Towards the end of 2020, I wrote a post to bring news of the roadmap we have set out to bring major improvements to the overall quality of service Superior Networks is able to provide to our clients. In this post I wanted to update you as to where we are at as of today, and some further updates.
Internal Infrastructure Improvements
Our work to overhaul our internal infrastructure has been ongoing, and we've made significant progress in retiring some of our older infrastructure environments in favour of reducing the number of servers we require to run our operational platforms, and to also ensure we're not running legacy operating systems throughout our fleet.
We would expect this work to be ongoing, however the client facing impact to this should now have concluded, and the remaining work we have is based around our project servers rather than our operational estate.
Brand Refresh
This work has not yet started, but we are looking to start it around Q2 2021 now. We will update you as we progress with our updated brand for Superior-Networks.
VPSCP Upgrades
We've been able to conclude our VPSCP Upgrades and have moved to a new platform which has already given us a number of quality of life improvements to both our administrator team and our clients.
A number of major issues we had with the previous platform have now been resolved, Docker and FirewallD now work natively on all newly installed VPS's, we can actually setup unlimited bandwidth quota's for our clients and the integration back into the billing portal is significantrly improved and we hope this will be appreciated by our clients.
This change has also allowed us to update the way in which our re-seller hosting plans function, and we look forward to launching a wide range of these in the near future.
Virtualization Change
Our original plans for this was to look to move all of our current clients in slower time from OpenVZ to KVM, to allow clients to run their own kernels and ultimately have a much greater level of flexibility in terms of what they want to run on their VPS's going forward.
As a longer term approach we will be switching all new VPS's built to be created using KVM, this will give our new clients that much greater level of flexibility, including the abilities as previously described.
What has however changed is that we will be able to move all of our existing OpenVZ clients on to the new platform retaining their current OpenVZ VPS's. This will mean clients will get the improved hardware benefits without needing to migrate any of their data.
The only things that will not currently be able to be migrated is the IPV6 allocations, which is due to a limitation on the way our network provider functions. We are looking at ways to remedy this in the future but all IPV6 allocations will need to be re-provisioned after the migration is completed.
Hardware Improvements
At the time of writing this update, we are currently awaiting the hardware delivery from our suppliers. We are pleased to confirm that as well as moving to NVMe SSD backed storage as standard going forward we are also improving our network connectivity and moving from a 500Mbps line per server to a 1Gbps line. We are also putting in more powerful processors and we hope this will bring an overall improvement to our clients experience with us.
As previously announced we will also be making no changes to our pricing with these improvements, we've been able to secure a great deal with our suppliers, and we'll be passing those savings on to our clients, so if you're a customer at the moment, you will be moved to our new infrastructure at no cost, and once our new infrastructure comes online you'll be able to switch to our KVM VPS's again at no additional cost when you place a new order.
Billing Periods
We have always encouraged customers to adopt longer billing commitments with us, this ultimately helps us better plan our resources and capacity to meet demand, so when customers have paid for a 12 month term, we have always rewarded them by giving them a discount where they only pay for 10 months, and likewise on a 24 month term customers have only been charged for 20 months. As we move forward this will continue to be the case, and we will also be looking to introduce shorter billing periods including weekly, daily and hourly billing.
As always the longer you take out a plan for with us, the cheaper your deal is going to be. These deals are also applying to our Reseller hosting plans, which also have an extra 30% off the standard pricing. Our reseller plans are perfect for companies wanting to get into VPS hosting, or individuals / companies with a larger amount of VPS capacity and want to get some extra savings and the flexibility of deploying / destroying VPS's as their own capacity demands.
You can also use the code WINTER30 for an extra 30% off any of our VPS plans (Including re-seller) when you order a 6 month or longer commitment from us. This offer will run for the remainder of January 2021.
