September Update
We’ve been looking at our own blog in our favorite readers here at VR and can hear the crickets chirping! <excuse>We’ve got a ton to say and share, but were swamped with VMworld last week and have been working away on our next major upgrade. </excuse>
I thought I’d share a few of the things that we’re working on. To start with, our goal is to provide a high quality, stable environment. This is a fundamental belief that we have and you’ll see that mirrored in our service. Today we have a clear set of stable, self-service functionality. We don’t believe in jumping straight to bells and whistles.
The other thing we believe in is availability and flexibility, and we’ve built our system for this from the ground up. You shouldn’t need to sign up on a waiting list to get an account with us or adding a new server. We don’t believe in charging you for re-provisioning, and our vclient allows you to destroy and rebuild your server as often as you need.
Our immediate priority is to bring additional critical functionality into the service and continue to enhance features. Our short list looks like this.
- Rescue-mode: Allows you to boot your system into rescue mode so that you can repair your server. You’ll be able to go in and out of rescue mode from our vclient web interface as necessary and for any amount of time.
- Additional IP address: You’ll be able to purchase additional IP addresses as well as manage their reverses from our vclient very shortly. (Note: we’ll charge $2/mo per ip in 1, 5, or 10 ip blocks.)
- DNS Management: We don’t view this as critical, but a surprising number of you have requested this. Our plan is to pull our existing zoneconfig.com functionally into vclient so that you have one interface to manage both forward and reverse dns records.
- Enhanced reporting on bandwidth, cpu, ram usage, etc.
On the service side of things, we’re planning to give everyone access to two CPU’s for performance bursting and further re-evaluate our ratio’s. We’ve also been testing Xen Enterprise 4.0 which will include native 64bit support and a myriad of other features. (look for a separate post about Xen and why we’re using a paid for, commercially supported version in the future..)
We’re also working on several tweaks and minor bugfixes to both images and functionality within our vclient. Lower priority items such as web based console and ssh client are on the list but likely several releases out. You’ll be seeing the first three items listed above very soon.
As for other items, we continue to be very appreciative and customer driven. If you believe we’re missing a critical feature not addressed above, drop us a line and we’ll consider it.