OS templates: what’s in and what’s out

Composed by Theo Robertson on . No comments.

As part of our product refresh earlier this week, we have revised our OS templates list once again to remove some templates gathering dust, making way for some new templates. These templates are available for provisioning and deployment today, so try one if you haven’t done so already.

  • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 11.04
  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
  • CentOS 5
  • CentOS 6
  • Fedora 14
  • Fedora 15
  • Debian 5
  • Debian 6

Newcomers

We’ve introduced Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to our lineup, the latest long-term release of the popular distribution. We’ll be retaining Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for a while, as we have noticed a number of issues with packages in the 12.04 LTS repositories which we’re not quite happy with. We will also be keeping Ubuntu 11.04 for the next few months, and following this, we will replace our 11.x release with 11.10.

Leavers

Fedora 13, Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10 and 10.10 have all received the chop from us, along with some preconfigured cPanel and Webmin templates. We felt that pre-installed control panel templates were not used frequently enough to warrant us maintaining them in our template list. Ubuntu 9.x use has almost completely dropped off the radar for our customer base, so we felt it was time to move on.

Fancy a distribution we don’t currently offer? Please submit a ticket and we’ll consider your request over the next few months.

June 2012 update

Composed by John Mellor on . One comment.

Here’s the latest update on what we’ve been doing over the past month. There are many works in progress still (see our April update), and we’ll be taking the wraps of some of that work incredibly soon.

Package changes

We last updated our packages when we created them back in January 2011. The industry has moved on, as have customer requirements over this time, so we’ve made some big changes to our plans. We’ve ditched the Italian names and simplified our package range, offering four packages in increments of 512MB. We’re still considering offering a 256MB package at some point, but for now we’re holding off. All of our packages are priced in GBP, and we’ll be exclusively using this currency on our website. We’ve also changed round our bandwidth allocations so they are tiered across packages, something we felt was fairer, giving a boost to our top-end package.

Existing customers ordering a new package will still be able to order in their current currency (USD/EUR). If you’re a new customer, you’ll also be able to select your payment currency if you pay through 2Checkout, so we will continue supporting international orders. We’ve introduced rate fixing for existing customers placing orders through our billing system in USD or EUR; their recurring billing will become fixed on the GBP exchange rate on the day of ordering.

Website revisions

We’ve made a number of minor revisions to our website following these changes to reflect customer concerns and our new product range. As always, we have worked to keep page sizes down and maintain our high ySlow website performance grade (currently at 90%) to deliver our visitors the smoothest possible experience. You may notice some images begin to change over the next few hours as Akamai’s CDN updates.

Privacy policy & cookies

Our privacy policy has had a drastic revamp following the introduction of the so-called ‘EU Cookie Law’, requiring us to develop a privacy policy and notify users visiting our website of us using cookies. You’ll now find a detailed breakdown of the cookies we’re using in our privacy policy under the ‘cookies’ header. A new cookie alert for first time visitors will also persist at the top of the screen alerting you to our use of cookies until you choose to dismiss it. Many other sites have chosen to put irritating banners up to notify users, but we’ve made a bit of effort to create something noticeable yet unobtrusive to the browsing experience. We’ll make a separate post about this at some point soon.

What can we improve on? Tweet @immediatevps, leave a comment or create a support ticket and we’ll see what we can do.

Billing bugbears resolved

Composed by Dan Norton on . No comments.

We’ve been aware for quite some time of an annoying quirk in our billing system. Until a few days ago, customers with existing VPS services wishing to create a new VPS would have their new service billed on the date of creation. That sounds fairly logical, until you realise that when you have three/four Virtual Private Servers, you will end up with a fairly complex billing procedure of regularly signing in and paying bills unless you’re happy to create a subscription.

We recognise that most people using our services don’t expect ‘anniversary billing’, as they wish to keep their active services for a reasonable period of time. As a result, we’ve changed our billing procedure around, so from today, existing customers signing up for a VPS will have their billing pro-rated to their default anniversary date. This will mean one billing date for customers to handle, simplifying the process.

Of course, for your sake and ours, we do rather like it if you pay via subscription. However, we understand that many people simply don’t want to do this, either on principle or on the grounds of cost control. Hopefully this process will make everyone a bit happier when it comes to making payments!

April 2012 update

Composed by Theo Robertson on . One comment.

Over the easter period, we have invested a tremendous amount of staff time into improving our client area experience and our internal client administration systems. This has culminated in the merger of our client and support systems for simplicity and faster support times. We are now able to directly associate tickets with services and customer accounts without the need to check two different systems for customer notes, billing and product information, improving our efficiency and speeding up response times.

Our upgraded billing system now corrects directly into our provisioning systems via an API over an internal network, speeding up our order process, increasing the responsiveness of parts of our billing control panel and improving security. We’re now using Varnish to speed up response times on our website, have forced SSL on our billing system and have improved SPAM and virus detection for incoming email tickets. Previously, SPAM and viruses would add significantly to response times as, put bluntly, our old system wasn’t up to scratch, so this should also aid us with getting back to customers more quickly.

In progress

We’re working on implementing a ‘quick ticket check’ system for customers, where you’ll be able to click on an email link and view a full ticket history without having to log in or choose your hosting brand. Our domain purchasing and management platform will also be added to our billing system in the coming month for Immediate VPS customers to use. In addition to this, we will be reviewing our network status website over the next week: something that is due for a big overhaul.

Two suggestions that have up a number of times are DNS hosting and in-control panel PTR management. We will be looking at both of those possibilities over the coming month and will try to implement solutions to improve our service.

Recent changes

Our migration from Germany to London completed last month, and with the exception of some network faults, most customers experienced a relatively painless switch. The new hardware we’re running on has resulted in a performance improvement; we’re now using hardware RAID10 and dual quad core processors (Xeon E5530, E5620, E5645) across all of our host nodes. We’re still looking at a timeline for implementing IPv6 as this is something our UK provider will be offering in the near future, but at the moment we don’t have an ETA for customers.

If there’s anything you think we could do to improve your experience with us, please tweet @immediatevps, leave a comment or send us a ticket. We’re here to listen and work with you to deliver a solid, high quality service!

New OS templates

Composed by Theo Robertson on . No comments.

Good news! We have added some recent stable OS releases to our template library in order to keep up with the times. The new templates now available are:

  • CentOS 6
  • Fedora 15
  • Debian 6
  • Ubuntu 11.04

If you are an existing customer, you can perform reloads via the VPS control panel. These typically take a couple of minutes to complete, but do remember that any existing data on your VPS will be wiped if you do this. If you’re not with us at the moment, you can choose from these Operating Systems in addition to our existing choices when purchasing a VPS.