Happy holidays! Crissic Solutions wants to say thank you for being a valued customer. This is a year-end email, so it will be rather lengthy.
The Idea Reborn
In April of this year, we restarted Crissic Solutions with a simple goal in mind – offer incredibly competitive services, but at a sustainable price. There are many insane offers out there - $30/yr KVM or $15/yr OpenVZ deals on rented hardware where they barely break even. Other companies pump yearly promotional sales regularly just to cover their hosting bills. Many of these companies die or vanish from the marketplace because they operate on a bad business model that is not sustainable or even profitable. We’ve managed to match and beat some of these “crazy” offers, but at a level that is both profitable and sustainable. We've done so without sacrificing performance and without sacrificing our high level of customer support.
Crissic Solutions Facts
December 26th, is our company 8-month anniversary
Clients currently in 85 countries
2,000 active services deployed
16 Dell C1100 servers online (and yes, we own them all)
15,360 IP addresses in our own ASN (http://bgp.he.net/AS62639)
250TB of bandwidth consumed monthly and growing
Cash flow positive and profitable
New Server Upgrades and Vrrrooom! Faster Disk IO
We’ve received lots of feedback about our services. Some comments made it clear that we had room for improvement. Those comments have been almost entirely related to our hard disk performance, or in many cases the lack thereof.
As of last week, we have stopped ordering C1100’s in favor of newer and more powerful servers. All new services will be provisioned on our latest hardware:
Dual Intel X5660 Hex Core 2.8Ghz CPUs
12 (yes TWELVE) Western Digital RE4 hard drives in RAID-10 with hardware RAID via a Dell H700 RAID card with battery backup
(Benchmarks show upwards of 600M/s disk performance, and significant load-time reduction due to no more IO wait!)
Upcoming Customer Server Upgrades
Beginning later next week, we will start a migration process, upgrading some (but not all – at least not right away) clients to our new hardware. The plan is to have all 2,000 services migrated to our new hardware in the next 3 to 6 months. A more detailed email with migration information will be provided as necessary. The first server to be migrated will be JAX5. We will send out an email sometime this weekend detailing a timeline. We will be performing live migrations so you should experience virtually zero service interruption.
Service Monitoring and Abuse System Modifications
We use a program called VPSMON to enforce specific abuse prevention rules. These rules limit SMTP connections to prevent IP blacklists, CPU restrictions to prevent node overload due to one or two customers, and load based restarts to keep the server operating smoothly. As a result of poor disk performance on existing nodes, services that had a decent amount of disk IO activity ended up getting rebooted as a result of these rules and disk IO wait.
These restart restrictions had to be put in place to make sure that all services on the node perform optimally. The unfortunate consequence is any service that utilizes a large chunk of IO (MySQL, active websites, etc.) gets restarted too frequently, and as a result negatively impacts a handful of users. Going forward, this restriction will still EXIST, but it will be a much lighter restriction (we’re looking at a load of 2.0 for about an hour or so to issue a reboot instead of 10 minutes) and it will be harder to hit as a result of IO performance gains. This means you will be able to use your service how you NEED and WANT to, rather than being restricted by rules that previously were hard to work within.
This restriction removal will NOT be in effect until all services are migrated. Based on existing services already migrated to new node, most users won’t hit any of the restart limitations. If you do end up hitting these limitations, we can set manual container configurations per-VPS (upon request) until the entire system rolls over to the new upgraded hardware.
This is just step one of many in the coming months. Our priority is improving our service quality without requiring dreadful price increases.
2014 New Year's Resolutions
Here are some of what we have planned to make Crissic even better during 2014, our New Year's Resolutions!
Re-focusing our attention on our KVM line with a server upgrades, new packages, and affordable price points just like we do with our OpenVZ line.
Enhancing the security of our billing and VPS portals
Better integration between billing and our panels
Incremental backups on a 24-hour time frame at no additional cost, and with the option to restore individual files, folders, or your entire VPS with a simple button click.
Shared and reseller clients, new nodes with CloudLinux and a plethora of additional addons
Thank you!
Without your support, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Thank you for choosing Crissic, believing in Crissic, and giving us the opportunity to serve as your VPS and Shared hosting provider.
As always, we value your feedback. If you have any feedback, good or bad, please do not hesitate to open a support ticket, or hop into IRC and let us know what you think!
Have a safe and happy holiday!
Crissic Solutions LLC
