A bookworm, photo by Dominic Mason

On Saturday the Debian team released the latest version of Debian, Bookworm. We’re pleased to announce that this is now available on our virtual and dedicated servers.

Bookworm is a fully supported operating system for our managed hosting and we already have it running on some of our internal production servers. Our preferred open source server management system, Sympl, has also been updated to support Bookworm. Other feature enhancements include much more control over PHP versions and settings. Our virtual server cloud has pre-built images for standard Bookworm and Bookworm with Sympl pre-installed.

There are many improvements in Bookworm, with PHP 8.2 support being the most anticipated by our customers. We would like to thank the Debian team for all their hard work in making this release.

We’re delighted to announce our sponsorship of Organic Maps. Organic Maps is a simple, user-friendly application that downloads complete Open Street Map data to your phone, allowing you to use their mapping application offline complete with route planning from the on-device database.

This is a wonderful application. It doesn’t track you, advertise at you or flood you with non-notifications, and it works without mobile data and conserves battery life. So if you’ve ever been lost without signal or somewhere where roaming data is prohibitively expensive, or to a very busy location where the mobile networks were overloaded this application is genuinely better than the alternatives.

While the app avoids the need for mobile data, this comes at the cost of a significant up-front download of all the mapping data that you may or may not use offline. This won’t trouble typical home broadband, but for the servers at the other end it adds up quickly. We’ve stepped in and offered two 4GB virtual servers with 400TB/month of free bandwidth to Organic Maps, split between our London and Amsterdam zones, reducing the reliance on a traditional and bankruptcy-inducing large cloud provider.

“Use the cloud, it’s cheap,” people often say, incorrectly.

A competing quote from a slightly cheaper large cloud provider

At our list prices this would be somewhat cheaper:

Being 90% better value is achieved in part by not having to fund our own space programme.

A small galaxy hit the bullseye of NGC922 about 330m years ago. More information: www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1218a/
Credit:
NASA, ESA

Congratulations to the Debian team for their new release of Debian Bullseye (11). Just over two years of hard work have resulted in over 40,000 package updates and 10,000 additions.

We’ve made images for our VPS cloud that are available in all regions and included the install ISO for customers who prefer to build their own OS images. Sympl, a management package for web and email hosting that we maintain has been updated to support Bullseye with packages available for download.

Our mirror server is up to date with the Debian Bullseye packages. We’ll now be looking at deploying new systems on Debian Bullseye and starting our upgrade program for Debian Stretch and Buster systems.

The UK Debian folks will be having a small party in Cambridge in a few days time and we’re sponsoring the beer to say thank you. It’s a weekend full of beer and barbeques.

Dormant mode means your VPS can have a nice snooze.

We’ve recently rolled out some new features that provide more flexibility to our VPS platform.

On-demand billing

Last year we added on-demand billing to our Raspberry Pi Cloud and we’ve now rolled this out to our VPS services, allowing you to add and remove VPSs at any time and pay by the second for the time that the server is provisioned. We continue to offer monthly, quarterly and annual billing options, with discounts for longer billing periods, allowing users to choose between the best pricing for long term usage and the convenience of on-demand, pay-as-you go pricing.

Dormant VPS mode

We’ve also added the ability to make an on-demand VPS dormant, so that you’re only charged for the server’s storage space (and any allocated IPv4 addresses) until you want to reactivate it. Dormant VPSs can be reactivated at any time, although it is not guaranteed that you will be able to re-provision to the same specification of server immediately. The RAM and CPU previously allocated to your server may have been reallocated, and a move to a different host server may be required.

VPS management API

We have also added an API for managing on-demand VPSs, allowing the creation and deletion of servers to be automated. The API is very similar to our API for managing Raspberry Pi Cloud servers. To get started, see our API docs.

Cloud-init user data

We use cloud-init to automate operating system installation when provisioning a new VPS. The installation can be customised using cloud-init user data, which can provide additional installation steps to be performed after the first boot. User data can be provided through both the control panel and the API. It also possible to store and re-use user data snippets in the control panel, making it easy to repeatably spin up new servers with your applications already installed and configured.

More capacity

We continue to add capacity to our cloud to keep up with customer demand with the most recent expansion being in our London Meridian Gate (MER) zone.

Private cloud improvements

Our Private Cloud service gets you the features and convenience of our public VPS platform, but provided on your own dedicated servers. We’ve recently rolled out improvements to our Private Cloud platform, allowing Private Cloud servers to be provisioned and managed via the API and control panel.