VPS Issues - Migration

[eUK-Nick]

Dear Customers,

A lot has been said about the deteriorating VPS Hosting service , lack of quality in the support provided - particularly about the support team not reading the tickets & mails fully.

I, as a part of the management, want to share a few thoughts with the customers. I am not trying to be patronizing or defensive, this is just an attempt to understand & explain things which have happened in the past few weeks.

To begin with, we brought in the then very sturdy Intel X3210 processors with 4 GB RAM & equally strong hard-disks. This was back in March i.e. early2007. The second half of the year came with tremendous response to our VPS Hosting plans which saw us adding hardware nodes by the week (literally).

By October, (with the benefit of hindsight, we now know that) the X3210 started showing signs of diminishing performance. We had by then, started procuring the Quad Core Intel 6600 processors by then as our hardware node machines. So the VPS Hosting' which were setup on these newer nodes were all upto scratch & performing the way we expected them & wanted them to.

However, the X3210 nodes which we had from the early part of the year, started giving diminishing returns in terms of performance. Our very alert VPS Hosting team sensed & noticed this just before Christmas. To be honest, we wanted to replace the older nodes with the newer QC 6600 machines at the earliest. The holiday season meant that we could not get done with the move to the newer nodes owing to lack of sufficient hardware. The New year brought with it the regular rush of support issues & the regular chores. The VPS Hosting support team again got engaged in them.

By now, the X3210 series of nodes had gone down to a pedestal we did not expect them to. Constant use meant that uptimes were not high (the nodes actually got rebooted automatically once!). Thats when we decided to move all the X3210 nodes to the QC6600 servers which we had now got for ourselves.

The past few weeks was a bit tough on the VPS Hosting Support team as they had to manage regular support + migration. While I dont want to sound as though I am giving excuses or attempting to defend the VPS Hosting support; but there was an avalanche of problems which they had to encounter during the actual migration as a result of which general quality on regular support slacked A lot of them have been doing unimaginable hours.

Although, the majority of the older nodes have been moved, we still have 5 more nodes to be migrated which will be done within the next 4 weeks. This also includes some of the nodes commissioned in July / August 2007. I request our customers to bear with the migration for these coming weeks. General support is back to the level (as well as quality) we always have given. We will be notifying about the coming migrations in the next few days.

I would like to thank every one of you all to have been patient & understanding with us. We now have systems in place to track hardware health of the nodes as well which will help us to avoid such a scenario in the future.

Once again, thank you all