Transcript of the 12/20/2012 Townhall

Thank you for attending our townhall. We will begin shortly. Please feel free to submit any questions you have and at the start of the townhall we will answer them.
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
We will be starting the town hall in a couple of minutes
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
We would like to welcome you this, our second annual town hall. First a bit of housekeeping. The format of this will be a quick review of the year, what we have upcoming for 2013, and followed by any Q&A. Feel free to put a comment at any time and we will answer them at the end of the session.
As 2012 is closing to an end its been a good year for VPS.net. We started off the year with the full introduction of our HP SANS’s improving uptime and performance for all the upgraded clouds.
We also have expanded our reach across the globe with addition of new locations taking our global reach to 20 unique locations, making us the most geographically diverse cloud provider.
With this we have seen a double digit growth across VPS.net a whole, bucking the current economic trends putting us in a good place for 2013.
We are however not happy just sitting on our laurels and have a number of service enhancements coming up in 2013, which will be available for all users.
In the first few weeks of Jan we will be launching our new bandwidth nodes allowing you to scale up just the bandwidth on your VPS as required without having to purchase extra nodes.
We will be also rolling out full IPv6 support within Q1 across all of our core locations, with native support in our control panel
We also are planning on extending our clone and deploy technology which currently allows you to clone your VPS on the same cloud. The new version will allow you to clone the VPS on to a remote cloud as well as adding the ability to migrate your data, to another cloud/location, at your own convince. This is currently on final internal beta testing
Also we will be further extending this to allow you to download and upload your own VPS images to avoid vendor lockin. Its your data, your are free to do with it what you want!
This are our plans for just Q1 of 2013, and we have many other great add-ons and service enhancements for the remaining quarters of 2013.
As always we love to hear if you have any idea of what you think we should be doing, or enhancements we should be making to the service. Customers are the reason we get up in the morning, and we want to keep them at the center of our little cloud hosting world.
OK Thats covers what we have done over the last year, and what we are planning on doing on the first 3 months of 2013. Now on to viewers questions
Jake :
Will there be any new locations added to the network in 2013?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Yes we are planning on extending to new locations, as well as upgrading some of our new locations. We also have some major upgrades going into London in Q1 that will give users faster CPU’s, and much faster disks using new 3Par SANS
Matty :
Any news on when we will have IPv6 available?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
We are aiming to have our core locations fully supporting it (via the control panel) in Q1. Currently London and SLC can have manually allocations issued and used. If you want to take advantage of that please email support@vps.net and one of the network techs will be able to give you a block
Mathieu :
Has there been any consideration to different tiered storage platforms?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Yes. Thats definitely on our 2013 roadmap and the new 3Par/HP SANS we are rolling out will allow us to sell tiered storage with minimal fuss. IF you have any exact requirements or would like any more technical details do please feel free to email me directly on rghf@vps.net
Steve :
What happened to the South African datacenter location?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
We have an agreement in principal with a provider but it fell through as we couldn’t agree exact terms. We want to make sure that any service we take from a datacenter matches our requirements. It is however on our 2013 roadmap as we do have a number of requests for it
Jeff :
What does that mean? Can we download the VPS image & use it as an in-house VM for testing?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Thats the general idea! Exact specs and support will be announced at a later time but we will allow people to move data in and out. We will also be looking to extend that further to allow people to send us hard disks or encrypted data, but again still working out the finer (legal) points of that
Jeff :
Any plans to offer load balancers or firewalls?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Yes. One of our sister brands has that in testing. Once they have completed their rollout we will use their experience to roll it out to our platform as well
Steve :
Are we able to request a new application be added to the Hosted Apps?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Sure let us know (mgmt@vps.net) what you are looking for and we will see what we can do.
Evan :
Will you be expanding to Toronto?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
If there is enough demand of course! Best to register your interest with us and we can then go from there.
Mathieu :
How does VPS.net plan to take on competitors with many lowering pricing? Wil VPS.net lower the pricing at all?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
We do keep an eye on the market and are aware of commercial pressures. Some of that is price, some of that is the value added features of the product and some is the entire customer experience around that product.
Jeff :
Do you know what the rough timeframe is for rolling out load balancers / firewalls?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
I would like to think Q2/Q3 2013 but again there are no guarantees on that.
Jason :
Will we see any changes in managed support offerings in 2013?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
I would be interested in hearing what you would like to see, as currently we do offer a range of managed support options ranging from simple one time jobs, through to full 24×7 managed support. Feel free to drop me a line atrghf@vps.net and I will be happy to have a chat about it
Stuart :
Linux kernel updates have caused problems in the past on reboot, has this been addressed?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Taking the number of OS templates/kernels we can potentially support the answer has to be one of “maybe”. Best to email support@vps.net direct on that and they will be able to drill down to an exact answer for your OS, cloud and kernel combination
Steve :
Is there a chance we will be able to export images to different clouds/locations in the future?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Sure that will be a fairly easy extension of the Clone and Deploy tech. I will pass that over to our devs to add to the roadmap/rollout plan
Paul :
I have concerns about system stability. Issues where you guys have a problem, turn something off then all our systems could be down for days. System stability from VPS has been shocking this year.
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Generally our stability has been vastly improved over the last year so I would like to believe that sort of experience is definitely a thing of the past, however as I said above we do focus on our customers. As such I would like to look at this in depth for you and speak to you as appropriate. If you could drop some details such as ticket numbers and background to rghf@vps.net then I will look into it and get back to you as quickly as possible.
Steve:
I’d really like to see a better failover option. There is DNS failover, but what about automatic failover to a different cloud? I know no other provider offers this so it would be amazing to see at VPS.net
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
All I can say currently is we are working on something. We’ve got 2 out of 3 of the puzzle pieces in place. We are just working on the last one
Jeff :
I agree with Steve’s comment about failover. I’d also like to see some tools to address issues such as high-availability.
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
See my last reply, but yes definitely going to have some great failover stuff coming up
Matty :
I’d just like to say well done to you guys! and you deserve to give yourself a pat on the back There have been some vast improvements all around since the first town hall.
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Thanks! Its a team effort and we all aim to give our best and hoping 2013 brings even more great customer service
Edy :
Any plan to open up a location in Jakarta, Indonesia? There’s a huge potential market here.
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
As above. Best to email us and let us know you are interested. The more people who say they want a location, the easier it is for us to open one there!
John :
Are you guys planning to revist the managed support options? Like offering different full management plans, etc?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Managed support means different things to different people. We offer what we feel is a decent spread of support options for all pockets. If however there is demand for something that we aren’t providing then we would love to hear about it. Best to drop us a line (mgmt@vps.net) and happy to discuss it and potentially do something custom.
Grant :
Any chance of making billing a 24/7 department? It’s been a problem when I’ve had a billing issue to have to wait longer than 24 hours for a response.
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Billing isn’t traditionally a 24×7 service offered by any service industry. Also taking the number of tickets we see its hard to justify having someone sitting there twiddling their thumbs for half the time. That said we do now allow support access to un-spending overdue account on a per case basis which is generally the most urgent type of billing issue that comes up.
Eric :
Will we be seeing any changes in the cloud hosting? It feels like it’s been neglected compared to the other services, and I haven’t seen anything mentioned for it in 2013.
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Yes. We’ve recently rolled out a number of new cloud hosting (shared hosting) locations across our clouds and there are some service enhancements/cleanups scheduled over the course of 2013.
Steve :
Which cloud location is the biggest?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
London has the most clouds and is up to LON-K currently
John :
Are there any plans to offer more selection on the cloudhosting packages? Or will you still be sticking with the 3 for 2013?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
The product is aimed at people who don’t quite know what they need, hence the simple 3 tiers. That said again if there is a demand for a more flexible offering its something we could easily accommodate.
Grant :
Thanks for your prompt reply and help! 🙂
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
You’re welcome
Mathieu :
I want to say Vlad is a tremendous help at answering complaints but I understand the company is growing. Will VPS.net maintain the same level of openness as it currently has?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Of course. I’m the person that dictates how open we are and I fundamentally believe that if you aren’t transparent its going to come back to bite you.
John :
Do you know what other potential locations we might be seeing for 2013?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director)::
Not currently, but I would expect between 1 and 5.
Mathieu :
Will we see the forum return at any point?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
We make sure that we can be contacted (twitter,facebook,getsatisfaction). The forum as it was, was a ghost town. Its a catch-22 of do we have a dead forum that doesn’t do reputation any good or try to encourage growth, when there are a number of other methods. The forum is great for customer to customer communication but it needs someone to spearhead that.
John :
What steps is VPS taking to help with IPv4 Exhaustion? Will it affect us at all any time soon?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Customers won’t find any major impact day to day, and it is something that we are tackling. The unfortunate position is that until everyone has native IPv6 support in their internet connection, and use it, we won’t be able to move to a pure IPv6 environment. If we could move to it tomorrow it would solve a number of issues but there is a general lack of apathy in the industry (and we are just as guilty of this as other companies) to make the move to pure IPv6
Emily :
I represent a non-profit organization and I appreciate the discount VPS.net offers. Will we see any other benefits for organizations like mine?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
We deal with non-profits on a case by case basis. If you would like to discuss you exact situation and how we can work together further please do feel free to email us onmgmt@vps.net
Ian :
Will you be at any of the DrupalCamps or DrupalCon?
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
We’ve not yet fully decided on our 2013 conference schedule, but it was my favourite conference of last year.
Rus Foster (VPS.net Managing Director):
Once again thanks for all your time and thanks for joining us!