With this new feature, you are now able to schedule a burst of nodes to your VPS for when you need it, and only pay for those nodes on a daily rate of $1 (£1 in UK) per node.

So how does it work ?, simple on your VPS view you now have this new Tab:

Inside it you are able to schedule a “Burst” of nodes for that VPS, there are 2 kinds of bursts, “temporary” and “permanent”

On temporary you can select to add a number of nodes to your VPS at a certain date and time and keep it there for a determined period of days, with this choice, you are charged $1 USD / £1 GBP per day per node you are using extra, at the end of the period those nodes will simply go away.

On permanent, you can schedule your VPS to be upgraded to a certain number of nodes, the nodes will be permanently added to your account and assigned to the VPS, you can at a later date remove them if you wish, those nodes are charged at the standard monthly rates.

Once assigned you are able to quickly view upcoming scheduled upgrades, you can also remove any scheduled upgrades before they occur and not be charged for it, charing only happens when the upgrade runs.

Why this feature one might ask ?, there are many instances when your VPS might need that extra resource boost, a good example for a temporary boost is used on these screenshots, say you have a mailing-list to send to your customers, notifying of something new or a special on your website, it can be a good idea to boost your VPS resources to coincide with the mailing-list so you can ensure your site wont be overloaded when that sudden influx of visitors comes to your website.

As for permanent, if you know you will need more resources from a certain date onwards, you can now schedule your upgrades so your not paying for the period before when you dont yet need it, it’s just piece of mind and another way VPS.NET shows how flexible our system is.

In the near future we will be adding “Recurring Scheduled Bursts”, so you can set temporary boosts on a recurring fashion.

Keep looking for many more great features, we keep working to amaze you.

                          

Not bad when you consider we have not yet ran any advertising on VPS.NET, nor our US Cloud is setup yet (it will be next week)… The VPS.NET team is overjoyed with the response we have got from the current Beta members (150+), everybody seem to love the incredibly easy and fast deployment method, using our “Node Slider”, plus the piece of mind that comes from hosting in the cloud.

And still we have much more to come, so stay tuned and visit often

                          

As such, we have gone back to the drawing board and squeeze every penny and pence we could out of the CFO, and have come up with the following changes:

1 – Double the Mhz per node, from 200Mhz to 400Mhz

By increasing the Mhz we make each node more powerful and capable, a better value on itself.

2 – Lowers the pricing per node.

So yes, not only we doubling the CPU, we are making the cost of each node cheaper as well, who said the VPS Cloud cannot be cheap as chips ? (no, you cannot have chips also)

Despite all these great discounts, we might even floats a few extra discount coupons here and there, just keep your eyes and ears open wide for those as well

                          

Having said that, I’m just writting a small post to show you the Ram available for the Beta period from the UK cloud .. 320GB

Thats way biggest than most people’s Hard Drives, and keep in mind, this is just the beginning, after the beta that number will be in the Terabytes … Yay !!

                          

As I look to my calendar for the 50th time today, I am rushed with a feeling of overjoy with the fact in 10 days we put forward the best Virtual Private Server Cloud ever released, to be poked, tested and abused by it’s Beta Testers, but I am also left with lots of anxiety when I look at all the network graphs, over 10K lines of new code for the back-end (so far, plus another 500k lines of licensed code), hundreds .. no, thousands of man-hours, a truckload of servers and countless spools of fiber cable .. and a whole lot of fun putting it all together.

Since we closed the Beta, we had a few more people “liaison” their way into the Beta program by calling a friend of a friend who knows a friend who can get them in, so by the time we said “No More !!!“, locked the office doors and refused to answer the phone to internal calls, the total Beta Pool stood at close to 100 people!!

… We cant wait

                          

A few interesting fact of the participants:

Location:

As expected, the majority where from the UK & US, but 1/3 are from a wide variety of geo locations.

VPS Experience:

Seeing that VPS.NET is an advanced cloud system, it’s no surprise to see so many Advanced users interested on it, but it’s worth noticing the interest of people who never had a VPS before, a VPS.NET Virtual Private Server ensures those people startup with the best possible system

We are on target to initiate the beta by the end of this month (January), everybody who signed up will receive more information on how to proceed by then.

cheers.

                          

We will start the program in January, participation will be limited to 50 users so make sure to register now for a better chance of a spot

You can enroll at this page http://vps.net/signup-for-beta-testing/

There are the usual requirements (listed on the signup page), basically acknowledgment that the Beta system is not to be used for abuse, but above all, we need participants who can give us lots of feedback, VPS experience is not a must, we are hoping for all levels of experience, from those who never used a VPS and can give us feedback on the intuitiveness of the system, to those who can compile a VPS Kernel while taking a shower and eating a hot dog (now that’s muti-tasking)

                          

That is usually followed by “yes .. but where is the actual cloud ?” .. and then my job just got harder.

Thanks to many Marketing Departments the web world over, this is how people see a “Cloud” System

Just a harmless cloud, living on this magical hyperspace world, an intangible object of mystery and awe .. with unlimited resources and power .. accessible only to those mega rich corporation and the smartest of sysadmins.

Fortunately the reality is a bit more down to earth, a cloud looks a little bit more like this:

Yes, sorry to crush your dreams, but the vps cloud really is a mega collection of servers and network storage, man made physical things that can be touched by a human at ground level.

So what is this technology different and ground breaking ? what makes our VPS Cloud so great ?, Simple .. instead of having 1000 individual servers, each housing 20 or 30 individual VPS’s who are limited by the server they reside on, we have one massive VPS cloud, with the combined power of 1000 servers that can be utilized to deploy VPS’s in seconds that are amazingly scalable, not bounded by a single server limitations and can be self healed in case of disaster in less than 1 minute.

In a regular VPS setup, you are offered this:

Basically you are purchasing a fixed % of a single server, lets look at a theoretical scenario, if the VPS provider allows 20 VPS’s per server you get: * 5% Of the memory (Ram) * 5% Of the HD Space * 5% of the CPU * X Amount of traffic

But that wont stop there, many VPS providers sell the ability to “Burst” on such environment .. and it’s sold as a “good” thing, except for the other people on the server, when you need to “Burst” .. the resources need to come off the other people’s 5% .. you might not care if you are the one bursting, but what if somebody else is bursting on your machine ? ..

Plus there is overselling, yes, it is possible on a VPS and widely done so by budget providers, once again, it will take away from your expected 5%.

Keep in mind my scenario is not a generalization, some VPS providers have a better offering than others, allot wont oversell, but in the end the limitations of this single server setup are the same for most all.

And last, if the server goes down, so go all the VPS’s inside it, a lengthy recovery process then follows.

The VPS.net Cloud works a little different, instead of a server we have a much more complex setup:

It’s a huge array of cabinets full of servers, al in unisync with each others, sharing a resource pool (alias, the VPS Cloud) and split into groups depending on their function, this my friends, is our VPS Cloud.

In this environment, the vps is deployed across the VPS Cloud, utilizing resources from different sources, it also allows to scale almost instantly (less than 30 seconds in most cases) to sizes larger than most providers dedicated server offerings, it also allows for the creme de la creme .. Self Healing in less than 1 minute.

Our major feature will also be, NO Over-selling .. once somebody buys those resources, they are taken away from the VPS Cloud availability pool, even Hard Disk space is not oversold .. you truly get what you pay for ..

How it’s done is a combination of technical ingenuity and our kick-ass back-end software, exclusive to VPS.net .. this is what really differentiates us from a regular vps provider ..

But the discussion into our backend software and it’s capabilities is one for another blog post, …. stay tuned more more details on days to come

                          

So as such, time has come to start a blog, to keep everybody informed on the latest and greatest features we are working on for the VPS Cloud, as such, during the upcoming days and weeks, we will post details on the new website, the Cloud features, the user interface, and much more.

VPS.net is a new brand by that great hosting outfit, the UK2 Group, owners of 10TB, UK2.NET, Midphase, etc ..

So keep checking this page every day (or even several times a day, things are moving fast), we expect to release VPS.net LIVE on January 31st, but will be looking for beta testers in the upcoming few weeks