[bitfolk] VPS spec upgrades coming soon

Hello, TL;DR: This email is purely informational and there's no need for you to take any action as a result of it. The base VPS memory will go from 480M to 1,024M soon, and the incremental upgrade will go from 240M to 256M, with the prices remaining the same for those line items. It will take some time (months) for this to be phased in. You don't need to do anything at present. Not Long Enough, Give Me More Info To Read: Ideally I wanted to avoid saying anything about this until it had started affecting csutomers, but I'd already given some time estimates to a few people ("somewhere around the first week of July"). Now there's been a few delays and some would be left wondering what is going on, so I thought I better say something. Clearly an upgrade of VPS specs has been well overdue for ages. In June, hardware orders were made and this process is now under way. It's not quite as simple as just buying "the same, but new". The current BitFolk customer base is spread across 9 servers, and every single one of them is basically not upgradeable at this stage. I don't really want to replace them with 9 new ones, so a little more scalability is required. The bottleneck at present is either IOPs or CPU. IOPs is the hardest one to solve so to increase scalability, new hardware must be SSD-only. That's obviously really expensive, so this is not something I want to get wrong. There was quite a long lead time on the hardware I'd selected. I felt it was worth the wait because the motherboard and CPU have a really good bang per Watt factor, and the predominant cost for BitFolk is power. That's now arrived, is in colo, and is being worked on, so hopefully won't be as much of an issue in future. The delaying issue now is software. There's a bunch of changes in both Debian¹ and Xen² which I need to account for in BitFolk's own software infrastructure. Once that's progressed a bit more I will need to start putting BitFolk's own infrastructure VMs on the new hardware to give things a bit more of a soak test³. Around that time I will also be talking to those I have already spoken to about this—and seeking some more volunteers—to have their VPSes moved to the new hardware. There's no need to contact me now to volunteer. I have to select the most suitable customers for this and then ask them. A key thing I need to discover is when the CPU and IOPs will run out for this specification. For that reason the initial candidates will have only the base amount of RAM (1G), so that the maximum number of them can be packed on, and only the base amount of storage (10G), again so hopefully that doesn't run out before another limit is reached. For some sense of comparison, the 3 busiest current servers look something like this: Name | # VPSes | RAM used | Storage used ----------+---------+----------+------------- bellini | 74 | 47G | 2.71T president | 60 | 45G | 2.71T sol | 50 | 47G | 1.69T The new hardware has 1.6T of usable SSD per box, and I want to fit more customers on each, so obviously I have to start with low storage VPSes first if I don't want storage to run out first. Obviously SSD storage costs vastly more than HDD storage. Not very many BitFolk customers order more storage, but it is unclear at this stage if I can continue to offer additional (SSD-backed) storage for the same price as the current HDD-backed storage. I do not want to put both HDDs and SSDs into the same hosts, so I want to avoid selling a mixture. I will know more once I've found out where the CPU and IOPs limits lie. The backup storage that is currently sold at the same price as live storage is going to remain on HDD and so will remain at the same price as now (or cheaper), whatever the case. Even after I am satisfied that the setup is working well, and the limits have been found, still I can't just move absolutely anyone in any order. The next priority will be to decommission the most power-hungry hosts. By this stage I will be continually ordering and commissioning new hardware and then migrating customers to it. During this time, as hosts are emptied, it will be possible to increase the RAM of some customers without moving them. Eventually however it will be necessary for every customer to have their VPS moved between hosts because existing hardware probably run around 3 to 4 times as power hungry than new hardware that should support more customers per box. So, there is no need for you to take any action at this time, other than to ask any questions you may have. I will be in touch with you directly once it is time for anything to happen. I just wanted to let you know what was going on, and to reassure those who I've already spoken to that I have not forgotten about this! The first set of hardware is bought already, the money is spent, and having both new and older hardware live is costing BitFolk even more money, so it is definitely going ahead. :) Cheers, Andy ¹ Debian jessie comes with systemd. I have to make sure I'm comfortable with this and that other various bits of software are integrated. I use Puppet for config management. Debian jessie comes with a version of puppet client which will not talk to the puppetmaster that is packaged with Debian wheezy. Upgrading the puppetmaster may necessitate wide-ranging changes elsewhere. As an aside, upgrades forced by Puppet are probably in my top 5 annoyances with it and I probably wouldn't use it in a new development. So I don't need to hear about your Puppet hate. :) ² The major piece of work here is accounting for the removal of Python code from Xen (guest) config files. At the moment each VPS has a config file which is actually a fragment of Python that only has variables in it, with a call to a Python script at the bottom. That script decides whether to just boot your VPS, or in fact to boot the rescue VM or to download an installer kernel/initramfs and boot that. The ability to do that has now gone away and a guest config file is now just a set of key/value pairs. This means that the Xen Shell will need to write a new config file for each command or change you make, and boot that one. ³ Obviously it's already been punished with memtest86+ and IO throughput tests. I mean more operational testing. -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting