We would like to update you on a few changes that will happen in September 2012 as well as some useful information.

1) [All Customers] Datacentre Move & Adding of 2 Network Providers

We are in the final phase of planning to move to Epsilon Datacentre (Singapore) around end of September. There will be no IP changes as we have full control over the network at all our datacentres. All current network providers (SingTel, PCCW, NTT) will stay, thus other than a scheduled downtime of about 2 hours to physically relocated the servers, there will not be degradation of your service or network performance in any way. We will update you again when we have a fixed date/time for the downtime.

With the migration will be an network upgrade for our customers as we will be adding on connectivity via Deutsche Telekom as well as Hurricane Electric. Both providers compliment our current network connectivity which is mainly Asia-centric, and extend our network reach further into Europe (via Deutsche Telekom) as well as USA (Hurricane Electric). We believe this will strengthen our position as one of Asia's best connected VPS provider.

2) [All Customers] Restocked OVZ-128 and OVZ-256 packages

We just restocked OVZ-128 and OVZ-256 packages, if you require one or have friends who require one feel free to let them know we have stock again. We're keeping a tight control on the stock for lower plans at the moment to ensure that all our customers continue to have the best experience with us.

3) [KVM VPS] Windows ISO added to KVM-512, KVM-1024, KVM-2048 packages

We have added Windows 2008 SP2 and Windows 2008 R2 SP1 ISO for our KVM packages with at least 512MB RAM. Unfortunately we decided not to include the Windows ISO for VPSes below 512MB because Windows 2008 uses about 400MB RAM actively, 256MB or less RAM would mean heavy disk swapping and would affect disk performance for our other KVM VPS customers.

Our customised Windows ISOs comes integrated with virtio drivers for best performance, so please set your Network Card and Disk Driver to virtio before installation. You can use your own Windows licence, or purchase one from us at a monthly fee of $5. The Windows License addon is available on WHMCS, just place an order from WHMCS.

4) [KVM VPS] Please Restart and Consider Using virtio 

We have disabled KVM's disk cache (default was write-through) on our KVM servers. Please perform a restart via SolusVM (Important! Must be via SolusVM) as soon as you are able to, your disk performance will be improved after you restart.

We have also received feedback from customers about slow network performance on our KVM VPSes. This is because virtio was not used for Network Card and Disk Driver. virtio for KVM provides a major performance improvement to your VPS and we highly recommend that you switch to virtio if your Linux kernel supports it.

CentOS 6.x, Scientific Linux 6.x, Debian 6.x, Ubuntu 11.x & 12.x have stock kernel support for virtio, rename /dev/sda to /dev/vda in /etc/fstab then reboot with virtio enabled in SolusVM
FreeBSD 8.3 and 9.0 supports virtio via the package/port virtio-kmod, refer to package instructions.
Windows 2008/2008 R2 support virtio via our customised ISOs, install with virtio enabled in SolusVM

5) [OVZ/KVM VPS] SSD Caching & Hardware Upgrade for OpenVZ VPS, SSD-based OpenVZ/KVM VPS

We're currently testing SSD Caching for OpenVZ on our test servers, as well as some new hardware (Dual E5-2620) for our OVZ VPS. If the testing goes well we will introduce this to all our OVZ nodes sometime mid to end of September. There'll be no additional costs to customers for this upgrade, and we'll likely perform the upgrade during the datacentre migration.

At the same time we're also considering to provide SSD-based OpenVZ/KVM VPSes. We intend to keep the pricing the same and only reduce the disk space so that our customers still enjoy our low pricing. We'll publish details when these are released.


        We appreciate your continued support and hope to be able to serve you better. Feel free to contact us via our ticketing system if you have any queries.

Kenshin
OneAsiaHost


Sunday, September 2, 2012

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