Our Largest Disk Space Upgrade Ever, Completed One Month Ahead Of Schedule!

Back in June, we announced that we would be increasing the disk space across our entire VPS line — and that this upgrade was going to be passed along to all our customers, both existing and new, at no additional cost. After weeks of hard work, I’m proud to announce that we have successfully completed the disk space upgrades — and prouder still that we did it more than a month ahead of schedule.

I should be clear — the fact that we performed the upgrade quickly doesn’t impress me so much.  What impresses me is the fact that we performed this massive upgrade so quickly, without compromising our exacting standards for uptime, customer care and service reliability.

It wasn’t easy.  Before our announcement we had done extensive testing. We had invested a small fortune in new equipment, and had devised the necessary workflow to get the job done right.  But no matter how hard you plan you can’t help but worry when the hard work actually gets underway. Over the course of just 58 days, we managed to test each and every box to make sure it met ServInt’s standards and get everything into production without a hitch.

We implemented the change in two phases:

1. All new clients were automatically turned up on new host machines (the giant servers we use to host our VPS and SuperVPS products) that were pre-outfitted with the upgraded disk space.
2. All existing clients were then carefully migrated to host machines reconfigured with new resources by ServInt’s network engineers.

We made that decision because we wanted to get as many people more resources as quickly as possible, and we didn’t want to make everybody wait.  Some of you may have seen your resources suddenly pop up overnight without ever having noticed the transition, and if you didn’t — well, that was the idea!

I’ve got pretty high standards for this company, and I don’t brag about our achievements too often — but in this case I really want to say that this was a fantastic example of intelligent engineering.  Our team worked long hours, as long as it took, at all of our data centers to bring you these features in a way that minimized interruption to our clients’ online businesses, and I’m proud of them.

Now that everybody has their free upgrade, we hope you can put it to good use. Look for even more free updates in the future — and thanks again for your business!

Follow Reed Caldwell on Twitter.

Announcing the Biggest Disk Space Upgrade In ServInt’s History. Nearly Half A Petabyte, For Free.

Reed’s Announcement! from ServInt on Vimeo.

If the point of virtualization is to make hardware abstract, why do most hosting companies charge for resource upgrades?

At ServInt, we work hard to ensure that our VPS and SuperVPS customers never have to worry about being left behind as new hosting industry technology and service standards evolve.

Sometimes our efforts to stay ahead of the curve are largely invisible: new cooling systems, network operations center enhancements, hiring and training practices, and so forth. We do this kind of thing all the time, and assume you have no interest in keeping up to date on all of it.

But sometimes we make really big decisions, and today’s announcement is one of those.

Let me get straight to the point: today, ServInt announces the largest disk space upgrade in the company’s history. In fact, we’re adding almost a half a petabyte of disk space, across our most popular VPS packages — and, whether you’re a new or existing customer, you won’t pay one cent for it.

There are lots of reasons why we took this initiative, but they really boil down to one thing: when you sign up as a ServInt customer, you’re not buying a server. You’re buying a solution.

You can buy a server from anybody. But very few companies will take the time, or do the hard work, or hire the talented people, or spend the money to make sure that their customers’ online business never falters. At ServInt, we do.

But that’s enough chest-pounding from me. Let’s look at the numbers. This upgrade affects all our VPS products as follows:

• ServInt’s Essential VPS service, priced at $49 per month, now features 50 GB disk space, up from 30 GB.
• ServInt’s Signature VPS service, priced at $89 per month, now features 75 GB of disk space, up from 45 GB.
• ServInt’s Ultimate VPS service, priced at $129 per month, now features 100 GB of disk space, up from 60 GB.
• ServInt’s SuperVPS service, priced at $199 per month, now features 100 GB of disk space, up from 75 GB.

As before, this new disk space is provided on powerful RAID arrays with industry-leading speed and is further bolstered by our exceptional free backup system.

ServInt engineering staff have already begun implementing the disk space increases for existing customers, and we expect to have all VPS subscribers up and running in the enhanced packages within the next 90 days. This upgrade will not require any effort or involvement from our clients.

This isn’t the first free service enhancement we’ve implemented for our customers, and it won’t be the last. One thing is certain: whatever improvements we deploy over the coming weeks, months, and years will be done in order to continue providing you with the solution you bought when you signed up with us as a customer.

That commitment is just one of the things that makes ServInt different, and it’s one of the things that makes me proud to own and operate this business.

Questions? Comments? Let us know in the comments below, in our Customer Forums, on Facebook, or on Twitter!

Follow Reed Caldwell on Twitter.

Open Source and Private Stewardship

On September 25th, CNet’s Matt Assay wrote a terrific post on his blog The Open Road entitled “Free software is dead. Long live open source.”

The crux of the post was that the particular brand of free software or FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) that is much-lauded by software partisans like Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow is now irrelevant. Assay makes a distinction between FLOSS, meaning software that is free as in freedom and which incorporates no proprietary standards of any kind by default, and open source, meaning software that is usually free (as in beer) and that allows users to contribute to and derive from it, up to and including proprietary standards.

With open source, there is no reason to worry about standards strangling innovation because the community will simply code it’s way out of a corner. Information and software can be shared, and you can still make money.

The free software movement was born from a climate dominated by belligerent and aggressive software giants. Standards and software patents were created or acquired to hold developers hostage in exchange for exorbitant royalties.

Suing over patents became a business model in and of itself. It’s completely understandable why free software rose to prominence so quickly.

But a lot has changed in the past 15 years in the open source world. IBM, once Microsoft’s closest ally and creator of the OS/2 operating system, began an open embrace of…well…openness. Sun Microsystems open-sourced Solaris, laid the foundation for OpenOffice.org, and open-sourced Java.

Apple’s contributions to the Webkit project were immense in its adoption as the defacto mobile web browsing platform. Webkit powers MobileSafari on the iPhone and Google’s Android browser, cementing it as the platform to beat on mobile devices. On the desktop it powers Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome and is thus a key component of Google’s upcoming ChromeOS, a linux-based operating system that uses the Webkit browser as it’s main navigational tool.

The backbone of ServInt’s network was created using open source software and the vast majority of our server’s run CentOS, a Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise. We have included well over 50,000 lines of unique code that has better optimized and secured our products…a task that would have been considerably more difficult in a closed development environment.

Even Microsoft has approached the open source community with a level of engagement that would have seemed absurd just a few years ago. The famously closed source company even released Windows 7 as an incredibly generous open beta for nearly two years…unheard of even in most open source circles.

The point of Assay’s article, and I suppose the point of this one, is that these projects are open, but they are all stewarded by forward thinking tech companies, organizations, and individuals who seek to make a living. Revenue and profit are not the enemy of innovation, they are the reward for innovation.

Today, the biggest competitor in the software world is not Microsoft or Adobe or Google, it’s free software. The fact that we are competing with terrific no-cost solutions has forced everyone to be more creative and take productive risks.

So allow me…’Free software is dead. Long live open source!’

I couldn’t have said it better myself.