Hardware upgrades complete, on to other improvements

Hello, I'm pleased to say that the hardware upgrades were completed on 1st April 2016. That means every single BitFolk customer was moved from an older piece of hardware to a new one, and in the process gained some extra memory and an extra virtual CPU core. The swap provision was standardised to a 1GiB xvdb device with a single swap partition on it. If you previously had a smaller swap device (480M customers had 480M swap) or no swap device at all (older accounts had a swap *file* on their root filesystem) then you may wish to check if there is some extra swap space you could be using: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Hardware_refresh,_2015-2016#Making_use_of_th… The higher specs of the new hardware allowed the total server count to reduce to 64% of what it was. Also, more importantly, the power usage is now at approximately 24% of what it was before. This should result in a big saving in hosting fees which are entirely scaled by power consumption, and represent BitFolk's biggest outgoing. I will be taking a couple of months to see how things balance out financially and to allow for some other developments out of my control¹, but then I will be seeing if I can reduce prices a little and/or introduce a cheaper 512M memory VPS package. I am now able to focus on some other areas that need attention. Those of you who have experienced refused connections to the apt-cacher² will be pleased to know that this has now been put behind a high availability proxy so those should be a thing of the past. Additionally I have moved the spamd³ service behind there and will soon do the same with the entropy⁴ service. These services had previously either not been redundant at all (apt-cacher) or had merely been multiple hosts behind one proxy (spamd, entropy) thus having the proxy as a single point of failure. I've put some work into deploying a new pair of proxies with a VRRP floating IP (and IPv6) so these services should also now withstand the loss of one of the proxies. As a side benefit that now means that we could sell you a floating IP service, where you could run a command (or, more realistically, have keepalived or some other monitoring software run a command) to float an IPv4 and an IPv6 /64 between two or more of your VPSes. Let me know if you would be interested in that. Other areas I know are desperately in need of attention: - Need to look into moving to pvgrub as a booting method. Current use of pygrub really mandates GRUB 1.x-style /boot/grub/menu.lst while most distributions are moving to GRUB 2.x /boot/grub/grub.cfg. The lengths we need to go to in order to force support of older GRUB are getting to be too much, but I would rather skip over pygrub enhancements that support GRUB 2.x and move straight to pvgrub. For those unaware of the difference, pygrub is a Python script that runs as root in BitFolk's host machines in order to parse boot instructions from your block devices. This has security implications as you can probably imagine. pvgrub on the other hand is a Xen-compatible build of the actual GRUB that is booted as a virtual machine as you, and then that tries to boot. This is much safer, and much more reliable since it actually *is* the real GRUB bootloader rather than a script that tries to mimim its behaviour. - Need to modernise Nagios monitoring. BitFolk's Nagios is now really too long in the tooth, is starting to have problems doing modern TLS connections for example. I am looking at replacing it with Icinga, and also hope for slightly more customer control over what is monitored (i.e. giving you access to some form of interface that can make changes, instead of requesting all changes by support ticket). Initially it just has to work though, because I rely on it for my own monitoring. - Support for European bank accounts in GoCardless (Direct Debit). I know there are few customers with Euro bank accounts who are grudgingly using PayPal subscription only because BitFolk's GoCardless integration doesn't yet support them, event hough GoCardless itself does. - Support for recurring payments with Stripe (credit/debit cards). BitFolk payments through Stripe are currently only possible as one-off payments and I know there are some who would prefer to have Stripe store their card details and let BitFolk just take a regular scheduled payment. - Everything else that is in https://tools.bitfolk.com/tracker/ :) There's far more things to work on than there is time to do it in, but there should be some progress at least. Thanks for your patience! Comments and insight on future direction are welcome. Cheers, Andy ¹ Our colo provider is soon going to be changing their method of power monitoring and will likely put prices up at the same time ² https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Apt-cacher ³ https://bitfolk.com/customer_information.html#toc_2_SpamAssassin ⁴ https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Entropy#BitFolk.27s_entropy_service -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting