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Secure Dragon - Moving, IP Space
Just got this in email....
Hello debug, First off, we would like to apologize for the lack of communication lately. Hopefully this e-mail will shed some light into what's been going on behind the scenes and why we have been so quiet. We've been extremely busy this month, easily this was the most eventful month for us which was both good and bad. Here's a list of such events in no particular order: New Website For anybody that's visited our website recently (as of 3/5/2012) you'll see we have a new website design. We've been working on a new design since last year but only recently started working on our current design. The design itself is nothing fancy, actually it's a template that we customized to fit our brand. What you don't see is what runs it though. The site was designed on a completely custom PHP and MySQL backend which offers a lot of flexibility and control so expect some interesting stuff in the future. What this means to you: We're the same company but hopefully we're sporting a new professional look. We also hope that the new design is easier to navigate and provides more information. Website Downtime and Infrastructure Security As our recent announcement stated, we have made some changes and taken some security precautions as a response to some threats against the hosting community. We were very fortunate that no attacks did occur but it has made us realize how real of a threat these attacks are and we have been working on reducing our attack surface and to protect our clients from such activity. Our website was moved outside of our network at the request of GoRACK since websites are normally the easiest target. At this time we do not want to discuss the security in place or our current efforts in this matter. What this means to you: This means that we will be improving our security which in return makes you safer. If at any time our security measures impact your service or experience, please let us know immediately. Security is our goal but not at the expense of our clients needs. ARIN We recently applied for our own ASN and IP space from ARIN and were approved (AS54561). This is excellent news for us because we now own our IPs instead of relying on a data center, we are now able to manage our own BGP, and we have much more control over our network, this also shows that we are in it for the long haul. What this means to you: All clients will be switched over to our new IPs. The IPs will be added to each client over the next few days but will not be active until the cut-over. Any IPs not owned by us will no longer work once we cut-over. We also plan on running a promotion for current clients to purchase additional IPs at a discounted rate with proper justification. We are looking into providing IPv6 for our clients also but this may be down the road when it's more financially viable for us. Our Datacenter As most of you know we've been hosted in GoRACK, since the beginning. They've been extremely reliable and very helpful to us. That's why I am disappointed to say that we will be leaving GoRACK this month to move into a new facility in Tampa, FL. GoRACK has been a key reason why we have been so successful as they were able to make our growth possible by providing a solid solution for the best price we could find in driving distance (while in development, they even provided us free colocation). Unfortunately recent events have forced us to look elsewhere and we were very lucky to find a data center that is 15 minutes for both of us, E Solutions. While we have spoken with them dozens of times over the past 2 years, it was only recently that their pricing would fit our business model (since we have grown so much over the past year) and we decided to jump on that opportunity. We've contracted a sizable commitment with them which also shows again that we are in it for the long haul. I would like to also say that we are leaving GoRACK on good terms to squelch any possible rumors that would state otherwise. What this means to you: All of our clients will be moved to our servers in E Solutions (all of our hardware is still owned by us) next week. All OpenVZ, Backup VPS, and cPanel Hosting clients will be migrated over to new hardware. Our Xen PV clients will remain on the same hardware but will experience some downtime (about 6 hours total which includes the 4 hour commute) as we manually drive the servers from Jacksonville to Tampa. Once moved, all clients will have new IPs (our own IPs) and be on a new network. We have invested a lot of time into our new infrastructure so we hope that our clients will notice the difference. Our website will not be impacted by this but new orders will be disabled until we are finished with the move. We will be sending out a second e-mail with more details about the data center move and IP changes as soon as more information is available. At this time, the earliest we will have network connectivity is Monday (3/26) so expect a second e-mail then with a timeline and hopefully a cut-over date. Possible changes that are in discussion Here are a few things that we've been discussing amongst ourselves lately but I wanted to give you an inside look into: Providing OpenVZ plans larger than 128MB. Allowing IRC on our network. High Availability services. Allowing users to backup their own VPSs (instead of our current weekly backups that have been impacting performance) Other projects We have a very lengthy ToDo list and have been pushing a lot of things onto the back burner as we focus on more critical things that could impact our clients. Here are some things that we've been working on as time permits but will hopefully get more attention next month if things settle down: ICE01 Replacement - We recently had scheduled to put ICE01 on its own hardware but this fell by the wayside due to other pressing matters. We will plan for this very soon though. SolusVM Replacement - We plan to have all VPS management inside of the client area so a central location for everything. We are actually pretty far along with development and will start testing what we have shortly. Custom OpenVZ Templates - We have already created a custom template for our Backup VPSs and have a list of more to make for our OpenVZ VPSs and Backup VPSs. Increased Communication - I know I've said this many times but I keep mentioning it so we don't forget. Expect to see more frequent and more beneficial information from us. We plan to leverage our information site more also as well as social networking sites. More Transparency - Currently we have a hardware status page, this is very basic but still decent. We hope to be able to provide more information to help you get an understanding of our network and to warn our guests and clients if there is a problem. Hopefully this e-mail provides you with enough information, but if not please open a ticket with us to discuss this in further detail. We want to assure you that these events have only made us stronger and we’ve invested a lot of resources into building up. We’ll adapt to anything thrown at us, and we hope that you have seen that in the progress we’ve made since the beginning. We appreciate the continued support from our clients, non-clients, and even competitors. A Message From Joe: I’ve said in the past that 2012 will be a great year for Secure Dragon (yes, it is the year of the Dragon), we’re only 3 months into it and I’m proud to say it’s been a very promising 3 months! Hopefully we continue to meet and exceed your expectations of us. -The Secure Dragon Staff- Secure Dragon LLC. www.SecureDragon.net
Comments
Yes I received the mail.
Personally I don't like the idea of the inmediate change, because the time that I will lose changing DNS entries and propagating, etc etc...
All seems very positive and a step in the right direction for the dragon.
If both IPs are available on your box for some period of time, you just change DNS to the new entries. Any propagation occurs while you have both so there's no loss of service. Eventually the old IP goes away, by which time you don't care.
Right?
Yes, but maybe I don't understand right. This change implies a move to another datacenter plus a move to another IP space, so the old IP is gone and the new one will be the only one active.
But maybe I can change the entries in the meanwhile (6 hours downtime it seems).
That's the interesting part. It's like they are saying the new IP's won't work until they switch. And at that time the old IP's won't work. So if you don't update your DNS at the exact moment, you are possibly going to experience longer downtime.
Am I reading that wrong?
Change your TTL's to 300 now, then back after the change
I did not read it like that, as I understand, you will be provisioned new IP space, but it will not become active until the move at which time the old IP will no longer function.
That's how I read it too. Only thing I can think to do is lower DNS TTLs now and monitor for the new IP becoming reachable.
Might also check to see if you hard-coded the (old) IP anywhere in the VPS configurations. Been there, done that
How is IPv6 any financial burden to you? Once you get IPv4 from ARIN, you are entitled to IPv6 and are only billed the larger amount of the two, so taking a /48 from ARIN should be within the fees you've already paid.
Or just get an HE tunnel for the servers.
@Spirit would not be amused
That doesn't bother me :P
I got this email too but it was TL;DR. Can someone post the highlights with single-line bullets for me? Thanks!
This.
Yes, anyway, as they said, are 6 hours of downtime... I wonder if they will give us our IPs before the move. Otherwise, are 6 hours plus DNS propagation =/
Isn't the best move :S
Can never please the whole crowd, but this looks like a very well planned move, and you simply cannot change the laws of physics, or the road, it is a 4 hour drive between data centers.
Yes, I know =(
Don't hate meeeee!
** Researching teleport **
@Naruto
No.
To be clear, that applies only to Xen PV clients.
So downtime should be significantly less.
The question should be raised on why they wont forward those ips to the new router? My assumption is that they are grabbing their stuff on the last day of billing and closing the account.
If that were true, it would be more beneficial to move out one week before and work with the DC to forward the ips.
That's all hypothetical of course.
Hmmm... then I don't have any idea on how the VZ migrations will be hehe
I assume OoenVZ clients will be migrated over the wire to the new hardware at the new DC. There will be some downtime but less than with the Xen boxes which are being physically moved.
I'm sure @Kujoe will be along later with details.
I think @miTgiB has the right idea setting the TTL to 300 now.
IPv6 is more expensive than IPv4 unless you have greater than a /20 of IPv4. IPv6 is $1,000 more expensive than IPv4 and since we do not offer it at this time we do not feel it's worth adding right away. As I put in the e-mail when the demand is higher and the costs are lower, we will consider it.
There are 2 of us, my father (Steve) and I.
This is for Xen PV only. All other clients should experience 0 downtime.
To be completely honest I am not a networking person and am not sure how we'd forward the IPs to our new data center since we have little control over our IPs up there (we do have a router in place but I don't have the knowledge to do it myself, the time to learn, or the money to hire somebody to do it for us). Our goal was to have as little intervention from our current DC whom we've had do all of our router configurations. As it stands, I have until Monday to get a grasp on BGP and configure our new router with it.
Our goal is to be moved out with a few days to spare since our last billing date is Saturday. We would have been out much sooner but ARIN wasn't the speediest with us (we started the process on the 5th and just got our IPs yesterday).
They will be online migrations so 0 downtime is expect for most clients. Some clients utilizing kernel modules like TUN or system resources may require a non-live migration meaning 5-10 seconds of downtime.
it's a leb, i can stand more than a few hours for a scheduled DC transfer. No need to rush, i think we just need to know in advance the new IP, run an additional backup and prepare to manage the ip change.
For me the magic word here is scheduled when i know the exact day it will happen i'm ok.
The idea of High Availability services listed in the email is interesting. I was searching for a small HA VPS some months ago, but found nothing at LEB prices.
This
That explains all, excelent n_n
Don't worry, be happy, Kujoe will take care of us
For sure
Best of luck boss!
@KuJoe have you considered opening the new location, without closing the old one? Seems like a good way to expand your business.
No matter how well you handle all this migration, some customers will leave you because of it - some people are just too conservative and just can't handle any change.
So no matter if they stay and migrate or move to another provider, they are changing, gotta love the logic of those people.