team as dedicated and as hard working as the one we have now. This week alone they handled over 500 support tickets, while averaging a response time just a shy over 15 minutes and an overall resolution time below 1 hour.

Conferences
The 2010 VPS.NET summer conference tour is nearing an end. This week Nick and Ditlev attended DrupalCon in Copenhagen, Denmark, where we were a leading sponsor. From the pictures, and messages I’ve received, it appears to have been a great success and extremely fun time. Not worry - if you haven’t had a chance to meet up with us yet, we’ll be at cPanelConf in Houston, Texas October 4th-6th. I was also told just yesterday that we’ll be at DrupalCon Chicago March 7th-10th 2011. Chicago is in my top 5 favorite cities list, so you definitely don’t want to miss it!

Affiliate & Reseller Programs
VPS.NET has two programs that are absolutely awesome out there for you to add an additional revenue stream to your online presence. Our affiliate program pays out $85 for each referral you send to VPS.NET. Our reseller program allows you to add a recurring revenue stream to your business, without any up front investment. If you’re interested in either, you can contact me at terry@vps.net and we can get you started right away!

VPS.NET 8/20/2010 Weekly Update

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Terry Myers

It seems like just yesterday that I took over writing the newsletter for Nick. Apparently we’re already on week 3. Here in Ohio the children are heading back to school, the leaves are changing colors, and unfortunately the days just aren’t quite as long anymore. Soon enough I’ll find myself digging out of several feet of wonderful lake effect snow, wishing it was summer again. The changing seasons makes life fun though, right?

Introducing JumpBox
VPS.NET has partnered with JumpBox to provide their industry leading software. JumpBox allows you to easily and quickly install over 55 different open source ready to use applications, such as Nagios, phpBB & Redmine. JumpBox will be available on all future clouds. As a result of our partnership with JumpBox, Turnkey Linux will not be available on new clouds.

Recover your Deleted VPS
A new feature that we’ve recently introduced is the ability to recover deleted servers. After deleting a VPS, you now have 48 hours to “recover” the VPS before it is permanently deleted. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had clients contact us because they mistakenly deleted the wrong VPS, so I expect this will likely be one of the most used features in the VPS.NET control panel, though I’m also sure there probably won’t be too many people who admit to using it. This new feature will be rolled out early next week, and comes at absolutely no charge to you. No resource usage, no fees - absolutely free!

SLC SAN 2.0 Updates
Last week I promised we’d have the new SAN 2.0 clouds up and running in our Salt Lake City location. They’re, unfortunately, not available yet. Not to worry - the hardware is running great, and there’s no problems there, we’re simply waiting on a few things to fall in line on the software side. We’re hoping that gets finished up soon; as soon as the clouds are deemed ready, we’ll have them made available to all of you.

DrupalCon
VPS.NET is a proud platinum sponsor of DrupalCon, which occurs next week (August 23rd-27th). Both Nick Nelson and Ditlev Bredahl from VPS.NET will be in attendance. Since I’m not able to attend, I’m hoping there’s a few VPS.NET customers out there who will be able to keep an eye on them!

I think that’s all for us folks. Make sure to follow the VPS.NET Twitter, and keep in touch. If you do anything crazy this weekend, make sure to take some pictures and share ‘em with us!

New Feature: Restore Deleted VMs

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Terry Myers

Ever mistakenly deleted the wrong VPS? It's a serious mistake that all of us have done before. It's never fun, but we've made it considerably easier to recover with our latest VPS.NET feature. If you delete a VPS, you now have 48 hours to recover it before it is permanently deleted. Late night caffeine filled mistakes are no more!

The recovery time for a deleted VPS takes just as long as creating a new VPS. There's no support tickets required; it's all entirely automated, making things totally easy for you, and removing any chance for embarrassment.

Now the coolest part of all of this (and my favorite when introducing a new feature) is there is absolutely no charge for using the recovery service. No charge for making it available, and definitely no charge if/when you need to use it. All of it's totally free.

Before you go off and delete an in-use VPS, I do have to warn you that it hasn't been totally rolled out. We expect to have it available to all VPS.NET customers by the start of next week.

VPS.NET 8/13/2010 Weekly update

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Terry Myers

Happy Friday the 13th everyone! Hopefully no one has had a run in with a man wearing a mask - I’ve seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly. Not only is today Friday the 13th, but today was also the kick off of (American) Football for me, as I was able to watch a friend’s son play in a scrimmage for the freshmen football team this morning. It’s always enjoyable to watch some of these young athletes go out there and give it their all for the game. I was able to snap a quick picture of an attempted screen pass. Unfortunately the throw ended up just a little bit short, but they still won 14-0!

Additional SAN 2.0 Locations
Our guys at the DC have been busy this past week, building out two additional clouds located in our Salt Lake City datacenter. These two new clouds feature our new SAN 2.0 infrastructure. The benefit to these are there are redundant SANs in place for each cloud, meaning your data is being held in multiple locations. If one of the SANs goes down, the other will simply take over and you’ll experience no downtime. The migration utility isn’t quite ready, but we’ll have one released shortly so you can move your data seamlessly from the old clouds to the new SAN 2.0 clouds. The move will however require a new IP address for your VPS. We’ll have SAN 2.0 clouds available in Atlanta and Chicago in the next two weeks, as long as there are no delays.

The new SAN 2.0 clouds are all capable of supporting Windows, so at launch time Windows will be available in all 4 of our current locations.

DrupalCon Invites
Are you in the Copenhagen, Denmark area and wish to attend DrupalCon? VPS.NET is a leading sponsor for DrupalCon, and has been given the ability to extend 5 DrupalCon invites. If you’d like to attend, send Nick an email at nick@vps.net and we’ll get an invite out to you. These are extremely limited though, so it will be done on a first come first serve basis.

VPS.NET CPanel Plugin
This one might’ve slipped through the cracks if you don’t follow the forum often, but we’ve released a cPanel plugin that allows you to use our free and fully redundant DNS system with cPanel. It requires no configuration changes beyond changing your DNS server. The advantage to using the VPS.NET DNS servers is it’s faster, having locations in 13 cities, extremely redundant, DDOS protected and reduces resource consumption on your server.

That’s all for VPS.NET this week. Enjoy the weekend -- I’ll be attending a local racing event hosted by VPS.NET client, DriftCleveland.Com. Hopefully y’all (Nick got me hooked on the word) are able to get outside and do something just as fun!

VPS.NET 8/6/2010 Weekly Update

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Terry Myers

VPS.NET at Conferences

I think all of us are finally recovered from HostingCon, which was a great time and an ever great success. We had a several hundred people stop by the VPS.NET booth, and we certainly had an entertaining time with our money machine. It was a great time meeting up with a lot of the vendors that make VPS.NET what it is, and we were able to kick off some discussions which should lead to some even greater things. You can check out some pictures of the UK2Group staff at the blog. Following up HostingCon in our conference schedule is DrupalCon in Copenhagen, Denmark starting August 23rd, and cPanelCon in Houston, Texas October 6th. Stop by and visit us!

Windows & SAN 2.0 Testing

We’ve kicked off testing for Windows on VPS.NET. I actually got a chance to personally play around with it the other day and it’s looking remarkably stable already. I know the demand for it is high out there, so we’re working on getting it in your hands as soon as possible. Just as important, we’ve also started testing the new SAN configuration. This new configuration creates an additional layer of redundancy by having two SAN units store your data, instead of a single SAN. The way it works is there will be one SAN actively working, with another having all the data synced to it. If the active SAN experiences a problem, the backup will take over without any downtime to your VPS. If you’d like to help us test either out, send Nick an email at nick@vps.net and we’ll get you access to the new cloud.

DNS & API changes

We’ve redesigned the DNS interface, which should make things much easier for all of you. It’s been simplified and made dummy proof (which is great for me); I think everyone will like the changes. Along with the design change, we’ve also modified the API, so it now supports all the DNS functions including the use of DNS templates.

World Cup Winner

After calculating out all the stats, we’re proud to announce the winner of the World Cup challenge. Alberto Mesas has won, earning himself 3 free nodes. Hope you enjoy the free nodes! For those of you who enjoyed the world cup challenge, I encourage you to join us in the American Fantasy Football Challenge. We’re still looking to see if we have enough interest to start a league, so stop by the forum and let us know you’re in!

That’s all for VPS.NET this week. Hope everyone enjoys the “return of the weekly newsletter.” We should have some more exciting news next week to announce, so stay tuned, and keep in touch with us on the VPS.NET forum!