Progress of hardware refresh / upgrades

Hello, I realised yesterday after receiving a ticket where a customer asked what was going on with the VPS specs, that I had not actually posted anything on this announce list about the hardware refresh and related VPS spec upgrades that are ongoing. I have to remedy that now, because to a customer who knows nothing of this upgrade process it just looks like we are selling better spec VPSes to new customers and leaving existing customers to pay inflated prices indefinitely. That means many of you are now going to receive the same information you already know, so sorry about that. Back in July I said that VPS spec upgrades were coming soon: http://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20150713.213922.6b419596.en.html There was more initial delay than I would have liked: http://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20150802.112450.2c7d67f5.en.html …but since September things have been proceeding fairly rapidly and at this point just over 36% of the customer base has been upgraded. I made a wiki page which I update regularly: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Hardware_refresh,_2015-2016 At the moment because of external pressures on which machines must be removed from colo first we've had to be more selective about which customers we offered upgrades to¹, but I think we are quite close (weeks away) to the point where we can just ask the whole remaining customer base who wants to be upgraded, and proceed mostly in order of response. A big down side of doing things this way is that we have many months where existing customers are stuck paying the same price for a lower spec than that which new customers can get, and in many cases hitting a renewal point and paying again for the lower spec. We would love to have been able to just cut over to higher specs in one go. As the majority of customers pick the smallest plan, and the upgrade from 480M to 1,024M is more than double, that would require us to have about double the RAM available immediately and it just wasn't feasible. We have been able to provide pro rata service credit for those finding their new spec more than they need and requesting a downgrade mid-contract. If you have any questions, please have a read of the wiki link above and if not answered there then do let us know. Cheers, Andy ¹ In fact it is more like which customers we force upgrades upon, because the response rate is only about 20%, yet we still need the older machines cleared of customers. -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting