Hardware refresh, 2015-2016

From late 2015 into 2016 BitFolk is performing a hardware refresh which means you'll be contacted at some point about having your VPS moved and upgraded.

Progress

2015-09-27: 13.0% complete.

Normalisation of disk layouts

Over time BitFolk has used a variety of disk layouts for VPSes.

The old state of the art

Immediately prior to the beginning of the hardware refresh the favoured disk layout was two disks, xvda and xvdb, each of which was treated as a partitioned disk (MSDOS partitions). xvda1 was then used for the VPS root filesystem and xvdb1 was used for the swap partition. xvda would be the correct capacity as purchased by the customer and xvdb was equal to RAM size (so base VPS would have a 480MiB xvdb).

The new state of the art

A minor tweak is being made for SSD-backed VPSes. As SSD-backed storage costs a lot more, it seems wasteful to give large amounts of it away for use as swap. Therefore the size of xvdb is being capped at 1GiB. That means that basically everyone migrated is going to have a 1GiB xvdb disk.

Those customers that currently have a VPS with more than 1GiB RAM currently have an xvdb that is larger than 1GiB. Although it has never been spelled out that the swap disk layout was part of the contractual agreement, we do regard it as so, so you are going to end up with an xvdb disk that is larger than what we would sell to new customers. We reserve the right to take that away from you at a mutually convenient point after your next contract renewal, and replace it with one that is 1GiB in size.

Those customers who previously had just a single block device are going to find themselves with a new one that is unused by the VPS. We won't be meddling with your VPS to make it use the new xvdb1 block device as swap.

FAQ

What will the upgrades be?

At the moment it's looking like the base memory allocation will go up from 480MiB to 1,024MiB. The incremental upgrade will change from 240MiB to 256MiB. So, if you started with the base 480MiB VPS you'd end up with a 1,024MiB VPS. If you started with a 960MiB VPS it would go to 1,536MiB.

Storage allocation is going to remain the same but will be backed by enterprise SSDs behind software RAID instead of 3.5" SATA drives behind hardware RAID.

It's still an open question what to do about storage costs, because SSDs obviously cost a lot more than HDDs do (even when you have a bunch of them behind battery-backed hardware RAID). The initial customer upgrades will be for low-storage customers, and as time goes on we'll be able to make a decision on whether costs for additional storage need to change.

Costs for backup storage space are currently rolled into generic storage, and this is very likely to change with the backup storage costs being broken out into a separate cheaper line item.

Will I be able to buy extra CPU cores?

Most likely not. Previously all BitFolk VPSes were limited to one CPU core (not dedicated). The plan is to increase this to two cores per VPS, and to scale that up linearly in some fashion with the amount of memory purchased. We don't want to split out CPU cores into a separate line item at this time.

I don't need 1GiB of memory, can I downgrade?

No. The base VPS that we're selling is the smallest thing we want to sell for now.

I was happy with slower storage, can I downgrade?

The intention is to go all-SSD for scalability reasons, but it is possible that this won't work out. You could hold off on having your upgrade in the hope that we decide all-SSD won't work out but we think this isn't a likely outcome.

When will I be contacted to arrange my upgrade?

It's difficult to predict. It will be as soon as possible. The following hosts are most likely to be emptied first:

• bellini
• cosmo
• dunkel
• kwak

Also the very first set of upgrades are being performed on customers with only the base VPS package, as this will provide the best real-world scalability data. Subsequent upgrades will be offered to all customers as soon as we can get to them.

If you're experiencing performance problems with your service then please contact support and as always we'll see what we can do about it. If it is down to our platform not performing as well as we expect then we'll do our best to find a solution that you're happy with.

Can I have the memory upgrade without being moved to a different host?

Initially not. After some time, legacy hosts will be empty enough that increasing the remaining customers' memory allocations would be possible, and we will do that as soon as we can. However, it is our intention to eventually decommission all legacy hardware since it is much less power-efficient, so you will definitely need to have your service moved at some point in the coming months.

My VPS already had extra memory and the upgrade is more than I need. Can I downgrade?

If you're on a monthly contract then just ask support to remove the extra memory line items that you don't need and that will take effect from your next monthly payment.

If you're on a quarterly or yearly contract then we're happy to remove the extra line items and provide a pro rata amount of service credit for them. Service credit can be used to pay any future invoices. We won't refund you, however.

I have a question that's not answered here. Where do I send it?

Sorry about that! Please send it to our users mailing list. It will be answered and the answer written up here. Thanks!