Testing new servers in US & NL.

Some of you know that we've been testing new servers at US & NL lately, in order to replace the CSB 1Gbps plans, and make them official part of PM offerings under PM branding and software.

We've gotten far in the testing, and dug really deep. Results are curious to say the least in some regards.

NL will be provisioned as 1Gbps replacements, now with Leaseweb servers, but in future also with other providers. They are capable of sustaining good speeds, and now that we have debugged the hardware (Note: Do not buy into HPs servers, they ultimately suck at twice to triple the price of "cheapo weak", and still uses the same "cheapo weak" HW for the most part) we can start phasing those in.

In NL, the servers come with 100Tb traffic limit in+out, you know Leaseweb is a bit like that, they like to charge also for inbound traffic. 2nd provider we will be using at somepoint in future at NL does not charge for inbound traffic :) The 2nd provider does cost quite a bit more upfront tho (3x price tag on day 0, while monthly remains the same).

These servers are big so we will be provisioning a lot more accounts per server, but the difference in performance does not exist as the HDDs are way more capable with double IO operations per second compared to current CSB 1Gbps servers. With the better network and traffic allowance these servers will do a lot more traffic per user than before, expecting to double up! Infact, these servers should be for all practical means be unmetered, we do not expect full allowment to be used.

Of course, the production will reveal the real capability of these servers, but those are our assumptions and if these will not serve the users well we will of course go back to current servers or do something else to bump up the quality.

We will also revamp the 1Gbps services to lower users per server quantity in future, by going to offer only a bit larger plans.

 

US Servers

The US 1Gbps servers do not work as 1Gbps at all. We managed only to achieve ~40M/s sustained speed, therefore no 1Gbps unmetered plans in US. These are truly unmetered servers, but the network speed also shows this with low sustained and burst speeds.

Our assumption is that users, meaning you, would not be satisfied with that low peaks on 1Gbps.

But it's not all bad, despite the intended 100Mbps servers not being available anymore at US, we will be using these to deliver 2009+ 100Mbps services, with actually a bit more than 100Mbps allocated per current server replacement of resources. We have to provision multiple servers worth on these servers via virtualization, but the end result should still perform as expected, and you should receive same performance level as currently, with the difference that peaks are higher.

As with the NL servers, if these do not serve you well, we will abandon these servers and go back solely to our current french servers.

As you probably know the US 2009+ plans came available and then abruptly became unavailable as the provider led us to believe the offer was not a one time deal but something we could get a lot of, so we were unable to acquire new servers.

These servers being bigger with more BW, larger faster HDDs etc. should work just nicely for US 100Mbps services and we can begin rolling out US 2009+ subscriptions again during next week.

 

To celebrate this

We will be soon updating the specials page with some really neat offerings! ;) Expect the page to be updated by next wednesday.

Not only that but we are planning a budget VPS based on the new US servers as well :)



Friday, November 26, 2010

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