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!

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!

The Friday 6/18/2010 End of the Week Round Up!

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Terry Myers

I wish we could be sitting on the beach, sipping Pina Collates, talking about how awesome Windows is on VPS.NET. Unfortunately the launch didn't happen - not yet at least. I can't even tell you how close Windows is to being ready. Even as a Mac user, I'm ridiculously giddy with excitement thinking of the Windows launch. For those of you who like an ETA, I'm told that Windows WILL be ready to go next week. Again, we're just waiting on hardware.

In other news, we released ClearOS as an OS template choice for users. Clear OS is an operating system that can handle multiple storage solutions, from just the basic storage option all the way up to cloud storage solutions. This means we now have 9 different operating system options with ClearOS, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Elastix, Gentoo, FreeBSD, Slackware, and Turnkey Linux, giving you an extreme ability to setup your own multi-tiered, diverse-location, VPS cluster.

I hate to use this line, but it's true - after MUCH demand we have added the ability to pay yearly through our deposit system. All you need to do is deposit cash into VPS.NET, and we'll credit your account. If you deposit more than $250 at one time, we'll give you an additional 5%, If you don't have $250 laying around, you can deposit less than that; we'll take all the way down to $1, if necessary.

A little bit of a big announcement - we've launched 2 new Salt Lake City zones in an entirely new a datacenter. If you wish to be migrated over to the new zones, there is a tool inside the VPS.NET control panel that will do it automatically for you. More info. on that can be found inside the forum post. These clouds feature completely new hardware, and an improved SAN setup. The new clouds aren't running OnApp 2.0 yet, but that is coming very soon! As a note, the old SLC clouds will be decommissioned June 30th, so it's time to act quick and migrate your VPS.

The final announcement this week is an improved DNS system, which features the ability to set SOA/NS servers, which allows you to completely white label VPS.NET name servers. As well, the new DNS system features real time changes, speeding up propagation and other DNS related issues. The new DNS system should be in place later today, and based off what I've seen, you're probably going to like it... a lot!

We're just hours away from it being the weekend now. This entire summer so far has gone by entirely too fast for me; supposedly as you get older this happens, but I'm having a hard time dealing with it!

It’s Birthday Week at VPS.NET

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Terry Myers

Inside every older person is a younger person - wondering what the hell happened.
- Cora Harvey Armstrong

funny pictures birthday cat can count Its Birthday Week at VPS.NET

There are certain days bartenders look forward to. New Years Eve probably tops the list, followed closely by the Friday after Thanksgiving (At least in the USA) but there's one day that you may not know about. June 3rd; The day of my (Terry!) birthday and the Eve of Nick's birthday. What typically starts out as a fun get away from the office, always turns into an expensive mess. While I at least get to enjoy the benefit of a lower insurance bill thanks to turning 25, Nick doesn't have it so good. He just got older. Granted, he's only 364 days older than me, he's still older and that much slower than me on the basketball court. Both of us however have survived, and thrived, and I'm pretty certain thanks to some enhanced creativity levels, come up with new ideas for VPS.NET! How many of these ideas we actually remember and then decide to be a good idea can certainly be questioned.

Recognize this little guy? We've ordered (I believe) 5,000 of the VPS.NET mascot stress balls. If you want one, the most fun way would be to meet up with us at HostingCon. For those of you who unfortunately won't be able to attend, we're cooking up a way to win one. Probably will involve some sort of fun contest, but it's totally worth it right?

An update on the "Meet the Staff" blog post: we're still looking for some more votes. So far Kody is winning. Based off what I know about Kody, it'd definitely be a fun and interesting interview, but lets see if we can get a few more votes. Give him a little competition!

We've released a new Cloud Linux template, with the release of 5.5 x64. All the versions you're used to (Basic, Apache only, MySQL only, LAMP, LAMP w/ cPanel & ISP Manager) are all there. Go check it out; a lot of users are making the migration from CentOS to Cloud Linux, so it's definitely become a fan favorite here at VPS.NET.

That's all I have for you this week. Definitely keep in touch with us through the VPS.NET Twitter. We enjoy hearing from you, so don't be shy!

This week in VPS.NET

Posted on April 30, 2010 by Terry Myers

As Ditlev struggles to cope with his baby growing up, and Nick recovers from the Dibi Conference (or should I really say his night out with new client, WooThemes.com), I give you the VPS.NET edition of as the world turns.

We're proud to announce that FreeBSD is now available for use with your VPS.NET account. It is currently in beta, however the BSD users out there should certainly appreciate this. I've been a Linux user my entire life on the web, but lately I've been getting the itch to dig into the BSD world. I'll be spending this weekend playing around with it. For those of you who wish to join me, it's available in the Chicago Cloud A location.

We've also launched a new 'report to manager' feature inside each support ticket. If you've experienced extraordinary service (as you should), click the smilie face. We'll give that technician a pat on the back. If for some reason you feel the service wasn't up to the VPS.NET standard, click the frown, and the VPS.NET management team will be immediately notified via a message to each of our Blackberries. This is a critical feature in the maturation of VPS.NET, as it's very important we find out where any service is lacking. I can promise you -- not just because I really dislike being awoken by my Blackberry -- that any issue where the service wasn't up to par will be immediately dealt with. 100% client satisfaction is of the utmost importance at VPS.NET.

As I eluded to earlier VPS.NET Managing Director, Nick Nelson, spent much of the week at the Dibi conference. A client even caught him doing his best European style pose, as you can see here. To go along with conference talk, Ditlev, Nick and myself will be attending HostingCon in July. For any of our web hosts out there, I'd highly recommend checking it out. Ditlev and Nick have both attended for several years in a row now, and always have a good time (both for business and fun!).

As a marketing major (graduate in 1 month!), I wander the web reading the various articles posted on marketing. I saw a terrific post the other day by Six Revisions on "Why Branding Yourself is Important." I think it's relevant to all of us, even if we're not a web host, designer or programmer. Your personal brand determines how people view you, and to experience any sort of success in life requires that you have a good brand.

It is an amazing 85 degrees here in Cleveland, Ohio though. It's time to head outside and play some basketball, especially after my Cleveland Cavaliers advanced in the NBA playoffs over the Chicago Bulls! It's time to bring a championship to Cleveland!