VMHaus implemented Pay just before you Go.

In 2018 Mythic Beasts acquired VMHaus, a small provider of very low cost virtual servers.

As an independent virtual server hosting provider, VMHaus was not financially viable. Post acquisition, we significantly reduced the costs of running VMHaus by using economies of scale from Mythic Beasts. We could recycle retired servers and disks from Mythic Beasts into VMHaus making their hardware effectively free. We provided rack space and transit from Mythic Beasts data centre space at cost price, taking advantage of Mythic Beasts economy of scale and buying power. However, an energy crisis and high inflation post-Covid meant that VMHaus would likely never become financially viable and in 2024 we took the decision to close the company. We gave all VMHaus customers six months notice to migrate to another server, with an offer of discounted hosting in the Mythic Beasts cloud.

VMHaus ran used a pre-payment model; customers had to buy credits in advance, then use up the pool of credits by running virtual servers. If your credits ran out, the servers stopped working and it was your responsibility to refill the meter before this happened. They also had some neat technical features we’ve incorporated into the main Mythic Beasts cloud – per-second billing, cloud-init for customising installs at boot and fully private network segments for each virtual server with IP address portability.

The pre-payment model made the shutdown of VMHaus a bit more complicated as VMHaus held funds that would not be used prior to the shutdown of the company. In order to refund unused credit, we needed customers to tell us where to refund it to, so in order to put a time limit on the wrap-up, we gave customers with positive balances a choice: get a refund, or donate the balance to the NLNet Foundation, defaulting to the latter if we don’t hear from you. The credit balances were typically very small, and in many cases, the accounts had been inactive for a number of years. Donated balances were each rounded up to the nearest dollar, reflecting the fact that this option saved us PayPal payment fees.

The NLNet Foundation funds projects that create and maintain key internet infrastructure – the sort of software that VMHaus and Mythic Beasts rely on.

We’re very pleased to say a large number of customers actively asked us to donate their balance, and combined with the balances from customers who didn’t respond to our many email reminders,we ended up with a final balance of $5240. We rounded this up to €4550 and sent it to NLNet Foundation.

We couldn’t find a picture of an imaginary computer so here’s a picture of a model of the awesome looking Cray-1.

With our successful move out of Harbour Exchange last year we’ve been making all our services available in Telehouse. We have now deployed a virtual server cluster in Telehouse and those of you who avidly watch our order forms have been ordering virtual servers there for a few months.

The addition of virtual servers in Telehouse means that we can now offer three London locations for users wishing to run distributed clusters.

We’ve previously offered a choice between SSD storage for performance, and HDD storage for capacity. In the last few years, almost all new virtual servers orders have been for the SSD option so in Telehouse we took the decision to simplify our operations and only offer SSD-based virtual servers using high performance NVMe storage. Storage is the limiting factor on our virtual server hosts, so faster storage means we can run more VPSs on each host without compromising performance. We never over-sell RAM on our VPS platform — a 4GB VPS is backed by 4GB of real RAM — so our newest host servers now have 512GB of RAM and 5th Generation Intel Scalable Xeon CPUs. Storage is mirrored pairs of enterprise NVMe drives, and the servers have dual power supplies and dual 10G uplinks. Higher capacity host servers allow us to pack more virtual servers into the data centre space, and simplifying our configuration requires us to hold fewer spares on-site to cover hardware failures.

We have also rolled out more large VPS hosts into our other data centres increasing our total capacity (both SSD and HDD) and making larger VM sizes more readily available across all our UK sites. We’ve also completed decommissioning all of our older hosts with less than 256GB of RAM.

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.