[bitfolk] Progress of promised RAM upgrade

Hi, Some of you may recall the additional 120M RAM that was promised for the end of January. If you don't know what I am talking about then it's likely that you're one of the newer customers who already got set up with the larger plans and none of this applies to you. If you're not sure, see the price list on the web site which is current and compare it with what you're paying. The first attempt at this - just putting 48G of RAM into the machines and rebooting them - hit problems when it turned out that 32bit Xen could not see more than 16G of RAM. That didn't provide enough RAM for everyone to have the upgrade, and represented a waste besides. I then decided to use what was at the time a cold spare server to experiment with a 64bit hypervisor on 32bit userland. If successful then it would be something I could replicate on the other servers with just some package installs and a reboot, as opposed to a complete reinstall. Well, it hasn't been as successful as I would like. Centos guests seem to be incredibly unstable, and I think it's too risky to go 100% with that configuration. In the meantime I have had to advertise the new plans on the web site because the whole point of this was to keep Bitfolk competitive. This became even more important recently when Bytemark announced their plan upgrades. My new plan is to install more hardware and build it 64bit to begin with, and evaluate running 32bit guests on there. Why not 64bit guests you may ask. The reason for this is that being able to move VPSes around between hosts is essential for redundancy purposes and therefore having only one host that can run 64bit guests rules that out for now. This will be revisited in a few months. If that proves to be stable then I will need to slowly empty the current servers onto the new ones and then rebuild the old ones. That's going to take months. People are quite understandably keen to have the upgrade ASAP and I do sympathise with this. It isn't right that new customers should get more for the same price and that was never the intention. There has been talk of cancelling services and then buying them new again, which is more work for everyone involved but would force the issue in your favour. To try to avoid this sort of thing as much as possible I have had a look and it seems like by not taking on new customers for a while and shuffling a few guests around I can provide the promised upgrade to all customers *on certain hosts*. With a bit more shuffling I can *probably* allow same for most of the remaining hosts. I will still need to eventually move everyone off of all the old servers and rebuild them, because there's a total of 24G of RAM not currently accessible. So anyway, first up are customers on curacao. If you shut down (*NOT* reboot!) and boot again, you should get an additional 120M of RAM. If you aren't sure whether you're going to get extra or not and want to check, look how much RAM you have now and then log on to https://panel.bitfolk.com/ which will tell you what your plan is. If your plan is bigger, shut down + boot and that's what you'll get. In the next few days I will do the same on obstler. Not everyone quite fits on kahlua or kwak if you all got upgraded. I will probably give the upgrade to those paying yearly or quarterly first and then attempt to move some things around to see if I can give more. It's not far off working, so should be possible. corona on the other hand is a bit of a lost cause. It was already maxed out of RAM at 8G, so didn't get any extra, and there's nothing that can be done. All I can do here for those who are desperate for the extra RAM is try to move you to other machines. I have stopped accepting new customers until the new servers are tested because otherwise things are just going to get dragged out more. There will be natural churn of customers so from time to time there will be space for those on the waiting list. In the meantime if anyone feels they are happy with their existing amount of RAM and want to downgrade to the new plan that gives them the same amount of RAM for lower cost, drop an email to support(a)bitfolk.com and that will happen. People on quarterly or yearly payments can too, and will get service credit back. Any questions, feel free to ask on or off list.. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting Encrypted mail welcome - keyid 0x604DE5DB